The ranks of political pundits can be divided between those who swoon for expressions of centrist bipartisanship and those who respond to such kumbaya expressions with venomous contempt.
It's not hard to understand the latter group's reflexive distaste for perfunctory comity. When centrism takes the form of "Broderism" (named after the late middle-of-the-road Washington Post columnist David Broder), it can be insufferable — amounting to little more than an arbitrary, unprincipled Goldilocks mixture of policies derived equally from whatever the two parties are hocking at any given moment. If one of the parties drifts away from the center, the Broderist mixture will drift in the same direction along with it. If, on the other hand, both parties shift toward their respective extremes, finding a mixture at all can be become close to impossible, with the list of compromise policies amounting to the empty set.
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