Atrios says:

That's the phrase coming out of the mouths of all good Washington pundits right now, that the Democrats must govern from the center.

I have no idea what that means, and nor do they. There was a time when the "political center" had some actual meaning and some genuine relationship to voter preference, but it's now a concept which has been redefined to be equated with the elite consensus. Centrism is sensible, sensible pundits are sensible, so whatever sensible pundits think is correct is the center. Magic!...

The truth is any agenda that the Democrats are likely to work on is entirely mainstream, and this would probably be true even if they had an 80 seat majority in the House and a veto-proof majority in the Senate. Whether or not this mainstream agenda will be judged as "centrist" by the sensible people who make such determinations I have no idea.

The unfolding battle right now is over who gets to decide what constitutes mainstream opinion.

In addition to what Atrios points out, right now what's galling about the calls that Dems govern from the "center" is that those presuming to dictate what the majority wants from Dems are the same people who said for months that Dems would be courting disaster if they dared question the "commander in chief's" conduct of the war on terror during wartime or if they embraced the "extreme" positions of backing a change of course or some sort of withdrawal from Iraq.

To indulge in a bit of oversimplification, Dems didn't listen to what these pundits were claiming was majority opinion, and instead listened to what the American people had to say about what their own opinions were. And it worked out pretty well for Dems, didn't it. Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere about how seriously we should take those who are again telling us what mainstream opinion does or doesn't want from the Dem majority right now.