I first registered to vote as an independent in 1966, during my service in the Air Force. I voted with military ballots, as a resident of New York. I have also been a resident of Washington, also registered as an independent. So I have been looking for a long time for something other then the two-party system while I traveled the world. I’ve looked at minor parties, but they all had different issues I did not agree with.
So when I returned to New York in 2000, I began researching organizations proposing the concept of structural political reform and discovered the Independence Party of New York City and became a party member, then an elected member: in the Manhattan county committee and the executive committee; and four terms on the state committee. With the concept of fusion voting used in the New York ballot process, there was an opportunity to work with politicians who agreed with our political reform concepts, which lead to supporting the three terms of Mayor Bloombeg.
As an independent activist, I have found the concept of party, no longer works. Many of us, some say part of the 40%, believe we select candidates not parties. But I still look at other solutions to the two-party system.
Pointing to record levels of public disgust for the political classes, moderates fizz with innovative schemes for grabbing power from extremists of the left and right. Some are wiser than others.
Americans Elect was incorporated on April 6, 2010, by Peter Ackerman and Kahlil Byrd as a follow up to his work on Unity08 for the 2008 U.S. presidential election. It opened its website to begin recruiting delegates for its 2012 Presidential Primary in July 2011. During 2011 Americans Elect was placed on the 2012 Presidential ballot in many states. But it never was able to get enough votes from its members to select a presidential slate.
More than 50 members of Congress have joined the bipartisan No Labels group, chaired by Joe Manchin, a Democratic senator from West Virginia, and Jon Huntsman, a former Republican governor of Utah with 2012 presidential ambitions. Members are called “Problem Solvers” rather than centrists, and insist that staunch conservatives and liberals are welcome. Yet they are only talking about the two major party members being nice in some type of mushy middle.
Books and newspaper columns talk of an “insurgency of the rational” and of the “sane, pragmatic majority” taking charge. A political action committee founded by New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, plans to spend millions backing moderates and independents in state and federal elections, with a nicely balanced focus on promoting gun control (angering the right) and school reform (which makes teachers’ unions seethe).
The Common Sense Coalition, set up by entrepreneurs and fund managers, wants an online “Army of Moderates” to lobby candidates and elected officials.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, launches a group pushing education and immigration reforms, using Republican and Democratic strategists.
The same arguments are cited, repeatedly, to explain why the time is ripe for a centrist insurgency. First, Americans are fed up with both big parties, especially in Congress. Great faith is put in the power of technology to help new groups out-organize and out-campaign incumbent party machines, like small furry mammals scampering beneath dinosaur feet.
The moderate start-ups tend to be fiscally conservative but socially liberal, keen on free trade and free markets, worried about social mobility and open to immigration. Some talk of curbing campaign spending and involving more ordinary voters in primaries that select candidates. But there is a hitch. Some say they would struggle to win a majority in any statewide or national election in America.
The globe-spanning nature of that rage undercuts claims that American voter disillusion can be addressed by clever, local innovations. Yes, runaway campaign spending is a headache. But the entire 2010 British general election cost less than some individual Senate races in 2012, and furious British voters still think their politicians are money-grubbing thieves. Broadening primary-voter pools is a good idea. But moderates are wrong to think that America’s self-styled independents are inevitably allies. What unites independents is hatred of politicians, which is not the same thing as centrism.
Even the techno-utopians who talk of reinventing politics are missing the point of such digital triumphs as Barack Obama’s White House runs. Team Obama used new technology to pull off something old-school: to help supporters find voters who resembled themselves, then tell them bad things about Mitt Romney.
Billionaires have every right to have opinions and fund their promotion. Politics could do with more reasoned debate. But beware innovative short-cuts designed to turn centrists into kingmakers, or to shunt aside the traditional parties (tempting though that is). Shrill partisans are a menace, but they enjoy a mandate from the angriest voters—and this is a perilous time to start disenfranchising the angry. The rational middle must advance by persuasion, not revolution.
Now we have found someone that is getting closer to my middle.
Charles Wheelan, a former Economist journalist, who not only lectures on public policy and teaches it at Dartmouth College, but practices it as well, he ran unsuccessfully for Congress from Illinois in 2009 has just written “The Centrist Manifesto”, which advocates that a new, centrist political party be created. His book argues that such a party would be potentially capable of winning four or five U.S. Senate seats, and holding the balance of power in the U.S. Senate.
He outlines a realistic ground game that could net at least five Centrist senators from New England, the Midwest, and elsewhere. With the power to deny a red or blue Senate majority, committed Centrists could take the first step toward giving voice and power to America’s largest, and most rational, voting bloc: the center.
The word "manifesto" typically generates more passion, but it's hard to rouse excitement when espousing a shift toward the center. Yet it's central to the argument that rabble-rousing emotionalism is part of the problem in American politics, where candidates in both parties feel that they must throw red meat to the extremists who are more involved in the nominating process than they are reflective of the citizenry at large. Contrary to analyses that see the country as increasingly polarized, the author suggests that most Americans are far more moderate and that they can find agreement on plenty of issues where two-party politics continues to find stalemate or gridlock. "The challenges we have to deal with as a nation are entirely manageable," he writes. "The key is to mobilize America's inner pragmatism." The strategy focuses on the Senate, where a handful of centrist legislators from swing states or a tradition of electing representatives from both parties could become power brokers, essential to the sort of compromise that reflects most Americans.
Though third-party candidates haven't typically fared well, Wheelan argues that the difference here is that the centrists will come from the common-sense middle rather than the radical fringes. Leftists will have trouble swallowing his antipathy toward unions, while conservatives will find his positions on the environment and gay marriage suspect. But as he works his way through flash-point issues to consensus on abortion and guns, he strives for a rationality that all but ideologues can embrace. It's a sign of the times that this sensible plea for moderation can seem so radical.
But we just said we do not like parties or want centrists, or a mushy middle. What happened to the intelligent independent individual? I want to take away the opportunity for a majority in 2014. Thanks to quirks of Senate arithmetic, a handful of independents could hold the balance of power.
Senators Not Running in 2014
Max Baucus - (D) Montana
Saxby Chambliss – (R) Georgia
Frank Lautenberg – (D) New Jersey
Car Levin – (D) Michigan
Mike Johanns – (R) Nebraska
Tim Johnson – (D) South Dakota
John Rockefeller – (D) West Virginia
Do you think we could take away the majority in Congress with intelligent, independents?
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!
Michael H. Drucker
Technorati Tag in Del.icio.us 
No comments:
Post a Comment