ABSTRACT
The 2000 presidential election marked the culmination, and perhaps the most concrete expression of a trend that had been gathering momentum since 1964. Bill Clinton won the presidency with less than 50 percent of the votes cast in 1992, but he began with a Democratic Congress. George W. Bush had a Republican Congress for a few months, but a party switch by one senator brought America back to divided party rule. The political center is the Holy Grail of American politics, the Archimedean point at which North/South/East/and West, men and women, urban and suburban, left and right, and race and ethnicity are in harmonious political balance. A focus on the search for a viable "political center" has obscured the fact that the political center is primarily cultural. There have been several different spheres in which a political center has developed in modern American history. A political center does exist, although not in the form that it has been variously proposed.
