Fervor is tempered with a dose of realism

Politically speaking, there's power in the center

Date published: 5/10/2006

By ED JONES

MAYBE IT'S A STRETCH to link this month's City Council elections in Fredericksburg to the race for the White House. Surely it would be more of a leap to connect the balloting in the city's four wards to Abe Lincoln's 19th-century campaigns.

But believe it or not, I see a pattern.

More and more, idealists are tempering their fervor with a healthy dose of realism. Having grown up in the polarizing "love it or leave it" culture of the 1960s, I'm seeing greater political power these days in the center, rather than on the extremes.

Take the recent council elections. Undoubtedly, various political camps in town worked for their favorites. But the factionalism that was so prevalent just a few years ago seems to have evolved into more of a spirit of working together to get things done.

Important steps were taken this week to develop the Maury School property and to establish a downtown hotel--goals that have generated decades of talk but, until recently, little action.

The early presidential sweepstakes for 2008 come off the same way.

Hillary Clinton's once unstoppable drive for the Democratic presidential nomination is being slowed by doubts about her polarizing persona.

On the Republican side, true-blue conservatives are giving way, for now, to mavericks like John McCain and Rudy Giuliani--independent-minded men who can lay claim to a piece of that moderate middle.

The fact that someone as ideologically anemic as former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner could emerge as a serious candidate is a sign that practicality is winning out over partisanship.

You can even see centrist power building in church circles. As Episcopalians head to their national General Convention next month, leaders like Peter James Lee, the bishop of Virginia, are calling on the center to reassert itself in the face of a liberal/conservative split over gay bishops.

Proclaimed Bishop Lee to his diocesan council last year: "The middle is not the midpoint on a line between two extremes. I call on the center to reassert itself as an embracing community that acknowledges that differences are present but they need not distract us from mission."

All of which brings us to perhaps the greatest centrist in American history, Abraham Lincoln.

How could the Great Emancipator, the radical Republican despised by the South, be called a centrist, you ask.

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Date published: 5/10/2006