Centrism: Like Strontium-90 In The Milk, Ctd

It's everywhere:

Political Independents: The Future of Politics? 

by John Avlon Sep 23, 2012 

They've been both relentlessly courted and politically sidelines for years. But two new books show how voters who reject both Democrats and Republicans can become a force.  

In the final stretch of this play-to-the-base presidential election, it is strange to say that the 40 percent of Americans who identify as independent are currently close to an afterthought. With so few undecided voters left, even most independents have chosen sides by now. 

But some day this election is going to end, and if the next president and the next Congress hope to break through the hyperpartisan stalemate, they are going to have to find ways to appeal to the largest and fastest-growing segment of the American electorate.

Edwards details prescriptions for each of these problems: primarily election reform, including open primaries and redistricting reform and congressional reform, including filibuster reform. (Some of these proposals dovetail with suggestions made in the “Making Congress Work” plan developed by No Labels, a group Edwards and I helped cofound with fellow Daily Beast columnist Mark McKinnon and Nancy Jacobson).

...

Edwards’s offering is a rational rallying cry for the moderate majority of Americans concerned that Congress’s division and dysfunction is hurting our ability to self-govern in the national interest. “If the game of government rewards intransigence and punishes compromise, we shouldn’t be surprised if we get a lot of intransigence and not much compromise,” Edwards writes. “If our government continues to fail us—and it will—then we need to change the incentives, change the architecture of the field on which we play.” The Parties Versus the People is an important—and I believe, enduring—addition to the growing literature of nonpartisan political reform. 

...

Sigh.

I frankly cannot see the other side of this river of offal.  It runs as deep and wide as the mighty Mississippi and carries so much freight for awful, lazy and cowardly people that I can't imagine the corporations who own our media will allow it to be dredged without a fight.

But what else can we do?

What immortal hand or eye 

Can reframe this fearful symmetry?

Not a Liberal hand, certainly.

Not a Liberal eye.

Because as long as Liberals are not permitted to exist anywhere within our national political conversation except as strawmen and cartoon characters, there will never be a spare nickel in the system for anyone who stands athwart this nonsense and shouts "bullshit".

On the other hand, that Big Centrist Lie dollar remains...

... 

The Parties Versus the People and Independents Rising stand alongside the best political policy books of this presidential season, like Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann’s essential It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, Linda Killian’s incisive The Swing Vote: The Untapped Power of Independents, and Jonathan Haidt’s sweeping The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. 

The growing ranks of nonpartisan-political-reform literature will only become more valuable when this election is over and we begin focusing on an even more urgent mission: how to heal hyperpartisanship and begin governing again in the national interest.

...a really, really good dollar.