What the national debate needs: Liberals.

Listening to last night’s New York gubernatorial debate, and the firecracker pop of Jimmy McMillan — the candidate from the “Rent is Too Damn High Party” — it finally struck me what’s missing from our national debate.

True blue, dyed in the wool liberals.

I know, I know.   Conservative readers of the In Box are spewing their cornflakes right now, convinced that we already have a cabal of “Marxists” running the White House and Congress.

But of course that’s nonsense.

Barack Obama is — to the dismay of millions of his supporters — an avowed centrist, a middle-of-the-roader, culturally and philosophically comfortable with Wall Street millionaires and Ivy League types.

Put simply, he believes (or acts like he believes) in the status quo, where the economy is defined by big corporations, big agribusinesses, and by trade deals that tend to favor those interests.

He seems to want to tweak the system, make it a little more efficient and maybe a little fairer, but he’s not questioning the fundamental paradigm.

Likewise Harry Reid, majority leader of the US Senate, who is a pro-life, pro-gun Mormon from a tiny rural town in Nevada.

And even Nancy Pelosi –arguably the most liberal Democratic torch-bearer — is a multi-millionaire, married to a real-estate developer and co-owner of a UFL football franchise.

There’s not a Big Bill Haywood or a Eugene Debs to be found in that crowd.

All of these politicians have pushed center-left policies that in less heady days would have been debated and argued over, but would hardly have been the stuff of end-times, hair-pulling controversy.

In the main, their positions seem radical because conservatives have been so skillful at shifting the debate, making time-honored programs and institutions — from unemployment insurance to social security — into spooky bugbears.

And yes, if you think public schools and environmental regulations and Medicaid are Marxist, then the current Democratic Party is too far left for you.

But the other reason President Obama’s positions seem so darned leftist is that we’ve edited all the actual liberals out of the conversation.

We hear regularly from extreme right-wing pundits, from Glenn Beck to Rush Limbaugh, but there simply aren’t comparable voices being heard from the left.

People such as Noam Chomsky and Cindy Sheehan are at least as thoughtful and interesting as, say, Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter.

And yet they are nearly invisible in our wider debate.

Conservatives complain about a liberal media bias, but often the reverse seems to be true.  A couple of weeks ago, liberal environmentalists staged a massive international demonstration in support of climate change action.

There were more than 7,000 events — the vast majority of them right here in the US — with far more participants that you see at tea party rallies.  But news coverage was sparse to nonexistent.

Liberals also appear to be far more vulnerable when they speak their minds.

In the wake of 9/11, two prominent liberals — Bill Maher and Ward Churchill — said and wrote provocative (and, in my opinion, wrong-headed) things about the attack.

Maher lost his television show (he later resurfaced on cable) and Churchill lost his position as a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

But when Beck and Coulter said equally offensive things about the 9/11 victims and their families, it was laughed off and dismissed as a minor media kerfuffle.

It’s important to note that liberals were once an accepted part of the broader discussion of American life.

It was common for religious leaders in pulpits across the country to raise fundamental questions about the morality and fairness of capitalism.

It was a bit of a shock last year when Pope Benedict blasted modern capitalism in an encyclical letter, arguing that the global recession”requires a profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise.”

But his distrust of “Mammon” was once a far more central message in America’s churches than the current preoccupation with big government.

It was common for political leaders and great authors to talk about the collective shame of poverty, disease and ignorance in our cities and rural towns.

It was common for activists on the left to be heard expressing the same righteous anger about their causes — protecting the environment, advancing racial equality, protecting the rights of women — that we hear now from tea party groups.

Were some of those liberal voices goofy, offensive or extreme?  Sure.

Jimmy McMillan wasn’t exactly winning over the Great American Middle with his arguments last night.

But right-wing voices are often just as out-there.  Republicans in this year’s race are still backing one candidate who likes to dress up as an SS Nazi soldier in his spare time.

Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller created a media frenzy this week when his rent-a-cops handcuffed a journalist.

But the more eye-popping moment was when he suggested that Americans should model our border security on that of the former East Germany — one of the more efficient communist police states in modern history.

“If East Germany could do it, we could do it,” Miller argued.

If that sort of thing is going to be mainstream, why can’t McMillan and his fellow travelers also play in the big leagues?

Why don’t they get hours of airplay in the media?  Why aren’t their faces on the covers of Time and Newsweek?

If they were, the Great American Conversation would be far more interesting and far more three-dimensional.

Tags: election10