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Newly formed Centrist Party meets in the middle
By Allison Bailey
abaile19@mscd.edu

The newly formed Centrist Party seeks to provide a stable foundation for politicians and voters who are neither right-wing nor left-wing, but somewhere in between.

"Every politician you hear, except for a few, will claim to be centrist,” said John Reisman, founder of the Centrist Party.

According to Reisman, politicians often say things to attract the votes of moderate Republicans or moderate Democrats. Then those politicians, after being elected, will be pulled back to the left or the right by the agendas of their parties.

“If we don’t get that concrete foundation in the center, I just don’t think we can give integrity to an office,” Reisman said.

The Centrist Party, which announced its formation on July 4, believes America is at a political impasse caused by the almost total dominance of the Republican and Democratic parties. They wish to break that stalemate by introducing a third major party to the system.

Metro political science professor Robert Hazan said the Centrist Party isn’t the first to have this idea.

“There are tons of parties and tons of candidates, but most people don’t hear of them because of lack of coverage and lack of budget,” Hazan said.

According to Hazan, it is difficult to determine how often a new political party is formed because most new parties don’t get any coverage in the mainstream media.

To avoid accusations of taking votes away from the Republicans or the Democrats like those leveled at the Green Party, the Centrists do not intend to nominate candidates until they gain enough support to compete with the Republican and Democratic parties. They hope to achieve this goal by the 2008 elections.

“It’s going to take time to build up, and if some viable possible candidates came in and helped attract attention to the party by the 2008 election, that would be great,” Reisman said. “It depends on if America is frustrated enough to say, ‘Enough is enough.’”

Currently, the party is working on getting registered and getting the word out to potential voters and candidates.

“It’s going to be a long road,” Reisman said.

“As far as I can tell they claim to be more radical in their attempts to reach more grass roots movements,” Hazan said. “Their vision of creating an American centrist party is to have a government that addresses the interests of the citizens rather than corporate America.”

The Centrist Party considers education, national security, healthcare, energy policy, the economy and the environment to be the major issues it will focus on. Reisman describes the party as being “issue based” rather than “platform based.” Reisman hopes that candidates will be able to determine their own platforms, he said, rather than have the platform decided on by the party.

“If we were to construct a platform the same way as the Democrats and Republicans, we’d end up with the same problems as them, which is polarization,” Reisman said.

Reisman said polarization is one of the biggest problems with current American politics. He said because the two largest parties have become so immobile in their stance on the big issues, very little progress is made.

“Many a bill has been compromised to meet the needs of bias rather than common sense,” he said. “This usually depends on who has the voting power in Congress. Since Congress is left or right, all bills suffer or gain from the tug of war between the parties.”

Hazan agrees that as far as Congress and the House of Representatives are concerned, only two political views are represented.

“There are many parties other than just the Democratic and Republican parties,” Hazan said. “But it’s really just a two-party system in terms of Congress and the House of Representatives. The Centrist Party wants to provide some alternative perspective and introduce issues perhaps that they feel are relevant and they feel haven’t been addressed by other parties, and by that I refer to the Republican and Democratic parties.”