For the next three years the Heath administration zig-zagged, between rightwing and more centrist policies, between conciliation and confrontation, until, with the phrase "U-turn" for the first time in common political usage, it narrowly lost power at the February 1974 general election.
A centrist coalition between the Liberal and Labour parties still looks likely... Updated at 7.42am BST.
The expectation is that Juncker will seek to run the commission as a centrist coalition between the main parties.
But in the capital's suburbs and, more dramatically, across the south-west and south-east, it's a fight to the death for wavering centrist voters between yellow and blue.
I bumped into Hisham Akkam, one of the steering committee members of the Justice Party, which aims to run a centrist line between liberal and Islamist, promoting neutral technocratic solutions.
Senator John B. Breaux, the Louisiana Democrat and Finance Committee member who has long worked on Medicare, argues that the legislation represents a fundamentally centrist compromise, between those who trust the government and those who trust the market.
Asked whether he detected a void in the Democratic presidential field, Mr. Obama replied that he sensed a mood of "Do we want to get beyond the slash-and-burn, highly ideological politics that bogged us down over the last several decades?" Mr. Obama went on to say that he admired former President Bill Clinton for trying to bridge a centrist course between Democrats and Republicans.
If Broder thinks that the GOP is genuinely willing to work with Democrats, the only centrist position between he and Reid might be in agreeing to disagree.
Far from being the most aggressive proposal out there, the plan actually on track to clear the city council steers a centrist course between upsetting the local economy and keeping businesses happy.
Lest we forget, when Theodore Roosevelt ran for president in 1912 -- two years after the "New Nationalism" speech that President Obama used as his inspiration and template -- he literally ran as a third-party centrist, triangulating between the incumbent conservative Republican president, William Howard Taft, and the liberal Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson.
