If independents really feel this way, they should severely punish the Republican Party for their lockstep obstructionism over the past four years.
Independent voters are not a monolithic bloc. Nor are many of them truly independent in their voting patterns, according to a new study by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation. Nearly two-thirds of Americans who describe themselves as independents act very much like partisan Republicans or partisan Democrats.
Still, one clear factor that separates them from Democrats and Republicans is a near-uniform call for greater cross-party cooperation. Seven in 10 independents say they favor compromise between the parties rather than confrontation, according to the survey. Just as many say they are dissatisfied with the country’s political system.
President Obama ran on and initially attempted to break the partisan gridlock in Washington DC. His book The Audacity of Hope was largely predicated on the idea that the two parties can come together to work on the things they agree about. There is no reason to believe that Obama was disingenuous in this belief. And even if you want to criticism him for being naive, it was a conscious choice by Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders to oppose Obama at every step and to throw as many procedural roadblocks in his path as possible.
Before the health care fight, before the economic stimulus package, before President Obama even took office, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, had a strategy for his party: use his extensive knowledge of Senate procedure to slow things down, take advantage of the difficulties Democrats would have in governing and deny Democrats any Republican support on big legislation…
…The strategy that has brought Senate Republicans where they are today began when they gathered, beaten and dispirited, at the Library of Congress two weeks before Mr. Obama’s inauguration. They had lost seven seats in November, another was teetering, and they were about to go up against an extraordinarily popular new president and an emboldened Democratic Congress.
“We came in shellshocked,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. “There was sort of a feeling of ‘every man for himself.’ Mitch early on in this session came up with a game plan to make us relevant with 40 people. He said if we didn’t stick together on big things, we wouldn’t be relevant.”
In 2010, the Republicans were richly rewarded for their obstruction. If independents were fooled two years ago, they’ve now had plenty of time reassess that decision. There is no longer any doubt about which party is responsible for gridlock in Washington.
re: your last paragraph, how are they supposed to know when the TradMed isn’t informing them that’s the reason?
As I say over and over and over whenever a poll shows up saying people want “compromise” I ask: At what point do these respondents think compromise is not worth while? At what point does compromise slide over into capitulation?
That’s what really matters.
“If independents were fooled two years ago, they’ve now had plenty of time reassess that decision.”
You assume they actually notice reality, from time to time.
I can’t imagine why.
Yeah, that is the problem. With the media refusing to report on this in any meaningful way, how would anyone not a political junkie know what’s up. The media largely shut out their go-to-guys Mann & Ornstein when the said it was the republican’s fault.
If my facebook feed is at all reliable, they are very wedded to the “both sides do it, pox on both houses” framing so beloved by the media. So like the media, they don’t see the obstructionism but only the gridlock.
Which was a cynical construct to get himself elected so he could enact liberal prerogatives.
They can’t, because the Republicans are radical redistributionists, laissez faire corporatists, and occasionally white supremacists or religious extremists.
Except for the fact that he’s a black guy in America and a liberal reformer of great ambition and cunning.
Yeah, and if that was obvious to no-count idiots like us on our computers, I’m guessing the administration and others on the ground were informed as well. Whatever we “know,” Obama and Pelosi and Reid, etc. knew 3-6 months earlier and have been scheming the whole time in the meanwhile.
Republicans were right to obstruct Obama at every possible opportunity!
Look at the liberal gains he’s extracted from them, despite the “record” obstruction. He’s killing them!
When the right complains that Obama is a socialist, redistributionist, gay rights-friendly uber-liberal who’s dramatically rewriting the social compact, the relationship between the individual and the corporation, and the American energy economy…they’re right!
Why did the Republicans rebel against the “moderate,” “responsible,” “bipartisan” stimulus bill? Because they should have! Liberals in congress and the administration leveraged an economic catastrophe to push through a $100B clean energy bill that you would never see an oil-and-coal GOP senator or congressman sign off on it otherwise.
