Yet another stand-back, thought provoking entry comes via CBS.com’s Editorial Director Dick Meyer:
The dumbed-down duopoly that controls political power in our 50 states is devoted to just one thing: self-preservation. Americans can’t take it anymore, but there’s no alternative.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a column desperately begging for a real third party in 2008 and depressingly charting the obstacles the legacy parties have erected. I received a boatload of e-mail, almost all of which said: “I agree, it’s even worse than you say, but what’s the solution, Mr. Wisenheimer?”
Since then, Chuck Todd, the political savant who runs “The Hotline” — otherwise known as “crack for hacks” — has written that the time is actually ripe for a third party putsch. He notes a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that found 45 percent like the idea of an “independent” party. And Thomas Friedman, the smartest serious American who doesn’t run a hedge fund, also committed public fantasy by writing about a third party.
So trying to be responsive to both my readers and the obvious, spontaneous tsunami of support for an idea whose time has come, I have found a solution. It’s easy and it comes in five simple parts.
We don’t want to risk taking this one out of context — so read the five parts yourself.
Further down in his post he adds:
The Independent Party’s final step will be to recruit as wide and talented a crop of House candidates as possible. I am morally convinced there is a huge population of talented, community-oriented people in their 30s and 40s who have been successful in business, journalism, education, science and philanthropy and who would like to be in government — but who think, like you do, that the current process is repulsive. There’s a good one in every district.
The Independent Party will have no platform to later ignore or make a mockery of. It will have something far more important: a recognizable political sensibility shared by a sensible, non-polarized majority of voters who actually have very good b.s. detectors.
And, indeed, it’s often said “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” In the case of American politics that saying elicits a “Well then fix it already!!!!!!!!!”
Both political parties have now become infected with winking disease. You know, the kind you see on many of the panel talking head shows on TV and cable, where journalists and politicos smugly glance with a slight sense of bemusement letting the others in the studio and viewers know that they know what is being said officially by this party hack or that government hack is BS…but it’s all part of the game.
Both political parties are also increasingly infected by the talk radio culture disease as well, where sound bytes peppered with what used to be called rhetorical extremism are the norm — all meant to get a someone’s often excessive phrase and puss on TV and to arouse the passions of partisan voters.
Read Meyer’s post IN FULL. He’s talking about opting instead for for nuts-and-bolts, problem solving, issue-oriented politics and government.
Which is why it’s a great specific plan that may never come about.
Unless more Americans get tired of the bipartisan winks.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.