ODD PARTNERS ON THE POTOMAC
By DAVID SHRIBMAN

(FORTUNE Magazine) – The far left and the far right are screaming at China. The liberal Ted Kennedy and the conservative Orrin Hatch are conspiring to win health care benefits for children. The Democratic President and the Republican congressional leadership are plotting to reduce taxes. Politics has always made for strange bedfellows. But these days the fellows seem stranger than ever, and emblematic of a fundamental shift in the way America is governed: Both major political parties are astonishingly weak; neither has the rigor of ideological identity--nor the taste for party discipline.

The structure of American politics was never particularly complicated. There was a moderate left and a moderate right and usually they were at odds, though the rhetoric was always more dramatic than the differences were. Now there is an extreme right in the Republican Party, the rump of a traditional left in the Democratic Party--and a growing center that includes moderates of both camps. "They don't look very much like parties," says L. Sandy Maisel, a Colby College political scientist. "They're not distinguishing themselves from each other because they're tailoring their appeal to the same people. The parties are responding to the electorate rather than the other way around."

A look at important developments in U.S. politics in recent months shows that every one is animated by an alliance of antagonists:

--The kids' health care coalition. Senators Ted Kennedy--ebullient, raucous, Eastern, big spender--and Orrin Hatch --taciturn, reserved, Western, noted skinflint--are the definition of diversity: They agree on almost nothing. Hatch has publicly said he opposes Kennedy 95% of the time, and that's a conservative reckoning. But this spring they're the leaders of a bizarre coalition to win health care for children and pay for it with a 43 cent increase in the tobacco tax. Hatch isn't the only conservative in this group; a dozen Republicans supported the bill in its first test.

--The trade skeptics. Conservatives who don't trust big governments and liberals who don't trust big companies have found common ground as the guardians of workers against exploitation on the job. Thus they're skeptical of American trade with many nations, especially China, the only major country that manages to embrace central planning and still maintain a positive trade balance with the U.S. Don't be surprised if the foot soldiers in this movement are allies of that redoubtable duo, the Reverend Pat Robertson and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Then there are those other strange bedfellows, right-winger Pat Buchanan and left-winger Dick Gephardt. Job protectors both, they opposed NAFTA and are now the most prominent voices against expanding free trade to Chile and other Latin American nations.

--The entitlement alliance. In private, hardly anyone defends the current structure of Social Security and Medicare. But in public, the entitlement culture gets loud support from liberal labor unions and conservative companies with traditional pensions; the companies count on Social Security to pad their employees' benefit packages and Medicare to underwrite retirees' health benefits. The liberals hold firm to the inspiration of F.D.R., who created the New Deal. Their right-leaning co-conspirators hold dear the insight of the late Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, who identified a resilient strain of conservatism whose first principle was to conserve the New Deal.

There are other odd alliances, like the one between erstwhile internationalist Republicans, who no longer want to spend money on foreign engagements, and liberal Democrats, who have been chary of intervention since Vietnam. No wonder so few Americans grow up aligned with the party of their parents. They may look to politicians for a manifesto. But they're more likely to get a Chinese menu.

DAVID SHRIBMAN is Washington bureau chief of the Boston Globe and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter.