Many Americans are moving towards a post-partisan view of politics. The two major parties are becoming a sideshow. This shift towards the sensible center has been underway since Ross Perot’s promising run for President as the United We Stand candidate in 1992. Though the unpredictable Perot fizzled both in 1992 and as the Reform Party standard-bearer in 1996, his strong support from moderate voters signaled a sea change in the electorate that has not abated since.

Candidates who appeal to both the sensible non-partisan center and sizable portion of their party’s base have won every presidential election since Perot first appeared on the national stage. And the same will hold true in 2008.

President Bill Clinton’s wholesale adoption of Perot’s central campaign theme – the need to balance the federal budget – empirically showed the little Texan’s influence. But Clinton went far beyond Perot to embrace central tenets of Republican orthodoxy. Mr. Clinton consequently oversaw a successful eight-year bipartisan run, featuring major legislation on welfare reform, law enforcement and free trade. He kept America strong, while shrinking the size of her government.

In the face of Clinton’s pioneering governing style, which portended Democratic dominance for decades, the Republican party, under the tutelage of Karl Rove, realized that their only hope for an electoral comeback was: A. to rally a virulently religious base with red-meat ballot initiatives in key swing states: B. recruit candidates who spoke the base’s evangelical vernacular of cultural and judicial change; C. lure the majority party down from its confident and high-minded perch into a nasty, bitter street fight.

In 2000, in the face of such overt partisanship, the Democrats blinked. Instead of seeing beneath Mr. Clinton’s peccadilloes to the enduring brilliance of his governing style – a philosophy that had been carefully crafted by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) over twelve long years in the electoral wilderness – the Democrats misread the tea leaves and played right into the Republican attack machine.

This failure can be laid, in part, at the feet of liberal political consultant Bob Shrum, who commandeered the unsuccessful 2000 presidential run of Al Gore. As an old-line big-government “progressive,” Shrum was eager to dismantle the Clintonian Centrist package. Though an essential and effective partner in Clinton’s history-making coalition, the self-righteous Gore harbored a more traditionally liberal agenda and was thus susceptible to Shrum’s stewardship. Shrum and Gore became a perfect failed marriage of old, tired, left-wing populism, running on a class warfare platform that had little resonance with centrist voters. Even if by some stroke of dumb luck, Gore won in 2000 (some still claim he did win in 2000, even though a full-state recount of all Florida’s votes by nonpartisan research teams revealed he did not), Gore and Shrum would have lost to the sophisticated, scientifically targeted, “compassionate conservatism” of Rove and Bush come 2004.

Majority parties win by consensus. Minority parties divide and conquer. The partisan strategy works for Republicans because a minority party by its nature has a bunker mentality. It must portray itself as constantly under siege by mass media and political insiders. The Republicans have been fine-tuning this us-vs.-them trump card since Goldwater in ‘64, even though the ratings success of Fox News and GOP-dominated AM talk radio suggests that at least the media bias argument no longer holds much weight.

But for the strategy to succeed they also must rope the majority party into their partisan dance. They must bait them into fights over push-button issues that will rally their minority base while denigrating the majority party’s above-the-fray halo. After the 2000 defeat in Florida, a bitter, reactive, and vengeful Democratic Party fell right into the GOP trap. The rise of Air America, MoveOn.org, and a slew of unabashedly pro-Democratic blogs such as the grossly imbalanced, and counterproductive, Huffington Post and Daily Kos, in cahoots with increasingly strident partisan cable hosts like MSNBC’s Keith Olberman, has turned the Democrats into a carbon-free copy of Rove-ian Republicanism. The now overtly partisan Democrat media has given solace and energy to what is blithely called “the Democratic base.”

There is one problem. For all practical purposes, there is no “Democratic base.” One can search in vain for commonality on gays, guns, freedom of choice, unions, welfare, and affirmative action, but the closer you look the greater the diversity of opinion. To paraphrase Paul Simon, it just “keeps slip-sliding away.” One can easily identify the GOP base. It 100 percent opposes gun control, abortion, and civil rights for gays. Period. No exceptions. It believes that Judeo-Christian moral values should have a strong influence on government policy. Period. No exceptions.

