centrist president

"We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating -- offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion."

"So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent -- because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship. The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president -- actually a moderate conservative president."

--Paul Krugman, via Political Wire

When dealing with an unreasonable opponent, there's a certain point where continuing to act reasonably is no longer rational. The current Republican Party is an insane, knife wielding maniac holding the global economy hostage to self-contradictory demands. (They raised the debt ceiling about 6 times under Bush.) Continuing to compromise, bargain, negotiate or try empathize with such lunacy is pointless. They need to be defeated politically (e.g. a veto, 14th Amendment solution, etc.), not philosophically.