During an interview following, however, my pleasure was greatly diminished. One of the President’s top advisors, “Pat” for our purposes, opened with enthusiastic praise for the incumbent’s performance, speaking the party line forcefully and with greater effect and accuracy than had the incumbent. In responding to specific questions, Pat spun and bent the incumbent’s words to confer what should have been said but had been fumbled. Twisting in my chair with every spin and bend, I finally rose in frustration, my arms thrust forward at the screen, “How can you possibly say that? What debate were you watching, for heaven’s sake?”

This soon passed, however, and my frustration gave way in part to a sense of compassion. Here was a top tier administration official, one whose parents and children were no doubt watching, forced by circumstance to praise and promote a second rate performance, even a weak one. Poor thing, I thought, imagine having to do THAT for a living. YECH! As I turned off the TV, the counsel of an elderly neighbor came to mind: “Never vote, young man,” she said. “It only encourages them.”

But we must vote, of course, and on this thought I felt the labor of my mind trudging through the debate and the spin. Can enlightenment be depressing? That was certainly where I saw myself headed. I was going to figure out something. I could feel it. I was going to come to an understanding of the forces of fact and sense pressing from different sides on a highly complex issue of national importance. But, I sensed, it was not going to be a “YES!” moment. No, it was going to be more like an “I guess so…” And this is how it came out: Is it in the country’s interest that an election for the President of the United States be determined by one candidate having a bad hair day in a nationally televised debate?

The answer has to be “No.” Had Pat in fact spoke the obvious, that the President had lost the debate, the election may well have been over that night. Now, I’m not suggesting that Pat nobly reached deep inside and took one for the country. No, not at all. Pat’s motives, not to mention enthusiasm, were clearly partisan. But in the coincident interest of the election, a bullet had to be bitten and Pat bit it. To have done otherwise would have been a disservice to the process and, in course, to the nation. If not depressing, then, this particular enlightenment was certainly uninspiring.

I was soon, however, to come to another enlightenment, a new level of personal awareness, one with which I found great comfort, and it was this: I could not have done what Pat did short of being threatened with the murder of a loved one. For good or ill, my strengths are not to be found in partisan politics. By nature or nurture, I am disinclined to party structures. I see politics primarily in the context of the issues and the candidates, not through the lens of a party. Increasingly inclined to express myself on political matters, having come to this understanding and awareness of where I fit politically has been highly empowering.

I am an Independent.

Elector

In politics, for Independents, moving the needle is tougher than for political partisans. We traditionally come late to the show and end up standing in the back where we have to clap extra hard and loud if we expect to have any impact on the needle. That’s how it used to be anyway. Now it’s different. Now the Independent is no further from the nearest web port to sites and blogs whose design and purpose is to facilitate and expedite finding out anything we want to know. As for clapping, we are encouraged to say what we think, to participate. That’s how things work today. It’s how we get to play.

Political activism used to be a largely partisan process. No longer. The emergence of candidate-driven national political campaigns and the rise of interest groups on every conceivable issue as amplified by the explosive growth of the internet, have combined to open the door to all. To have impact, however, their voices and views need venue and structure.

IDn wants to facilitate this process for the Independent. The venue will be our blog, which can expand to meet the needs of all those wishing to speak. For structure will, we’ll start with a list of issues on which to comment. To provide focus, some limit is needed in this and we propose the following to start:

The Economy/Budget

Energy/Environment

Healthcare

Immigration

Iraq/Iran/Middle East

Jobs/Trade

Social Security  

IDn will not take positions on any of these issues. Our role will be to facilitate our readers’ exploration and understanding of them from the Independent’s perspective. Next is the reader’s turning these views into action by participation in appropriate fora, supporting in voice and resources those candidates whose views are closest to their own. The last step, of course, is voting their views in November.

It comes down to this: If you don’t speak up now, don’t expect to have much of a voice later. Time is short. Your choices in November could well be determined within nine weeks from today, maybe sooner.