Boiler-plate Issues like low taxes, strong defense, small government, protecting our borders, and energy independence also matter deeply to Republicans, but the culture values get out the base, and, thus, trump all else. Because they are a minority party in terms of overall voter preference, the Republicans have a very low margin of error. This is why there is such a disciplined clarity to traditional Republican candidates and why there is such a palpable vagueness to most Democrats. The Democratic party is so unwieldy and diverse that one can only create consensus by talking in broad terms such as “hope” (an effective trope used by Mr. Clinton, the original lad from Hope, Arkansas before Republican Mike Huckabee reclaimed the mantle) and “change” (which can mean anything you want it to mean). This is not to say that Mr. Obama’s speeches are not prescriptive. They are, when absolutely necessary, programmatically detailed (read his acceptance speech in Denver). But, on the whole, Mr. Obama, like any majority party candidate, prefers to remain vague and obtuse, especially on how he will pay for his many fine and high-minded programs or effectively deliver on his promise of change, lest he alienate a core Democratic constituency for whom “change” means something else altogether. And in his struggle to please conflicting factions, Obama embodies the conundrum currently bedeviling the Democratic Party. National polls show that Americans prefer generic Democrats over generic Republicans by at least 12 percentage points this election, yet Obama has fallen several points behind McCain in national polls, even though the Arizona Senator lacks the youth, oratorical skill or command of policy detail possessed by his Illinois challenger.

What is going on here? Even diehard Democrats acknowledge that covert racism only accounts for a tiny percentage of the discrepancy, and, besides, racial bias washes both ways (a conservatively estimated 95% of African-Americans support Barack Obama; and you can be sure it’s not simply because of his policies). Something deeper explains the discrepancy. I believe that deeper cause is cognitive dissonance. The Democrats have been rope-a-doped into playing the Republican partisan game when the country is crying out for practical post-partisan consensus. What’s more, the Democrats don’t wear the partisan mantle well. A part of them wants to lash out hard at Republican disinformation (which is ample and relentless), but they are not well practiced in the devil’s art, and so, their retorts end up seeming half-baked and whiny (complaining about the “same old politics” while engaging in the same old politics renders both stratagems impotent). Their scurrilous amateur rumor-mongering (e.g., that Palin’s eldest daughter birthed her Down Syndrome child) backfired in a way that Republican Swift-boating never seems to. Most important, their attacks lack the razor-sharp precision and gleeful wit displayed by Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and, yes, Sarah Palin on Wednesday night past in St. Paul. The Democrats are not nimble or mean enough. They’ve been so conditioned by their leftist wing to be hypersensitive, hyper-considerate, and humorlessly PC, they feel guilty when they let her rip.

And so they are stuck. A part of them wants to stay above the fray, and a part of them wants to be the attack dog. The result is that they do neither very well, and end up looking like a noisy Chihuahua incessantly barking behind a chain-link fence.

Nature abhors a vacuum. And so it is in the game of human natural selection we call politics. When one party half-heartedly enters the field of combat, it leaves to the other side a larger field of battle and the ability to define what, in fact, the battle comprises. By their deeply conflicted, half-baked partisanship, the Democrats have unnecessarily ceded a huge swath of political territory to the GOP. Thus, to their utter shock and dismay, in the Malthusian struggle for general election supremacy, the Obama camp is suddenly losing, even though they have out-numbered, out-organized, and out-fundraised the opposition.

Over the last few days, as Mr. McCain has moved ahead in the national polls, Democrats are discovering that a partisan progressivism not only does not work in a country that is generally moderate to conservative in outlook, but it does not even suit their view of themselves. The Move-Ons, Huffington Posts, and their ilk are loud and impolitic newcomers, who end up making embarrassing gaffes (such as MoveOn’s “General Betray Us” ad) that hurt more than they help. Unfortunately, it is too late to rein them in. As Democrats are drawn into a half-baked divide-and-conquer rhetorical war strategy they are ill-prepared for, the majority of Americans who prefer a post-partisan pragmatic candidacy are left without a full-throated Democratic defender. Obama’s embrace of left-wing populism has meant the wholesale abandonment of key tenets of Clinton’s Third Way (fiscal discipline, personal responsibility, and a proactive defense of American ideals abroad). Though these tenets, in modified form, propelled both Tony Blair and George W. Bush to successive victories, Obama gives lip service to these moderate ideals (and is not fully trusted by the center, and alienates the left, when he does). As a result, Obama’s Democrats are adrift without a battle-proven ideological anchor.

It took a lot of work and a lot of losses for the Democratic Leadership Council to build the intellectual and strategic wherewithal to wage a successful presidential run. The Obama Democrats – with their base in the under-30 You Tube crowd, wealthy urban elites, and African-Americans – do not have a similar, empirically validated, message or approach that resonates with the moderate center.

As newly energized GOP foot soldiers ratchet up partisan attacks in the field, pulling in the base in record numbers on the basis of the Thrilla from Wasilla alone, common sense independents are free to vote for the man, and not the party. And of the two men before them, the one who seems the least beholden to party is John McCain. Tying McCain to Bush isn’t working. Yes, McCain voted with Bush 90% of the time, but, according to the Congressional Quarterly, Barack Obama voted with Bush around 50% of the time. It’s a difference of 40%, not the 90% the Obama camp misleadingly claims. What’s more, according to Congressional Quarterly, Barack Obama voted with the Democratic party 95% of the time, while John McCain voted with the Republicans as low as 70% of the time.

