Bull Moose Thinks The Center Is Surging
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Elections, General PoliticsThe Moose says many smart things.
Here are some more…The Moose celebrates the emergence of the middle.
The political story of the week is that independent voters are heavily swinging to the Democrats this year. This shift could very well result in a Democratic wave that could propel the donkey to control both the Senate and the House.
We may very well be witnessing the collapse of the Rovian base model. Republicans are now suffering from base politics blowback. The independents are in open rebellion against petty partisan polarization. This is an insurgency of the center.
And then, this…
The independent center is not tied to either party. The idies are firing the Republicans. Can the Democrats win the allegiance of the radical center with a governing agenda that claims the middle of American politics?If Democrats and Republicans merely bicker like Sunnis and Shiites over the next two years, independents could look outside the two party system for an answer. There is a severe lack of confidence in our entire leadership class, and donkeys and elephants will be making a major error if they ignore that fact.
Ah yes…but where will we find him/her? Who has the gravitas to step up the the national political plate?
Ideas?
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 and is filed under Elections, General Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 25th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
The biggest difficulty I see is that Bush’s “no compromise” attitude will basically make the next two years a pointless standoff - he will veto anything that doesn’t give him everything he wants, and the Democrats will have so the government will grind to a halt. Of course that is far better than hurtling downhill towards the cliff like we’ve been doing for the last 5 years…
Until and unless we change the nature of elections a third party is impossible - the entire system, in particular the primary elections, are designed to maintain the status quo of two parties and shut out challengers, and tend to yield extreme candidates from both parties.
October 25th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
Ted Turner isn’t doing much these days. After you get over your initial gag reflex, think about it. He has a lot of favorable qualities.
October 25th, 2006 at 9:28 pm
No way, no how. Ted Turner is box office poison.
October 26th, 2006 at 11:20 am
There are lots of ideas about a third party candidate running for President in 2008. For example, Michael Bloomberg has been fending off media questions about this for months. Why all the hub-bub? Because Mayor Bloomberg won his office in 2001 with his margin of victory supplied by the Independence Party, and won reelection in 2005 with 75,000 votes on the IP line (Column C - yes, we have fusion in New York) in coalition with 47% of the black vote which jumped the Democratic Party ship.
The bottom line, in my opinion, is that independent voters are the ones with the gravitas to step up to the national plate. The more we speak out about the need for alternatives to bi-partisan corruption, and use our votes to express our independents, the more reason there will be for a heavy-hitter to step forward.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:03 am
I agree that we’re heading in the right direction. But for any kind of independent centrist movement to go anywhere, we’ll need more than a good candidate. We’ll need to actually agree on what we stand for rather than simply being against the excesses of the two established parties. And that is where I fear any such movement would fall apart.
On the other hand, the Republican party started out as a single-issue party and used the foothold they gained to expand their platform. The only issue of that magnitude I see today is Iraq or the war on terror. Maybe we could make “national sanity” our wedge issue? :-)