TODAY'S NEWS HEADLINES for INDEPENDENT VOTERS

ELECTION FALLOUT

• Presidential election highlights growing gap between generations - Young voters, universities buck trend, back Obama (Citizen Times Asheville NC) At Western Carolina University in Jackson County, the student body is actually split evenly among Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters, said Gibbs Knotts, head of the political science department.
• Analysis: Results show Kansas red, not purple (Joplin Globe) The number of registered Democrats was nearly 7 percent higher than it was in 2004, and the number of unaffiliated voters had climbed nearly 9 percent. Meanwhile, the number of registered Republicans slipped 1.5 percent.
• A Progressive Congress Under President Obama (Beyond Chron - San Francisco's Alternative Online Daily News) But the country’s leftward shift that gave Obama a landslide victory also produced a new crop of Democratic legislators – making waves that bode well for the future. This should embolden progressives to demand more from Washington – not less – as a new Congress and President get sworn in.
• End Game for Ideology (North Star Writers Group) Brit Hume, longtime Washington editor for Fox and a man who learned his trade as a reporter rather than a pundit, declared that America, which had been a center-right country, was now, on new evidence, a center-left country. Shock! Horror! Creeping socialism!
• A 'Center-Right' Country? We Shall See. (By Steven M. Warshawsky, American Thinker) Douglas Schoen, who was Bill Clinton's pollster in 1996, similarly argues that Barack Obama "owes his victory not to the left, but to the middle." Huh??
• Dear Obama: Don’t go right; get it right (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) Americans are fed up with government by slogans. They hunger for workable solutions to their pressing problems.
• G.O.P. Dog Days? (By William Kristol, NY Times) What’s more, this year’s exit polls suggested a partisan shift but no ideological realignment.

The vote last Tuesday suggests that the country has shifted center-left. This is the debate now happening among the pundits and political class.