The Weekly Sift

Next weekend is Labor Day, which is the traditional let’s-get-serious moment in American election campaigns. Ad wars heat up, and people who don’t pay a lot of attention to politics begin to wonder what offices are up for grabs this time and who they might want to fill them.

The conventional wisdom says this is the time to stop trying to rally your base and start talking to the swing voters, who occupy some theoretical “center” of the political spectrum. It’s time to drop your edgier positions and focus on so-called “kitchen table issues” like the price of gas. That’s the question I address in this week’s featured post “Hazards and pitfalls of moving to the center”. In that post, I try to give move-to-the-center its due as a logical path forward, while examining what this kind of thinking leaves out.

The question I come down to is: When you get down to the nuts-and-bolts of exactly which positions you would need to change or de-emphasize, who would you be abandoning? I’ll try to get that out by 10 EDT.

In the weekly summary, I’ll continue the practice I started last week of separating substantive developments from the ones that just boil your blood, for example separating Lake America from the larger trade war with Canada. Among those substantive issues are the apparent deal to control Venezuela’s oil, the heat build-up in the oceans, the fall elections, and the continuing effort to control the worst excesses of the Trump regime through the courts. And I’ll close with a farewell to Dolly Parton.