My apologies to Time magazine, but last night’s forum on community service was one of the most coma inducing hours of political television I’ve seen in a long time! This is coming from someone who teaches about civic engagement for a living! It it really of interest to the nation that both candidate believe that community service is important, that citizens have both rights and responsibilities and that (wait for it) we should ask Americans to serve a cause greater than their own self interest? Pretty cuddly stuff here. I am surprised they didn’t hand out red white and blue plush kittens at the event for periodic stroking.

I understand that having the event on 9-11 placed some constraints on how confrontational the moderators could be, but the result was two wasted hours on a critical topic. One line of question which might have made the evening’s events more interesting would be to ask the candidates why our country has become increasingly polarized and whether or not they thought they were contributing to that polarization. Ahem, yes, yes they are.

One of the great tragedies of the last few elections is the decline of engaged people in the middle. Oh, there are swing voters, but these individuals are not necessarily ideologically centrist, rather it appears to be a vast reservoir of unengaged potential voters who have become motivated to participate because of a perceived affinity for the candidate (hockey mom) or because of abstract, untethered principles (change we can believe in). What we lack are true moderates. Can you name me one “moderate” blog?

The great shame of all this is that there is an increasing lack of a “moderate middle” in American politics that could serve as an adjudicator of validity claims from the two campaigs. Case in point, it’s next to impossible to get an objective assessment of how Sarah Palin performed on her first interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson last night. Conservative blogs heralded her grit and blamed Gibson for asking difficult questions. Liberal bloggers mocked her for presumably not knowing what the Bush Doctrine was among other perceived gaffes. The truth has to be in there somewhere.

The proliferation of the internet has exacerbated this decline of a middle. Henry Farrell’s research on on-line blog habits reveals an echo chamber effect whereby liberals read liberal blogs and conservatives read conservative blogs. This virtual polarization is reinforced by the trend towards demographic sorting by lifestyle choice. This is the true “community service” problem we have to engage directly.

Update: Here’s political scientist Cal Jillson’s take on whether Sarah Palin should have know about the Bush Doctrine.