Saturday, October 30, 2010

Myth of the Independent Voter

The phrase conjures a clear-eyed figure standing tall above the partisan fray to assess merits of candidates and their stands on issues, and there may be such paragons, but for the most part the so-called Independent Voter appears to be a ragtag collection of the too lazy, dim, immature, self-involved or all of the above to take the political process seriously and think for themselves.

What else explains the wild swing of "a bloc of voters"--millions of individuals--who saw Barack Obama as the second coming of Hope and Change and now condemn him for not living up to the Hype they swallowed without grasping the complexities of governing?

After eight years of Bush disaster, the country, ready for someone different, was fortunate enough to elect a president of intelligence, seriousness and determination to meet the worst challenges in generations.

Obama never promised miracles and certainly didn't deliver any. He made mistakes and miscalculations but avoided a total economic meltdown with reasonable competence. In the face of mindless and near-treasonous Republican opposition, he got the country back on the track to recovery.

His record of meeting one crisis after another--the credit freeze, Detroit fiasco, Gulf Coast Oil Spill--is far from perfect but impressive in the face of GOP determination to make politics the Art of the Impossible.

“The single most important thing we want to achieve," says their Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, "is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

If Independent Voters provide him with a cadre of clowns and incompetents such as Joe Miller, Sharron Angle et al, they will condemn the country to two more years of gridlock and social discord.

In that event, independent will become a synonym for stupid.

3 comments:

Fuzzy Slippers said...

You are too cute, "near treasonous opposition"? How do you figure when the dems held supermajorities in both houses of Congress and the White House? Wouldn't the special deals, bribes, and general thuggery inflicted upon Democrats who didn't support BO indicate that the problems with BO and his policies rub more than just dems the wrong way? Now, should the dems lose the House and/or the Senate, you'll be right, they will indeed present a wall of opposition to stop this dangerous man in his tracks. That's not treason, that's patriotism.

By the way, you will find that insulting a large voting block will not make them suddenly decide to don the BO cheerleader outfit and shake their pom poms for Dear Leader. In fact, as you can see over on the far fringe left, it has quite the opposite effect (check out Firedoglake.com). The insults haven't done much to draw Indies in, either. Weird, huh?

anonymous said...

The bile and blood-soaked viscerallity of many of the opposition to this president is hard for most of us to understand. One can only hope there are more of us than them.

MaxMax said...

Fuzzy Slippers, the Democrats have never held super majorities in both houses since Obama was elected. The Senate had a 60 vote majority for only 7 months of Obam's time in office. Neither party has absolute "march-in-step" allegiance of their members. The biggest obstacles to passing key legislation has been blue dog democrats like Ben Nelson. With the dysfunctional democratic party it is a miracle Obama has accomplished anything.