TODAY'S NEWS HEADLINES for INDEPENDENT VOTERS

POST ELECTION ANALYSIS

• GOP must reinvent itself after trouncing (Hendersonville Times News/BlueRidgeNow - NC) So what is to be done? Lenin said, “in order to make an omelet you have to break eggs.”
• The Christian Party (by Jeffrey Hart, The Daily Beast) George W. Bush transformed the center-right party of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and his father, George H.W. Bush, into the political instrument of the religious right, tying the party to the evangelical protestants and to such Catholics as made the culture war central to their politics.
• AT LARGE: Hume says U.S. is still ‘center right country’ (Tuscaloosa News) In his jumbled syntax, Hume, the most pontifical of the television pundits, was trying to advance some sort of theory about how despite the election of Barack Obama, who you will remember was branded as the “most liberal senator in Congress” by the Republicans, we are still a “center right country.”
• A Shift In Direction (The Tampa Tribune) Nonetheless, many people are now advising Barack Obama to "govern from the center."
• Mark Green: 7 Days: FDR = Obama? Alter, Huffington, vanden Heuvel & Green Discuss and Compare Their Transitions (Huffington Post) Jonathan Alter: It's a bit of an oversimplification to think that we're going to move left in lock step across the board, but as a general proposition there's no question that the country is moving left, the last line of my piece was "leftward ho".
• Can Obama Truly Deliver? (CBS News) "The country must be governed from the middle," Pelosi told reporters on November 5. One reason, Democratic advisers say, is that so many new members of Congress are centrists that the party won't be able to hold its majority in 2010 if it lurches left with meddlesome social programs and vast new spending schemes.
• Obama's community-organizing skills valuable in presidency (The Morning Sentinel) The CEO says, "Hire me and I will fix this company." The community organizer says, "Let me help you fix this community."

POLITICAL THEATER Bread and Puppet livens gathering of pro-secession advocates at Statehouse (Burlington Free Press) "We think the empire is going down," Naylor said. "Everyday it gets worse and worse and the leaders are clueless."