The LuLac Edition $4,055, April 17th, 2019

WRITE ON WEDNESDAY

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This week's "Write On Wednesday" is local editorial reaction to CNN host Michael Smerconish's recent appearance in our area. This comes from The Times Leader. 

COUNTRY COULD BENEFIT FROM HEEDING SMERCONISH'S MESSAGE

Michael Smerconish came to Kingston with a sensible message we hear too little these days. It’s time we started listening.
Anyone who has followed the son of parents who once lived in Hazleton knows this TV, radio and newspaper commentator hovers close to, but not on, the political middle. He hit that topic clearly in his presentation at the (new) Jewish Community Center a week ago today.
As Roger DuPuis reported in a Monday story, Smerconish pointed out he has taken stances unfavorable to each side through his years, opposing the Cuba embargo, supporting capital punishment, endorsing profiling techniques following the September 11 terrorist attacks and championing the legalization of marijuana.
“They’re hard to classify, don’t you think?” he suggested.
Actually, they aren’t, or at least they shouldn’t be. They are classified as “centrist,” a once coveted position where real work got done. People on the hard right or hard left used to temper their demands enough to win over centrists because, frankly, they made up the majority and real work could not happen without them.
And in truth — as Smerconish proposed — it’s a safe bet that a full, accurate accounting of where Americans stand on most “divisive” issues would show the majority fairly close to him, somewhere left or right of center. Often left of it on some issues and right of it on others, but rarely very far from it.
Smerconish cited the “Hidden Tribes” study by More in Common USA that found the loudest complaints in this country come from 8 percent of those on the far left and 6 percent on the far right.
“They are tearing us apart,” he said, “but somewhere in between are two thirds of the rest of us for whom compromise is not a dirty word, and we’d like to see some things get done.”
We have been muddling through one “crisis” after another in recent years not because the majority of Americans can’t come to a consensus on how to resolve or avoid problems, but because the system has been hijacked by people who refuse to comprise, who put politics into an eschatological frame, insisting failure to follow their narrow view — left or right — will result in nothing short of the demise of life as we know it.
Smerconish has become an outlier in a field where he should be the norm: Professional pundits have increasingly gone to the extremes because, bluntly, they get more attention that way.
Extremism has not been working. We have a situation in Washington where immigration reform remains unattainable, where both parties take take turns running up record deficits, where critical issues like funding for Medicare and Social Security remain unaddressed regardless of who’s in charge, and where desperately needed investment in infrastructure remains a talking point rather than a resolved issue.
Hidebound hardliners offer solutions that fail precisely because they reject the concept of compromise. Smerconish is not selling something new, he’s pitching a fundamental fact: We do not build a great country by battling each other from the edges; we build it on common ground.