We don't even have an official membership list. The answers to that question have not always been friendly. Senator Eugene McCarthy used to say that a moderate was someone who would see a person drowning twenty miles out to sea, throw him a ten-foot rope and then say that he'd met him half way. But I think that that's what the ideologues do. They're the ones that have only one size of rope to throw, and any problem that can't be solved by that length of rope either isn't worth solving or is declared not to exist in the first place.
Moderates are the ones who adapt their tools to fit the particular problem and policy environment.
A Moderate is someone who wants to find pragmatic solutions to help real people solve real problems. I want to focus tonight on what that kind of moderation might portend in one particularly polarized policy field, environmental protection. Now environmental protection is an area in which there is plenty of room in the middle because the poles have been pushed so far apart. On one end of the spectrum, we have those who view a return to Eden as a reasonable interim goal for environmental policy. We clearly need to get beyond the stalemate to which such absolutist positions have often led us.