Winning an election once meant taking centrist votes from the other lot without offending core voters.
Romney sometimes took centrist positions early in his political career (e.g., during his 1994 campaign against Kennedy, he argued that homosexuals needed "more support from the Republican Party" and that "abortion should be safe and legal"), but later in his career he fashioned himself as a fiscal and social conservative, maintaining that his views on such issues had evolved.
"There were some important issues on which Elena took centrist or even center-right positions, but it was never clear whether she was pressing her own views or merely carrying water for her boss on the Domestic Policy Council, Bruce Reed," said Christopher Edley Jr., who worked with Ms. Kagan at the White House and is now dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
After the vociferous criticism of the justices -- especially but not exclusively those in the majority -- it is understandable that some might have been moved later in the term to take unexpectedly centrist positions.
He said that given the furor over genetically modified foods in Europe, "I'm worried that European leaders won't have the flexibility they need to take reasoned, centrist positions on this".
If we can take some centrist Democrats off the hot seat and still have meaningful health reform, what's the problem? 1.
Parties in the diagonal from the bottom left to the top right are expected to take relatively centrist positions on decentralization.
Mr Lieberman has taken a centrist position on everything from Iraq to Social Security reform.
Sure enough, in taking more centrist positions that disillusion his leftwing fans, Obama is starting to look like what he is: one more presidential candidate who wants to win.
André Krouwel, a political scientist, argues that the populist Mr Wilders has warped Dutch politics by pulling parties to the right and rendering them narrower and more radical even as he has taken up centrist positions on health care and pensions.
