My Summer of Anger

During the summer of 2005, I commuted between metro-Atlanta and the suburbs three days a week. The Atlantan rush hour is a cultural experience second only to LA in hellishness. Disgruntled businessmen and women sit in their sedans, moving stop-and-go at 2 mph for hours in 100 degree heat, listening to Rush Limbaugh, Neil Bortz, and Sean Hannity. The anger hovers over the four-door armada with unrelenting oppression. You can feel the hate -- at the DOT, at "the liberals," at the car in front of you -- burn through you like a cancer.

I ate it up -- not the talk radio pundit's views, but their anger, which most of the time I fueled right back at them. I wrote about my frustration with the GOP (twice). My hatred for the Kelo v. New London decision. The bias I perceived in NPR's reporting. Senator Byrd's involvement with the KKK. The "liberal media." My burning anger at the pundits. By August of 2005, I am quite convinced that if I had met Neil Bortz, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Al Franken, Bill Maher, Ann Coulter, or Randi Rhodes on the street, I would have punched them in the face.

Once I left Atlanta I calmed down, but keeping myself from blowing up about one of these miscreants, or their deviant hosts like Air America or Fox News, is a constant struggle. That's why I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I read this column by center-right New York Times columnist David Brooks this week. He makes the so very important point that last year a man who the pundits hated with a passion won the Republican presidential nomination. John McCain's centrist views have always kept him out-of-favor with the far-right and their idealogues. Ann Coulter said she would campaign for Hillary Clinton if McCain won the nomination (I don't recall her keeping her word). Candidates like Romney and Thompson were the darlings of Fox News (Huckabee even has his own show on the channel now) -- never McCain.

Which adds great weight and support to the notion that thank heavens, the pundits don't matter. They are not the voice of the majority of the Republican Party, much less middle America. They may be able to get 75,000 people to march on Washington in the name of something-or-other but that doesn't put a dent in the 9 million votes McCain received in the '08 primary. The people who do matter, the people who make up middle America, the average voters in this country, are the centrists. The "purple state" voters.

Fox News and their minions are loud, but they are not powerful. If our Republican leaders would realize this and not be scared of voting against their supposed "base," and if our Democrat leaders would realize this and stop blaming all Republicans for the crimes of the few, we could make great progress in this country. I think Obama gets this, but we need more voices than just his. I know it's hard to unite people under the cause of centrism -- moderation never makes a good slogan. But it's what we need, and it's what the American people believe in.