One of her insights is that American politicians are mostly lawyers, who are trained in advocating one side or another in adversarial circumstances. This may account for politicians' propensity to argue for the extremes and go for the win rather than searching for middle ground, as mediators often do. While some lawyers are trained to be mediators, we both guessed that most lawyers are not.
I've thought in the past that mediation training would benefit all of our newly-elected officials. As I don't know the specifics of what that really means - how are mediators trained? - I'll put that idea on the back burner for further research. However, a quick look at the Wikipedia discussion of mediation makes me think that the "muscular middle" I'm trying to define is different from mediation - which is "a neutral third party who has no enforcing powers." I'll speculate that mediators' communication skills would help build balanced centrist policies, but effective centrist leaders need to wield power advocating specific (not neutral) points of view.
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