Elector

The single, driving concept behind the Declaration was and remains that all men are created equal. This is its soul, its ultimate claimed truth. Absent this, the document is meaningless. And this was radical, perhaps beyond what our every day experiences would incline us to understand and appreciate. Yet this is now the base assumption of our political lives. It is, in fact, the secular foundation of our value system.

Within the Declaration, there are three phrases that specify or imply the basis on which it was written. The first of these is the most obvious: Self-evident. The authors took to themselves, and by extension all humanity, the power and authority of reason and applied it to the world about them. In doing so, they declared that at birth each human being was, by right of birth, the equal of all others. They did not need a state or a religion to tell them this, nor would they let a state or a religion deny it to them, or to their children. Self-evident was self-evident, and the phrase was Franklin’s.

The next is pursuit of Happiness. This may be the most radical thought in the document. For some, it remains radical to this day. It challenged not the authority of the state but the place of religion in an every day life. And what was so radical? This: It is alright to live a life whose aim is fulfillment in the world about us. In effect, it allows that the purpose and measure of a life lived must not necessarily include getting to heaven, that a life lived well and good here on earth could be its own reward. In 1776, this was radical.

The last of the three phrases is the last three words of the document itself. On signing their Declaration, the Founders pledged to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. They saw in their individual lives something of worth, sacred, something good in and of itself. And, by extension, that this good was the basis of the inalienability of the Rights they claimed for all humanity. Make no mistake: humankind as born apart from sin was a radical thought in 1776. And this, too, remains radical for some today.

That we are each born equal remains the enduring force of our national spirit. And for the responsible Independent, it is no longer enough to show up on the first Tuesday of November to choose among the candidate offerings of others. Today, there are few practical barriers to our participation in the political process. With the internet and new media, we have 24/7 access to the political process.

This is not a radical thought. It is a radical fact. Engage now!

Elector

There may be no better example of this than the 1968 Presidential election, won by Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey.  Nominated at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that July, Humphrey was President Lyndon Johnson’s incumbent Vice President and champion of liberal Democrats everywhere. The convention, perhaps the most fractious and violent in the country’s history, had chosen Humphrey over Democratic senators McCarthy and McGovern, who had campaigned strongly against U. S. participation in the War in Vietnam.

To many in the party, the Convention was a sham. For them, the party bosses had handed the nomination to Humphrey on the instruction of LBJ, despite wide-spread opposition among the delegates to the war. Perhaps more importantly, the violence of the anti-war demonstrations had the party faithful – North and South, labor and liberal – questioning its direction and leadership.

Whatever the dynamics of the election, history records a 27% decline in votes cast for the Democratic candidate in the 1964 election won by LBJ as compared with Humphrey in 1968. The absolute numbers are perhaps more telling. The 43.1 million votes cast for the Democrats in 1964 shrank by 11.9 million to 31.3 million in 1968, an election won by Richard Nixon with 31.87 million votes, a margin of barely 500,000 votes.

While the candidacy of former Alabama Governor George Wallace in that year’s election no doubt played a heavy hand in the final numbers, the fact remains that a good many Democrats stayed home that November. Given Nixon’s winning margin of less than one percent of the votes cast, it is more than plausible to suggest that those Democrats who failed to vote that year put him in the White House. Leaving history to judge the ultimate impact of Nixon’s election, responsibility for it must certainly be shared by those who would have cast their vote against him but decided to cast it aside.

This said, there is a voting technique that allows the citizen a voice without having to vote for a particular candidate. Register to vote, go to the polls, and vote for every position except that of the presidency. If enough were to do this, commentators may be moved to note that while this many millions went to the polls that day, more than so many millions of these abstained from voting for either party’s candidate. While no more than a footnote to history, if that, it is a statement nonetheless. The important thing is that no matter what you do with your vote, you do it on purpose, and with purpose.

A vote is a terrible thing to waste.

Elector