Phrase
The term Vital Center was coined by the Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in his 1949 book of that title. 
Schlesinger first mentioned the term in a "New York Times" article in April 1948 titled “Not Left, Not Right, But a Vital Center.”
US President Bill Clinton started to use the phrase "vital center" in speeches given during his term of office. In 1997, Schlesinger noted in an article for "Slate" magazine that Clinton hoped to appropriate the term to mean "middle of the road" or something that his "DLC fans" might prefer its meaning to be, which would locate it "somewhere closer to Ronald Reagan than to Franklin D. Roosevelt." In the "Slate" article, Schlesinger strongly rejected that interpretation of the term:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;In my view, as I have said elsewhere, that middle of the road is definitely not the vital center. It is the dead center.
— He would later reiterate this argument in his 1998 introduction, objecting to the domestic use of the phrase:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;"Vital center" refers to the contest "between" democracy and totalitarianism, not to contests "within" democracy between liberalism and conservatism, not at all to the so-called "middle of the road" preferred by cautious politicians of our own time. The middle of the road is definitely not the vital center: it is the dead center. Within democracy the argument adheres to FDR's injunction to move always "a little to the left of center."