Miller's Manifesto
Matt Miller is one of my favorite political thinkers, a proud Democrat who's not afraid to call BS on his own party and focuses relentlessly on finding workable solutions rather than beating an ideological drum. He's giving up his weekly column, for now, but offers some great parting shots in this piece:

Many thoughtful politicians and officials have privately told me that they believe there is little hope of changing today's tyranny of charades short of a galvanizing social explosion. The other possibility, they say, is that the American people become so frustrated that they "kick the bastards out" and start electing people willing to challenge the status quo.

Maybe that will happen. But there's another scenario as well. The overriding (and depressing) truth in public life today is that neither major party has a political strategy - that is, a strategy for winning elections and acquiring power - that includes solving our biggest domestic problems. I don't believe this situation is sustainable. If both sides continue to peddle charades in the next few years while real problems fester, I believe it will create enough energy and frustration among enough leaders and citizens that a new "radically centrist" third party movement will be born.

My guess is it would feature something of what Ross Perot brought to public life in 1992, when he won nearly 20 percent of the vote, and thereby changed what we in the Clinton administration did on budget policy thereafter. Perot tapped a broad frustration with a two-party system that let problems like the deficit and the national debt spiral out of control. He respected citizens enough to believe they could understand the stakes, and when he rolled out his charts and graphs on TV, millions of them did.

Today, on the eve of the boomers' retirement, our fiscal problems are worse than when Perot took up the cause back then - and we've had 13 more years of kicking the can down the road on the uninsured, the working poor, schools for poor children, and more. Whether such a movement would find its agenda co-opted by the major parties (as is usually the case in U.S. history) or whether it would become an enduring force for change is impossible to know.

But the one thing that is clear is that such a development is feasible. The U.S. economy generates more than an adequate supply of high-net-worth patriots who could provide the money (and possibly even the candidates) around which such an effort might be built. As the 2004 exit polls showed, a clear plurality of Americans identify themselves not as liberals (21 percent) or conservatives (34 percent) but as moderates (45 percent).

As America's fiscal collision with the boomers' retirement nears, yet so many problems remain unaddressed, the idea that this constituency would continue to find little public expression for its aspirations or its temperament or its pragmatism strikes me as implausible. Something has to give. My intuition is that if Washington Republicans continue to veer right, and Washington Democrats (despite my friendly coaxing) find themselves trapped in a "reactionary liberalism" unable to embrace new ideas, at some point a critical mass of leaders on both sides will start to think (and should start to think) about a new force that can move the nation toward real answers.

None of this changes the two operating assumptions that undergird my own politics: one, that it will take major economic trauma to break the current brainlock-deadlock in the public policy debate, and two, that the Democrats, for all their flaws, are far more committed to finding those common-sense, broadly utilitarian policy solutions than are the ideologically driven Republicans. (Indeed, Miller presumably feels the same way.) But his work at its best reminds us that there are other options out there, other answers waiting to be found, beyond interest-group politics and funder-driven politics and the other sorry landmarks on our current political map.