Grijalva: It Would Be A Mistake for the White House to Cut a Deal Without Us.

hilarious!

I'll let TNR's Jonathan Chait answer you:

Middle of Nowhere

Splitting a baby is actually a bad thing.

I think that often where I am is just in the middle. The middle is often the commonsensical place to be. The notion that one side is right and one side is wrong is generally, as one finds in life, not the case.”

--political commentator Cokie Roberts

Roberts has a great point. The sensible position usually does lie halfway between two extremes. Just look at history. In the 1960s, the country was split between extremists who wanted to deny civil rights to African Americans, and extremists who insisted on completely equal rights everywhere. The dispute caused so much strife and anger because no sensible moderates could be found to stake out the middle ground between these equally radical positions--say, desegregating some institutions but not others, or letting black people vote in every other election.

Or consider the nasty contretemps between Galileo and the Catholic Church. Both sides staked out such unyielding positions on whether the Sun revolved around the Earth or vice versa. A lot of vitriol could have been avoided if each party had agreed to the simple proposition that the two bodies revolve around each other.

OK, so maybe Roberts doesn’t have a great point. But she does have an extremely seductive point. The notion that you can determine a sensible position simply by stopping halfway between the Democratic and Republican stances is one of the enduring fallacies of public life. There are few more sought-after labels in American politics than “moderate” or “centrist.” They signify an independent thinker, unbound by ideological or partisan dogma....

A huge proportion of self-styled “centrist” thought simply boils down to surrendering one’s own capacity to make normative judgments about politics and public policy....

... “Half a loaf is better than none” is a good argument to make to liberals who might be disappointed with an imperfect final deal. It’s not a good argument on behalf of centrists who are themselves forcing liberals to take half a loaf. Senator Kent Conrad spent months insisting liberals should abandon a public option because it couldn’t pass. Finally, he admitted that he, too, opposed it.

The fetishization of compromise often overlooks whether such a compromise makes any inherent sense. Not all issues lend themselves to compromise. Joe Lieberman recently piped up that he prefers to take minor steps on health care--such as banning insurance company discrimination against those with preexisting conditions--and forego covering the uninsured.

But, if you forbid insurance companies from discriminating against the sick without bringing healthy people into the risk pool, then healthy people would have no reason to buy insurance. They could just wait until they get sick and take out a policy, and the insurance companies would have to sell them one. Rates would skyrocket, and the whole system would become unaffordable. Some say we should build a bridge across a river. Others say we shouldn’t. Joe Lieberman wants to build a bridge halfway across.

Lieberman explained his rationale by reaching for a historical analogy. “I think great changes in our country often have come in steps,” he said a couple of weeks ago. “The civil rights movement occurred--changes occurred in steps.” Actually, almost all of the civil rights movement’s progress happened in one big bang, after decades of stagnation. It also required the Senate to put the needs of the country ahead of its own customs by circumventing the committee that had traditionally bottled up civil rights legislation. There is a lesson here for the present day, though not the one Senate centrists seem to have absorbed.