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However wide the ideological distance between positive and negative prognosticators of employment growth, the pragmatic center is where the White House preferences are likely to fall. Obama's pragmatic center may be far from the ideological center between public-private program alternatives. Instead, it is closer to the pressure center of partisan and interest-group forces that normally participate in fiscal policy-making. As a behavioral pragmatist the moderate position for Obama is found at the center of ideologically separated political competitors whatever the content of their beliefs, since content is relatively uncritical in this perspective. Pressure groups' numbers and organizational strength define the value of their diversity more than the substance of their beliefs. For the strong believers on both political left and right the outcomes will rarely look pragmatic because they will rarely fit the traditional standards for moderation

Like many political scientists, I willingly align myself with the intellectual side of the public intellectual title, but I make no claim to having a public identity. Still, I am moved to join in the shared confessions of public intellectuals (PI) by responding to Amitai Etzioni's article, because the ten-point distillation of his trials and tribulations so strongly resonates with my own experiences. However marginal they may be, frequent media commentaries and interviews have given me enough exposure to the treacherous pathways between scholarship and the media to sufficiently understand the PI's dilemma.