Pew Research: Partisan Ideology (A Philosophical Shell Game)

Moderate. Liberal. Conservative. Republican. Democrat. Independent.  With choices like these, who's to say what the Pew Research poll means! What does it mean to say you are a liberal or a conservative? What does it mean to say you are a Republican, Democrat or independent? And what does it mean to derive meaning from polls?

THE PARTIES
More Now See GOP as Very Conservative - Views of Parties' Ideologies (Pew Research) Nearly half of independents (47%) say their political views are moderate, about the same as last year. The remainder tilt conservative, with 33% saying they are either conservative (29%) or very conservative (4%); 17% say their views are either liberal (14%) or very liberal (3%).

Recommended chaser:
Whereas modernist conversation required a grounding in epistemological claims about why we think and feel the way we do when we try to influence each other, Newman and Holzman see that view of language as a kind of "aboutness" and as limiting. In contrast, they propose a view of language as something we perform in relationships, and they take readers beyond John Shotter's position that all meaning-making conversation occurs in a context of justification and argumentation. They suggest, instead, that new meaning is best created in a shared performance of meaning, and they discourage recitations or negotiation of meanings that we bring from our prior forms of "knowing". --  A Review of Fred Newman and Lois Holzman's The End of Knowing, By Tom Strong, Division of Applied Psychology at the University of Calgary

What Can Change in America: The Structure of Politics

STRUCTURAL POLITICAL REFORM
A way out of our dysfunctional politics (By Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post/Opinions) What has steadily changed over the past three or four decades is not so much the ideological intensity (though it has grown) but the structure of politics, making it more beholden to narrow, specialized interests — including ideological ones — rather than broader national ones....

...It’s depressing — but the fact that our politics are the result of structural shifts means that they can be changed. Mickey Edwards, a Republican and a former House member from Oklahoma, has a highly intelligent essay in Atlantic magazine, suggesting a series of reforms that could make a difference. Some of them are large-scale, such as creating truly open primaries and handing over the power of redistricting to independent commissions. Others are seemingly small but crucial changes in congressional procedure and practice, for example, filling committee vacancies by lot and staffing committees with professionals rather than with political apparatchiks.... [more]

For more on this topic, read Jackie Salit's The Parties Are Over from NY Newsday, October 2010

Are Americans ideological???

Yesterday Morning Joe reported on a conversation he had with David Axelrod last night, Axelrod said that Americans are not ideological, and Morning Joe agreed. What do you think?

TODAY'S NEWS HEADLINES for INDEPENDENT VOTERS

INDEPENDENT VOTERS

The New Politics: Barack Obama, Party of One - Without entirely realizing it, America elected its first Independent president. The implications for how the country will be governed are profound, exhilarating, and loaded with risk. (By John Heilemann, New York Magazine) Virtually since Election Day, they have been debating the putative shape of what they like to call Obama for America 2.0, with much of the focus on a central choice: Should the network be folded into the DNC or housed within an independent entity? The risk for Obama in pursuing the former path was clear: a possible turnoff for the millions of loyalists who bought into the Obama brand but happened not to be Democrats. On the other hand, though an outside group would have given Obama a power base separate from the DNC, he would also have been less able to exercise control over its agenda... With the selection last week of Obama's friend, Virginia governor Tim Kaine, to chair the party, the question has more or less been answered: Much of the campaign's grassroots operation, I'm told, will reside at the DNC.

POLITISOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS Around The Sphere (By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief, The Moderate Voice) Glenn Greenwald: The notion that Democrats must spurn their left-wing base and move to the "non-ideological" center is the most conventional of conventional Beltway wisdom (which is why Ignatius, the most conventional of Beltway pundits, is preaching it).

TODAY'S NEWS HEADLINES for INDEPENDENT VOTERS

INDEPENDENT VOTERS

• Vice President Dick Cheney divisive? That's probably okay by him (BY THOMAS M. DEFRANK, DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF) His approval rating is lower than his boss' dismal numbers. The McCain campaign considered Cheney so toxic with moderate and independent voters that he never campaigned with the Republican nominee last fall.
  
• The American Debate: He damaged party in two fundamental ways (By Dick Polman, Philadelphia Inquirer National Political Columnist) A new analysis by the conservative Hoover Institution deftly frames the GOP quandary: "The decline of Republican strength occurs when strong Republicans become weak Republicans, weak Republicans become independents, and independents lean more Democratic or [are] even becoming Democrats. . . . The problem for Republicans is that their base is slowly shrinking, and they cannot win without the support of moderates" - all of which suggests "an emerging party realignment" to the GOP's detriment, perhaps "a long dry run."
  
• Mind the Gap-What the narrowing divide between a center-left nation and a center-right establishment portends (By DAVID SIROTA, In These Times) In fact, with Obama considering converting his campaign e-mail list into something of a state-directed advocacy apparatus, he may have a grassroots machine specifically designed to thwart independent progressive pressure against his government. That's not as far-fetched a possibility as it sounds, considering congressional Democrats' explicit declaration of war against "The Left."
  
• RELATED ARTICLE The Center-Right Nation Exits Stage Left (By Tod Lindberg, Washington Post) Hoover Institution colleague David Brady and Douglas Rivers of the research firm YouGovPolimetrix have been analyzing data from online interviews with 12,000 people in both 2004 and 2008. It shows an overall shift to the Democrats of six percentage points. As they write in the forthcoming edition of Policy Review, "The decline of Republican strength occurs by having strong Republicans become weak Republicans, weak Republicans becoming independents, and independents leaning more Democratic or even becoming Democrats." This is a portrait of an electorate moving from center-right to center-left.
  

