Democrat "centrists" protesting outside of the Trump rally last night.
Posted on 01/15/2020 5:37:02 AM PST by Kaslin
The most abused adjective in political reporting is the label "centrist." It should tell you everything about the politician. Unfortunately, it tells us far more about those applying the label. The American Conservative Union ratings system has been widely accepted as the voting compass from the perspective of the right. According to the ACU, a centrist would look like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who has a lifetime ACU score of 44.8%. Reporters could call her a "liberal Republican," and they should, except that term simply doesn't exist. (Don't believe us? Check it out.)
Or take Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who is considered a "conservative Democrat," but that animal doesn't exist in the Senate. His lifetime ACU rating is 26.7%, putting him in lockstep with the left almost three-quarters of the time.
Where this all gets ridiculous is the presidential field. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was regularly pitched as a centrist by the press. Her ACU score from her Senate years, ending in 2009, was 8.1%. But that wasn't the worst of it. When she picked Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate, even The Wall Street Journal oozed that Kaine's "centrist policies" could help Clinton. His ACU score at the time was 1%. (He's now up to 2.2%.)
It's happening again in this cycle, to the point of absurdity. With extreme socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders in the race, anyone who isn't endorsing a socialist position -- like redistributing wealth, abolishing private health insurance and shredding the fossil fuel industry -- is categorized as a centrist. Defending the leftist lurch that was Obamacare is now the centrist position in this daffy media dictionary.
When Joe Biden left the Senate in 2008 to be then-presidential candidate Barack Obama's running mate, his lifetime ACU score was 12.7%. He's only lurched further left ever since. But now, suddenly, he's a "centrist" candidate.
Take Ed O'Keefe at CBS News. This election cycle, he has touted "the national front-runner Joe Biden, a moderate, sandwiched between two liberals, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders." There you have it. Socialists are liberals, and semi-socialists are moderates.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota is perpetually labeled as a centrist because she's not tap-dancing with Sanders on socialist single-payer health care or free college or the Green New Deal.
The New York Times warned last year, "While her approach may appeal to centrists and moderate Republicans in her home state, her breaks with liberal orthodoxy risk alienating the ascendant progressive wing of her party." Her lifetime ACU rating -- i.e., votes, not rhetoric -- is 4.7%.
Most of the Senate Democrats who showed up for the presidential run live right around Klobuchar's leftist percentage. Sen. Kamala Harris' rating is 4.6%; Warren's is 4.2%; Sen. Michael Bennet's is 5.5%; Sen. Cory Booker's is 5.1%. How leftist are they? Their voting record has them to the left of Sanders! He has 6.8%.
Candidates such as Mayor Pete Buttigieg who have no ACU rating can be 100% pro-choice and 1,000% LGBTQ Nation and be "centrist." "The View" co-host Joy Behar calls him a moderate. Enough said.
Michael Bloomberg can proclaim the urge to confiscate your guns and give away millions to Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club, but he's a "centrist" because he's a billionaire. ABC's Mary Bruce described Bloomberg as "a centrist who has become an active proponent of gun reform."
All this nonsense defines for everyone where our political journalists are located on the political spectrum. They think they represent the mainstream. They never have, and this cockeyed labeling shows they're only getting worse.
Problem with those people is they have to define themselves; moderate, progressive, centrists, etc., whereas conservatives are, well, conservative.
Today’s leading democrats are “centrists” only in the sense that they are midway between their mass murdering soviet socialist predecessors and their mass murdering national socialist role models. We are facing pure evil.
if they aren’t conservatives they’re communists...
the battle of the c worlds...
The whole point is to move the goalposts; rather than considering abortion-on-demand, “gay marriage”, open borders/sanctuary country, and affirmative action as “leftist”, they are now pretending those are the centrist positions - pushing anyone who agrees with ANY ONE OF THEM to the “far right”...
Is Buttigieg an observant or merely cultural Molochian?
They are MARXISTS!!!
The most correct descriptions for Democrats are “corrupt and contemptible”.
Dung beetles and coyotes avoid them.
Labels are not just about votes, they are also about rhetoric and appearances.
Mitt Romney sees himself as a Centrist Democrat.
loons
Centrists and skunks always get run over in the middle of the road. Ever notice that?
Yeah, cnnnbcabcmsnbc will get right on it.
Progtard DildoCrats, one and all.
Whores have more standing to argue about virtue than these clowns have to argue about being centrist or moderate.
Democrat "centrists" protesting outside of the Trump rally last night.
“Reporters could call her a “liberal Republican,” and they should, except that term simply doesn’t exist. (Don’t believe us? Check it out.)”
The article automatically disqualifies itself for intelligence with this statement. I did look it up:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Liberal%20Republican
Definition of Liberal Republican
: a member of a political party of dissident Republicans formed in opposition to the first Grant administration
So much for their opinion when they can’t even be investigative or intelligent about the basics of statements. In other words, they are either reckless with their statements by not caring to cover their statements, or just plain liars with an agenda and hope people like us don’t bother to call them that.
rwood
FReegards rwood!
-—first Grant administration-—
I think you just proved the point with which you seem to take issue. If such a term existed in todays GOP, what exactly would it signify and is there anybody in the GOP to whom the term might apply?
The polar opposites are honorable people and Rats.
The journalism cartel (commonly called “the media”) exists for the simple reason thatPeople of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” - Adam Smith. . . and because major journalism is wire service journalism - and wire service journalism is a continual virtual meeting of all major journalism. Which means that you have to be “naive as a babe to believe,” in Oscar Hammerstein’s formulation, that journalism is not a cartel.The central abuse of that “conspiracy against the public” is, IMHO, the ideological homogeneity of journalism - and the conversion of the names of political virtues (“liberal,” “progressive,” “centrist,” “moderate” - and, notably, “objective” - into expressions which mean nothing other than going along slavishly, and getting along famously, with the journalism cartel’s ideology.
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