You recall the ‘Dollar a Year Man’ from several generations ago? The concept has been re-engineered for the New Century, re-imagined by one Matt Miller. Mr. Miller and his New Democratic allies have reworked the Dollar A Year Man into the ‘500,000 Dollar a  Year Man’ the friendly, engaging bureaucrat that will manage the affairs of the populous, in the capacity of a pseudo-philosopher king – Plato reworked for the advantage of  a select class of benevolent  American public intellectuals. Political paternalism is the key construct here, framed as an, almost, ‘pro bono publico’: an idea as purely self serving; synonymous with particular instances of political opportunism.

Mr. Miller is also a proponent of the political notion of the ‘Radical Center’, a borrowing from Emancipated Reporter (Thomas Friedman). The Radical Center is a public relations gambit, to rescue the ‘image’ of the Center from stodgy and unimaginative, to somehow active, dynamic and alive with the ‘New’ in political ideas and practice. The Center could be defined as the meeting place where compromise is made: the imperative of the political. But Mr. Miller is immersed in ‘image management’; he loses sight of the necessary compromises of political life, as a demand of the exercise of civic responsibility and public virtue.