Saturday night I attended a modest get-together of Queens County NY Independence Party activists at the home of one of our members in Long Island City. The purpose was two-fold: One, to celebrate our hard work over the past year that had put the country's leading independent Mayor in office with 75,000 votes on the IP line and brought about a 47% bolt from the Democratic Party by African American voters in the one of the most heavily DP registered electorates anywhere.
And the other purpose was to raise money for our 2006 ballot access drive that will field some 900 county committee candidates in Queens alone. The New York City Independence Party operation is known nationally for its dedication to and expertise in grassroots organizing.
Chairman of the (former) Queens IP Interim County Organization Jerry Everett pointed out in his remarks that independents are people who have volunteered to become second-class citizens (because that's what we are in this two-party winner-take-all clubhouse monstrosity of a political system) in the fight for grassroots democracy.
I couldn't help but imagine living rooms all over the country where independents were gathered to figure out what to do about the state of our political affairs.
An article this morning by Ron Brownstein and Janet Hook in the Seattle Times [Changing horses in midstream: Why it's harder] reminded me that the parties are worrying about this. Brownstein and Hook report, "In this year's midterm election, control of Congress may turn on whether the public's clear desire for change is powerful enough to overcome the resistance to change built into the political system."
Party politicians everywhere are trying to play conservative positions over liberal positions on any issue small or large to gain an edge in these elections. One problem for them in Oregon is that there is an independent Ben Westlund who is going for the governorship as a "radical middle" candidate willing to build coalitions to solve problems.
In Pennsylvania, Russ Diamond has discovered that it may not matter what positions entrenched politicans take on any issues--voters are fed up with the entrenched positions of all of them.
Welcome to the Civil Rights movement of the 2000s. I'm proud to be a volunteer in the second class citizen army. It's how we'll get from here to there.
-NH
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