Clearly, if there was ever a presidential candidate who bucked his party, it’s John McCain. This is a guy who seriously considered being John Kerry’s running mate, and who was actively encouraged to switch parties, or form an independent party, back in 2004. Americans know that John McCain worked to lead bipartisan immigration reform (with Ted Kennedy, no less) and campaign finance reform (with Democrat Russ Feingold). They know he actively opposed Bush’s Iraq War Strategy. They know he openly challenged GOP orthodoxy on global warming and drilling in ANWR, and that he opposed tax subsidies for ethanol (even though Bush supports them), costing him dearly in the midwest. They know he actively opposed earmarks (regardless of their party of origin), and that he's been a tireless proponent of a patients' bill of rights and a boxers' bill of rights. And in the great Teddy Roosevelt Progressive Republican tradition, he's been an ardent bipartisan crusader against steroid use, tobacco use, and ultimate fighting. Trying to link McCain with Bush is going to be a tough road for Mr. Obama, especially when the record doesn't support it.

When you are the minority party, you realize that you sometimes must make large compromises in order to remain in power. It is a tribute to the Republican Party’s astounding flexibility, and a deep-seated desire to do whatever it takes to win, that it has selected a bona fide post-partisan maverick like McCain. Through his selection of a socially conservative reformer in Sarah Palin, and a smooth, non-rancorous, and highly disciplined convention, McCain has been able to achieve the near-impossible: energize the Rove-ian base, rally Perot reformers, while stealing the centrist mantle from William Jefferson Clinton. There is no DLC equivalent behind him, but there is an ad hoc team of bipartisan centrists – Lieberman, Ridge, Giuliani, Graham, and Schwarzenegger -- who are willing to spread McCain’s message to a nation desperate for post-partisan action.

The Obama camp's smug, know-it-all bluster doesn't fool anyone. They are worried. On key issues, they are losing the centrist vote. First, centrists are angry that their great and proud nation must kow-tow to nutball, egomaniacal oiligarchs like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad simply because of our dependence on foreign oil. The bigger issue for centrist Americans is not pollution or global warming, but energy security. They want a man-on-the-moon effort to secure our energy future. They know that McCain will pursue that agenda without hesitation and without a social filter that screens out immediate and practical domestic energy solutions such as clean coal, natural gas, nuclear, and deep-sea oil exploration. Americans may be shortsighted, but they are not stupid. They’ve seen the price of oil plummet based on mere speculation that McCain might win the presidency and thus expand drilling.

Secondly, Americans do not trust Obama on taxes. They know that Mr. Obama’s promise to increase taxes “only on business” in effect means an indirect tax on them. They know that higher business taxes will be passed on as higher prices on a range of products and services, including gas and food.

Third, and perhaps most damaging to Mr. Obama, most centrists believe that “the surge” has worked. Furthermore, they believe that we need not just an “orderly” withdrawal from Iraq, but a palpable “victory.” It’s the dreaded V-word that Obama dare not utter, lest it contradict his long-standing opposition to the Iraq War and thereby alienate his angry leftist base (which was drawn to him primarily because of his opposition to the war). Centrists agree that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney screwed up big time in Iraq, but they don’t pin the blame on McCain. In fact, they credit McCain for the ouster of Rumsfeld and for getting the Bush administration to change its Iraq policy.

Finally, centrists do not believe that Mr. Obama has any better answers to the current economic mess than does Mr. McCain. Centrists know we can’t spend our way out of a downturn (it’s now common knowledge that even the Great Depression was not alleviated by FDR’s social programs, but, rather, by the Second World War). In large part, our current economic woes are due to a housing bubble. Mr. Obama could easily pair the Republicans’ mantra of deregulation with the housing mess, but so far that claim has not registered with voters. The economy would surely be Mr. Obama’s strong suit (if he was running on a strict DLC platform), but it’s still unclear to centrists what Obama’s New Left solutions are, how they fundamentally differ from failed leftist policies of the past, and whether they would, in fact, work.

As a result, coming out of their convention in St. Paul, the Republicans managed to lead with a message of sensible centrism, while, beneath the radar, they rallied their highly partisan base. Meanwhile, the confused and rambling Obama Democrats flail about for a cohesive and consistent line of attack that will resonate with the centrist swing voters they desperately need.

If he has any sense of tragic remorse, Bill Clinton must be kicking himself and good for what a sexual dalliance has wrought for the party he so dearly loves.