FROM PAJAMAS MEDIA:

Welcome to Politics Central

Very much a work in progress, the mission of POLITICSCENTRAL is to elevate our political discourse.

Opposed to sound-bite politics, POLITICSCENTRAL aims to promote a deeper level of discourse, and seeks to introduce a consistent tone of civility in our coverage and discussions.

In addition, POLITICSCENTRAL will address the environment, which has allowed our discourse to become often crass and frequently thoughtless — that is the environment of knee-jerk polarization and hardened partisanship.

As citizen and voter you have undoubtedly noticed that American politics has become pretty polarized - meaning - are you in the “liberal box” or the “conservative box”. In addition partisanship goes further - “are you 100% in the liberal or conservative box or not?” (See X21 Central for more.)

In sum POLITICSCENTRAL will present the thoughts, opinions and insights of a broad range of people that span the American political spectrum. In doing so, it will strive to create a civil and collegial atmosphere to encourage this more thoughtful discourse on our views and aspirations.

Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, libertarians and the many who don’t choose to identify with any ideology are all invited to participate and debate the issues with us and with the blogosphere at large. Our topics will include election coverage, political issues, media the politics, and the X21 phenomena.

We will be exploring electoral issues via podcasts, vblogs and plain old-fashioned text from politicians, candidates, bloggers, pundits and others for the election of 2006… and then onward toward 2008.

Some of the people participating you will find on this page today. Others who will soon be joining our initiative include Joe Trippi, Claudia Rosett, Ron Rosenbaum, Victor Davis Hanson, Marc Cooper, Mike Godwin, Jeralyn Merritt, Jeff Goldstein, Micah Sifry, Michael Barone, David Corn, Michael Leeden and Austin Bay - a deliberate ideological hodge-podge. With more to come…

Not to mention the Mystery Pollster - yes, we intend to have fun.

Given the beta phase that we are in, there may be technical or content items that will need to be improved or even fixed over the next few weeks.

For now, we commend to you Craig Karpel’s article on moody voters and the exclusive podcast interviews with Sen. Rick Santorum and Jim Jonas of Unity08.

We thank you for visiting and both welcome and encourage your feedback (Suggestion Box: below right).