With his approval rating at a new low over concerns about the still-ailing economy, President Obama hit the road this week to launch what the AP deemed a "counteroffensive." The only question, to continue the stale military analogy, is whether Obama intends to shore up his center or bolster his flank. Because while the Los Angeles Times reports "Democrats urge Obama to be more aggressive on jobs" and columnist E.J. Dionne hopes "the fighting Obama" is back, the New York Times revealed that "Mr. Obama's senior adviser, David Plouffe, and his chief of staff, William M. Daley want him to maintain a pragmatic strategy of appealing to independent voters by advocating ideas that can pass Congress, even if they may not have much economic impact."
That course would be a tragedy for the President and the American people, and not merely because the times demand bolder economic remedies than extending the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits. That's because, as recent polls and analyses show, the political center no longer exists.
That was the message delivered Sunday by Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times. Summing up the findings from books like The Big Sort by Bill Bishop and Alan Abramowitz' The Disappearing Center, Stolberg explained the growing geographic polarization in the electorate since Jimmy Carter's narrow victory in 1976:

That year, 26.8 percent of Americans lived in "landslide counties," which voted either Democratic or Republican by 20 percentage points or more. By 2000, when Al Gore and George W. Bush split the popular vote, 45.3 percent of Americans lived in landslide counties. In 2008, the figure was 47.6 percent.
Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, reported the same phenomenon at the state level in his book "The Disappearing Center." In the 1960s and 1970s, he said, big states like New York, California, Illinois and Texas were evenly split in presidential elections, making them battlegrounds. "Now," Mr. Abramowitz said, "a lot of the big states are lopsided."
Political clustering is reflected in religious participation and even shopping choices. David Wasserman, of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, recently calculated that 89 percent of the Whole Foods stores in the United States were in counties carried by Barack Obama in 2008, while 62 percent of Cracker Barrel restaurants were in counties carried by John McCain.

"If voters are seeking an explanation for hyper-partisanship and dysfunction," Wasserman said, "they ought to look down the street." Or better still, as Stolberg lamented, "in the mirror." That's because, as recent polling from Pew Research suggests, those supposed independents both parties struggle over each election cycle turn out not to be so independent after all.
Its analysis "Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology," Pew exploded the conventional wisdom that rathen "than being moderate, many of these independents hold extremely strong ideological positions on issues such as the role of government, immigration, the environment and social issues." As the data show, Pew's three strains of independents ("Libertarians", "Disaffecteds" and "Post-Moderns") may have shed their party labels, but not their ideology. While the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as independents has risen to 34%, once those leaning to Democrats or Republicans are factored in, the mythical middle drops to just 10%:

And as it turns out, the voting behavior of those financially-strapped Disaffecteds, affluent white Libertarians and well-educated, secular Post-Moderns is much more partisan that independent:

Sadly for Democrats, those Disaffecteds who "often don't have enough to make ends meet" (83%) and believe "government should do more to help the needy" (61%) and "business corporations make too much profit" (73%) are also socially conservative. They don't just lean right; they vote Republican.

All of which suggests Commander-in-Chief Obama would do better to mobilize and strengthen his left flank.
But lost in all these analyses is an inescapable development in modern American political culture: toughness is its own reward. While the debt ceiling crisis showed that Democrats were more supportive of compromise and the final deal itself, that was largely because their party was alone in fearing the catastrophic consequences of a U.S. default. Meanwhile, the 24/7 media isn't focused on policy, but entertainment. When conflict and confrontation is the product and all issues have two - and only two -sides, the loudest and most extreme voices are the most prized and amplified. And as Bill Clinton lamented after the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004:

"When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have somebody that's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right."

The tragedy of the Obama presidency may be that he could have been strong and right. On the under-sized stimulus, the watered-down health care reform, the defanged overhaul of the financial system, the extension of the upper-class Bush tax cuts, Barack Obama repeatedly sought to win over irreconcilable Congressional Republicans who were never going to give him their votes under any circumstances. The predictable result was the worst of all worlds: disheartened Democratic supporters, an emboldened GOP opposition and a public disenchanted with policies that don't make the needed impact on their lives.
As the Obama White House ponders its next campaign to jump-starting the economy and creating jobs, it would do well to remember the lessons of its first one. As the first stimulus was being crafted during the transition, Paul Krugman warned on January 5, 2009, "Look, Republicans are not going to come on board. Make 40% of the package tax cuts, they'll demand 100%." The next day, he fretted that that the $787 billion recovery package was not only too small, but would pose dire political consequences for President Obama:

I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we're talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says "See, government spending doesn't work."

In October 2009, Krugman updated his grim assessment. "I went back to my first blog post -- January 6, 2009 -- worrying that the Obama economic plan was too cautious...Alas, I didn't have it wrong -- except that unemployment will, if we're lucky, peak around 10 percent, not 9." A second stimulus would almost surely be required, an economic necessity that politically would be almost impossible to produce.
So as Team Obama debates whether to go bold on the economy or just muddle along to the middle, the message to the President from America mythical independents and poisonous media culture should be clear. In this environment, the center is where political principles and good public policy go to die.