There's no mushy middle," said State Senator Keith Langseth, co-chairman of a legislative task force studying how to pay for a ball park.

In 2010, radical centrist Michael Lind stated that "to date, President Obama has been the soft-spoken tribune of the mushy middle".

"The mushy middle: that's what we are all fighting for," he said.

In the mushy middle is this summer's forgettable "Pearl Harbor," a spectacle about Hollywood box office that barely pretends to be about war.

If that means Mr. Stewart has located the political center, his humor is so sharp that it never seems like the mushy middle.

FIVE months ago, this Hudson Valley village was an outpost of the vast mushy middle.

"He never liked the mushy middle."

But... there's a large audience out there that's somewhere in the mushy middle, an audience that might be ready to embrace Will & Grace.

They're stuck in the mushy middle.

Afterward, Senator John Kyl predicted that the Bush cabinet would include "a lot of nominees from the mushy middle."