July 18, this item from Jacqueline Salit was cross-posted to “The Neo-Independent” and to the Huffington Post.  The “Neo-Independent” places it right alongside an old item from the recently deceased Fred Newman (“Deliberately Unsystematic Thoughts on a New Way of Running a Country,”), and links to two other pieces on the problems of America’s partisan governance.  The two pieces in tandem with Salit’s piece, as described by the politically becoming “Neo-Independent”:

Also included in this installment are three articles well-worth reading that look at today’s emerging independent movement: Mickey Edward’s “How to turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans” from The Atlantic, Jacqueline Salit’s “How Obama Can Be a Non-Partisan President” from The Huffington Post, and an analysis of the Pew Research Center’s recent study Beyond Red vs. Blue by Sarah Lyons, entitled “Independents are Not Moderates.”

I am hard-pressed to find Salit’s piece on any of the front pages of Huffington Post.  Looking over the “Politics” page, where Salit’s piece is categorized, I see a mass of items.   The most contentious and controversial items, and items involving figures of political scorn, have a a comments number in the three or four digits.  Others have comments in the 30-range.

Salit’s piece remains orphaned.  There is no there there.  She cross-reference from the Neo-Independent to the Huffington Post, and from the Huffington Post to the Neo-Independent.  Her advice for Obama to “woo the Independent vote”?

For many independents, it’s not enough for Obama to simply criticize Congressional leaders for their partisan intransigence. He has to show that he’s willing to back certain structural changes in the political process that make such intransigence more difficult. This means taking a stand in support of open primaries where independents can vote, which are currently under fire from right wing Republicans. And, imagine the shock waves that would follow an Obama appointment (in consultation with leaders of the independent movement) of two independents to vacant seats on the Federal Election Commission.

She would know because she is the Leader of the Independent Voter.
It’s interesting to compare this political analysis to the political analysis Newman put out following the 1990 New York gubernatorial race.  From a speech given on November 9, 1990 — “Community as a Hart in a Havenless World”, found in a book published collecting such things entitled “The Myth of Psycho-Analysis”.  (The only other excerpt I found in this book worth noting comes from same speech, so when I get around to that what he had to say about an article by Joe Conason in the Village Voice.)

Dr. Fulani went over some of the statistics from Tuesday, Election Day.  I don’t want to repeat them though I’m tempted.  Thirty-two thousand people voted for this sister(1) for governor of New York State.  What happened to those people as they’re talked about in the establishment press?  Well, they’re not people at all to the establishment press.  In the establishment press, they’re called “voters”.(2) And the establishment press says certain things about them as voters.  It says “They’re voters who only make up .8% of the voters who went to the polls so let’s dehumanize them.  We won’t even say they were there.(3) We won’t count them because they’re voters(4) and when you classify them, when you label them, when you label us, when you label the people here as voters, then you can say a whole bunch of things about us(5) which effectively say that we don’t count as people!  All those folks in jail, they’re not sisters and brothers in jail, they’re not sisters and brothers, human beings, they’re “prisoners!”  They’re “dangerous,” they’re “murderers,” they’re “statistics.”  They “cost us taxes.”  They’re not human beings because they’re appropriately labeled to deny they’re real people.  You don’t think the 32,000 people who voted for Lenora B Fulani are real people?(6) In fact, I suspect that some of them are probably in this room right now!(7) But the tens of thousands of those people who are not in this room tonight are not “voters.”  They’re women and men, Black, Latino, and White, they’re gay and straight, they’re human beings with pain and problems, with children, without children, they’re living, working, eating, right now, and they form a community of people, not “voters” but people,(8) who have the courage to come together and stand up and defy being imprisoned in the categories of those people who use language like, “This is OUR community; get the hell out!”(9)

(1) veering into a black dialect there.
(2)  How dehumanizing to call the people who voted “voters” in describing vote tallies.
(3)  Are the other 99.2 percent identified as “people” or “voters”?
(4)  Or, they won’t report them because they’re a rounding error?
(5)  You know that organization “No Labels”, which showed up on Meet the Press and had a quick splash of news coverage, and was widely seen as a “Michael Bloomberg for President” vehicle, and was composed of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans wanting to do away with their “ideologies” and “interest ties” in the name of harmony?  It’s suspect thinking, but takes on even more suspect thinking by the way one of Bloomberg’s beneficiaries and people who’ll hob nob with “No Labels“– self labeled as “post-modern Marxists” — throws around their desire for lack of labels.
(6)  Picking the audience’s liberal bleeding hearts’s sympathies for the Prison Population and the Oppressed and transferring it to the supposed dehumanization of seeing their point eight percent vote tally either not reported or being reported as “voters”.
(7)  Something approaching one hundred percent of the audience, actually.
(8)  The Mario Cuomo voters were people too, who also bleed and breathe.  So, for that matter, were Pierre Rinfret’s voters, Herbert London’s voters, Louis P. Wein’s, W. Gary Johnson’s, and Craig Gannon’s voters.  Just sayin’!
(9)  This makes some sense in the whole context of Newman’s speech.  There was an uproar over them moving into some community, hence the impassioned victim-hood and stern defiance.

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