In the New York Times this morning is an article that drives at exactly the point I made with regard to the two party system and the best interest of the people. "Principled Compromise" should become a theory for increased tolerance and thinking ahead with a PURPOSE, instead of trying to get some policy over the next guy. I sometimes think that our Congress is driving forward, looking in the rearview mirror with a mirror for the back window! No matter what kind of government we really have, it needs to support the common good of all.

Ms. Mitchell, in her review, has found exactly the momentum that can produce a government which works on center. I think of it as BALANCE. Not so much a balance of power, but a balance of ethics and goals, individual and social needs. If the Jana is right, and the opening night was a flop, then now is the time to wake up and get it right. I believe that Jeffords was the "hundredth monkey."

Hooray for splitting at the seams!

The entire article is at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/07/politics/07SENA.html

June 7, 2001

New Senate Leader Urges 'Principled Compromise' as Democrats Take Over

By ALISON MITCHELL

Daschle Pledged to Create Bipartisan Coalitions

WASHINGTON, June 6 — Democrats took full control of the Senate today and the new majority leader, Tom Daschle, called for "principled compromise" to avoid gridlock in a capital where Republicans no longer hold all the levers of power. He described political polarization as "an indulgence" that the Senate could not afford.

[snip]

[Comment: Of course, if they added a third party the platform would become very stable. We might all have something to vote about, all of the time.]

The midyear change in majority control also poses a challenge for the Democrats. They face high expectations from the party's liberal base, at the same time that they must govern with a tenuous majority and a party caucus stretched between liberals from the two coasts and conservatives from the South.

One of the Democrats' most prominent centrists, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, said Mr. Jeffords's declaration last month that the Republican Party no longer stood for moderation was "clearly a message to the president and Congressional Republicans but it's also a message to us, the Democrats in Congress." He said the party had to govern from the center.

With less than half the Senate watching the change in power, Mr. Daschle acknowledged today in his first floor speech in his new role that his majority was slim and that Republicans and Democrats were virtually at parity.

"At a time when Americans are evenly divided about their choice of leaders, they are united in their demand for action," Mr. Daschle said. "Polarized positions are an indulgence, an indulgence that the Senate cannot afford and our nation will not tolerate."

He celebrated the clash of political ideas as "the noise of democracy" and said "sometimes it's not a very stereophonic sound, sometimes there's too much sound from the right or from the left." But despite partisan fervor, he said, "we need to prove to the American people that we can overcome the lines that all too often divide us. We need to prove we can do the work the American people have sent us to do."

At the same time, in appearances on an array of morning television shows and at a news conference, Mr. Daschle made clear that Democrats would challenge many of President Bush's ideas and put forward legislation of their own to regulate managed health care, increase the minimum wage, create a Medicare prescription drug benefit and to improve an electoral system that received new scrutiny because of the contested election in Florida.

"On occasion we will see it as our role to stop something that we don't think is appropriate policy," he said. And in counterpoint to Mr. Bush's own energy policy, he said the Democrats would put pressure on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to cap wholesale electricity prices in California.

[snip]

For Mr. Daschle, Democrats said, the challenge will be to hold conservative and moderate Democrats more effectively than he did in the tax cut fight, when 12 Democrats voted with the Republicans. And Mr. Jeffords also complicates his task. In his first vote under the Democratic majority today, Mr. Jeffords voted with most Republicans against a Democratic amendment on standardized tests in schools.

Mr. Lieberman said that Mr. Daschle has long lectured senators that they need to build a "center- out" coalition. And he has long included Senator John B. Breaux, the conservative Louisiana Democrat, as a member of his leadership team to sound out his views.

Democratic senators say that if they do their job correctly they will be bringing to the floor issues that do not divide Democrats and that are popular with the public. As Senator John Edwards, a centrist North Carolina Democrat put it, "Mainstream issues are going to be the big issues that are brought to the floor."