Are you among the 40 something percent of Americans who consider themselves political independents? You will appreciate this new book by Jacqueline Salit, president of IndependentVoting.org, long-time activist and strategist for the independent movement. I urge you to rush to your local bookstore and read this smart, witty and engaging look at American politics in 2012 from an outsider’s inside take.
INDEPENDENTS RISING
Speaking on behalf of the independents (By Jacqueline Salit, Constitution Daily) The recent Supreme Court health care decision was striking in many ways, but perhaps most of all, for its dramatic separation of constitutional and policy questions. If the decision was in any way a bellwether, it might be that in these times, the best outcomes are produced when process and policy are distinguished from one another. As was evident in the outcry over Justice John Roberts’ unexpected turn, making this distinction can disrupt partisan convention–and that’s a good thing!
Kirkus’ Review: INDEPENDENTS RISING (Kirkus Reviews) Independentvoting.org president Salit (co-author: Talk/Talk: Making (Non) Sense of an Irrational World, 2010) discusses independent voters in this “honest and unvarnished account of events, personalities, and contexts in the formative decades of what I feel certain will turn out to be a century-defining dynamic.”
Independents Rising: Outsider Movements, Third Parties, and the Struggle for a Post-Partisan America, Jacqueline S. Salit. Palgrave Macmillan (Publishers Weekly) Given the upcoming presidential election, Salit’s earnest and informative book is sure to be consulted by those trying to understand the enigmatic and influential independent voter. Independents first spilled into the mainstream with the 1992 presidential campaign of Ross Perot (who garnered 19% of the popular vote) and have been a driving source of politics ever since.
Jackie Salit’s Independents Rising: A Review from the Trenches (Nancy Hanks, The Hankster) By January of 1992, I was a seasoned national field organizer for a budding independent movement. I had been slogging away with colleagues in small teams, knocking on doors and setting up tables on street corners and on college campuses from Philadelphia to Cleveland to Chicago since 1986, to raise money and build a base of independent-minded Americans in support of legislation that would have made it easier for independent candidates to get on the ballot.
Independents Rising: Third Party Politics In America (EXCERPT) (Huffington Post) Michael Lewis is an imposing man. Six-foot-six, 340 pounds, barrel-chested, he looks like someone who could crush an opponent without even a sideways glance. Lewis played semipro football in his younger days. Today he is married, with two young daughters, and has worked as a prelitigation specialist in the financial credit industry. It’s a business that Lewis feels uncomfortable about.
Book Review: Independents Rising by Jacqueline Salit (Nancy Hanks, The Hankster) From the first words of Jackie Salit’s upcoming book Independents Rising: Outsider Movements, Third Parties and the Struggle for a Post-Partisan America (out in stores on August 7, pre-order from Amazon) “For Sema/ Fiercely Independent” to the last “…George Washington warned that political parties can ‘become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.’ The American people want that power back. That’s why independents are rising,” this intimate, open and powerful portrait of the past two decades of the American independent political movement struck a deep chord with me.
Book review: Independents Rising, by Jacqueline Salit (By: Ken Bingenheimer, Examiner) Partisan gridlock has pushed public approval of Congress’s performance into single-digit territory, and the single largest–and growing–political group in the country is the non-affiliated voters. Yet in much of the country, this massive group is disenfranchised, denied the ability to exert any influence in primary elections and forced to choose between increasingly partisan party nominees in the general election.
Independents Rising: Outsider Movements, Third Parties, and the Struggle for a Post-Partisan America, Jacqueline S. Salit (MacMillan) A revealing look at how independent voters have been upending the political establishment for thirty years – and how they’ll decide the future of American politics.
Jackie Salit: Independents Rising (Philadelphia Weekly) Political Pundit Jacqueline Salit recounts the little-known history of the independent political movement, exploring and attempting to define exactly who independents are and what their impact on the current political system is. WHEN Saturday, October 13, 2012
JACKIE SALIT’S WEBSITE: http://www.jackiesalit.com/
JACKIE SALIT ON TWITTER: https://twitter.com/jackiesalit @jackiesalit
JACKIE SALIT ON FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jacqueline-Salit/206759922784036 (search Jacqueline-Salit)
Provocateur/ pundit/ organizer Nancy Hanks is a long-time activist in the independent political movement who’s done it all: petitioning to put independent candidates on the ballot from New York to Texas and points east, west, north and south; fundraising for the independent think tank, the Committee for a Unified Independent Party (CUIP), and its online counterpart, IndependentVoting.org; running as an independent for New York City Council from Queens, New York City’s most diverse borough; serving as the current Treasurer of the Queens County Committee of the Independence Party of New York (of the IP NYC Organizations); conducting research for the Neo-Independent, a magazine that addresses the concerns of independent voters.