Centrism

I got to thinking about the concept of Centrism recently because Joe Lieberman has been saying Connecticut residents should vote for him because he's a centrist. Something about the notion of centrism has always struck me as phony, and I've been trying to figure out why.

I'm not saying that I don't think people can have "centrist" ideas on certain things - like believing abortion should be illegal except in cases of rape or incest, or that we should have universal health care but not run by the government, etc. I also understand that certain people call themselves centrists because they're just not that interested in politics or because they're turned off by the two parties.

Centrism as an identity, though, strikes me as pretty calculated - as if you see what the extreme positions are on all issues and find a position that's somewhere in the middle. It just seems to me that most normal people don't think that way, and that people like Lieberman who identify themselves as centrists are actually taking a calculated stance, in his case to be accepted by the beautiful people who run Washington these days.

It also amuses me that you rarely hear of centrist republicans - it's always centrist democrats.

Anyway, all of this brings me to a hypothesis that I would love some feedback on: centrism is the acting out of the internal struggle between one's conscience (what he/she really believes is right) and one's desire for power (what needs to be done to break into the republican-dominated power structure).

Discuss...