returning to the center

If not that I were still basically depressed about the election results, THIS PIECE in the NY Times would be pretty funny.

There’s a famous mainstream maxim in American politics that candidates should move towards the extremes in the primaries and then rapidly back to the center for the general election. That already seems to be happening in almost comical fashion in Egypt. Consider this:

“At a news conference in Cairo on Saturday afternoon, Mr. Shafik, who had in the past compared Egypt’s youthful revolutionaries to a disrespectful child, now praised the ‘martyrs’ of the uprising and promised to return the fruits of the ‘glorious revolution’ to the youth.”

Yes, Ahmed Shafik’s commitment to the fruits of the glorious revolution and its martyrs can hardly be doubted, can it? He simply happened to be the Prime Minister for Mubarak at the height of Mubarak’s violence against the glorious revolutionaries. Other than that, I’m sure we can take his words at face value.

But perhaps it will work to everyone’s benefit. It is often forgotten that whatever policies people mouth during election campaigns, personal ambition often trumps everything else, and there’s always a slight chance that a “President Shafik” would be forced to suck up to revolutionaries in policy terms even in ways that would infuriate his pro-military electoral base. Or maybe not. But we have to have something to hope for right now, and I may as well grasp at straws.

But here’s the real point, given what will probably be a very close runoff:

“He urged people to vote in the June runoff, and spoke kindly about several of his competitors, including Hamdeen Sabahi, the founder of a Nasserist party whose populist campaign drew millions of voters, giving him a surprising third-place finish in the unofficial vote tallies.”

Sabbahi may be the kingmaker! The Brotherhood was publicly flirting with making him Vice President, and now he is praised by Shafik. The mere existence of an electoral runoff system may in fact turn the runoff’s two rather extreme competitors into tolerable centrists.

Or again, maybe I’m just grasping at straws and the whole thing is either going down Drain A or the Drain B. But why burst into tears on the telephone? May as well hope for a comical reversal thanks to the rules of the game.