Health insurance reform? Bipartisan? Yeah, because Republicans so love to revoke corporate welfare and place profit caps on private enterprise and force them to issue rebate checks to consumers. They are all about that stuff. In between their myriad abortion restriction bills, they are just every other week with capping corporate profitability and massively increasing provision of government services and subsidies to the less well off in society. It’s hard to keep track of how often they do it.
Of all people, Charles F’n Krauthammer is the one who gets this better than most. The administration largely operates a foreign and military policy that evolves and resembles the last 18-24 months of the Bush administration and could plausibly be described as a postpartisan consensus. But on domestic policy?
They are everything the right has ever hated and feared. And they’re winning. There will be no end to legislative conflict. Obstruction is a matter of political survival. Only when the Republicans are reduced to a token number, or they capitulate and become liberal themselves, will the gridlock end.
Independents mostly hate not voting for the winner. Otherwise they simply agree with stupid poll questions that they think conform to their self-perceptions of being reasonable and moderate. As delusional as that vast majority of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck that believe they are middle-class.
I think most “independents” just call themselves such to feel smarter, as if they are not subject to the same impulses that drive political decisions for the rest of us. It is very easy to be “against” vague concepts like gridlock and partisanship without having to actually exercise any thought on the matter. So, I’m sure that many can be fooled again.
The near-mythical independents posture about hating gridlock and political incivility, and yet are the ones the destructive/obstructive partisanship and fierce attack ads aim for, because nothing else get through the happy-talk swamp gas bubbles they call their minds.
Independents are low turnout are two sides of the same coin.
Most independents are disgusted with the lies and corruption that comprise modern politics (and probably always has). They vote, when they vote, because they are told it is their sacred duty, a privilege that brave men fought and died to give them. They try to decipher a veritable sleet of slanted campaign ads and biased media reports. They usually wind up with “throw the incumbent bums out” or “choose the lesser evil”. Sometimes, they conclude that both evils are so villainous that they cannot choose. Then they stay home. There is a State Assembly seat here in Illinois where the incumbent (Democrat) has been ejected from the (Democratic-controlled) legislature for the first time in 100 years. The Feds have him dead bang for bribery but the trial won’t be until after the election. The district is so heavily D that the Republicans haven’t even put up a candidate (must be in Chicago). Democratic Party leaders created a phony Illinois Unity Party and have placed the name of disgraced Cook County Board President Todd Stroger’s ex-chief of staff’s (undoubtedly chief graft dispenser) as candidate. Under the circumstance’s can you blame indepents for staying home? Do you call them “low information voters”? On the contrary, they know their candidates all too well. Or consider the Louisiana Gubernatorial race between ex-Governor Brown, convicted bribery felon, and David Duke, Grand Dragon of the KKK? Only a lockstep party voter could vote in these elections and in the Chicago case would be mightily confused by the Democratic precinct captain telling them to not vote for the Democratic candidate.
Independents are quite similar to agnostics.
There are true agnostics who will tell you that when it comes to ultimate reality they don’t know and you can’t know either, and then there are those functional agnostics who never ask the question or just shrug when the question arises with “Ionknow.”
As with agnostics, for every declared independent I’ll easily find you 10 functional independents of the ionknow variety. They are, by definition, “low information voters” – not pejoratively, but accurately.
Atheists are admired/reviled as free thinkers, but to me, it’s the agnostics who are the true radicals. Atheists just take the other side of the question much like Dems take the other side from the Reps. In doing so they accept the validity of the question. Agnostics reject the question itself as literal nonsense.
So if you’re right about the 10% thinking indies, I suppose the agnostic analogy somewhat holds for them.
Your comment about atheism and agnosticism, as if the two are mutually exclusive, is kind of ignorant. How do we accept the validity of the question whatsoever? I’m disappointed, Dave.
They are mutually exclusive. It’s the difference between “I know” and “I don’t know”, A and not A.
Nasty, nasty. They are mutually exclusive. The atheist says there is no god — “a-theist”: “without god”. The agnostic says the question is nonsense because there is no rational way to answer it — “a-gnostic”: “without knowledge”. The atheist, by definition, believes that there is no god. Both are convinced that their belief is true — they are two sides of the same coin. The agnostic ignores the coin entirely.
I’d be interested in where you see the flaw.