POLITICAL REFORM/OPEN PRIMARIES

• Reed, others form big plans (Brad Shannon, The Olympian) More changes might be coming to the state's ever-evolving election system. Secretary of State Sam Reed and state Rep. Sam Hunt, the Olympia Democrat who leads a key committee that handles elections issues, both have ideas. They would Limit the party names that candidates can use when running for office under the top-two runoff primary system. Reed wants real party names such as Republican, Libertarian, Democratic or unaffiliated, spokesman David Ammons said. Hunt seeks the same.
  
• PD Editorial: Leon Panetta - Obama's pick for CIA chief brings a distinguished record (Charles Dharapak / Associated Press, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT) Panetta and Republican Thomas McKernan are co-chairmen of California Forward, a bipartisan group that helped pass the redistricting measure on November's ballot. Their ongoing agenda includes reforming the budget process and restoring open primaries.
  
• Changes needed in light of 2008 elections (BY DEBRA BOWEN, The Reporter - Vacaville CA) Debra Bowen is Calif. chief elections officer: "The primaries also highlighted the confusion faced by the growing ranks of California voters who decline to affiliate with a political party. Some mistakenly believe that to be politically "independent," they should register with the American Independent Party, rather than registering as decline-to-state (DTS) voters. As some nonpartisans discovered when they went to vote, doing so kept them from voting in any other party's "open" primary. I eliminated some of this confusion by redesigning the voter registration card this year, but there is more we can do. I plan to push legislation this year that will make voter registration even more intuitive for California's more than 3.4 million DTS voters."
  

POLITICSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS

• Does bailout spree signal the end of democracy? (BY RANDY SALZMAN, NorthJersey.com) A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. 
  
• In Obama, many see an end to the baby boomer era (By JOCELYN NOVECK – AP) "It may be technically correct to call him a boomer," says Douglas Warshaw, a New York media executive who, at age 49, is part of whatever cohort Obama is in. "And it's in the Zeitgeist to call him a Gen Xer. But I think he's more like a generational bridge." He adds that Obama got where he was by "brilliantly leveraging the communication behaviors of post-Boomers," with a campaign waged across the Web, on cell phones and on social networking sites.
  
• Are Moderates Really Pragmatists? (The New Republic/The Plank) There are knee-jerk centrists who simply take the left-wing and right-wing positions on any given policy question and decide, without any empirical analysis, that the right answer must be somewhere in between. But the example Matt cites isn't a very good one, and is indicative of an annoying tendency on the part of some liberals to impute too quickly bad-faith motives to centrists. 
  
• David Ignatius: Obama makes move toward center (Washington Post Writers Group, Memphis Commercial Appeal) Obama talked during the campaign about creating a new kind of post-partisan politics -- and dissolving the country's cultural and racial and ideological boundaries. Given Obama's limited record as a centrist politician, it was hard to know if he really meant it. John McCain had a more compelling record of working across party lines than did his Democratic rival.
  
• Obama's Economic Recovery Speech (By Justin Gardner, Donklephant) I'm calling on all Americans – Democrats and Republicans – to put good ideas ahead of the old ideological battles; a sense of common purpose above the same narrow partisanship; and insist that the first question each of us asks isn't "What's good for me?" but "What's good for the country my children will inherit?" from transcript
  

NEW YORK POLITICS/INDEPENDENCE PARTY

• Dueling New York Senate Polls (by: JeremiahTheMessiah, Swing State Project) In the match-up with King, Kennedy gets support from 74% of Democrats and holds a 12-point lead among unaffiliated voters. King is supported by 73% of Republicans.
  
• SENATE DEAL Pain vs. gain (Winners & Losers - Crains New York) LOSERS: Frank McKay and the Independence Party. They spent big on Senate Republicans after failing to get Mayor Michael Bloomberg to run for president, and they backed John McCain. That's three strikes.
  
• Independence Party forms - Overtakes Conservative Party for 3rd party status in NYS (by Patrick Rocchio, YourNabe.com BRONX) "For the first time in the history of the awards, which promote good government, we have a county committee in the Bronx," said Bronx County Independence Party chairman Keith McHenry. "Our goal is to fight partisanship."
  

TODAY'S NEWS HEADLINES for INDEPENDENT VOTERS

INDEPENDENT VOTERS

• Voices for change (BY JOHN GUERRIERO, Erie Times News) "I think that Obama is a smart and savvy guy who knew just the right notes to hit during the Democratic primary as an underdog to beat Hillary Clinton, and knew just the right way to attract Independent voters and some Republicans in the general election."
  
• Warner earned reputation for independence (JEFF E. SCHAPIRO. Richmond Times Dispatch) "Senator Warner's personal penchant for independence and willingness to take issue with his fellow partisans made him especially appealing to this pivotal bloc of swing voters."
  
• Most Voters Like Caroline, But Only 37% Say She Is Fit for Senate (Rasmussen Reports) Fifty-five percent (55%) of Democrats say she is qualified to serve. Kennedy is a Democrat likely to be appointed by a Democratic governor and it may not matter much that just 20% of Republicans and 30% of unaffiliated voters believe she is qualified.
  
• Despite numbers, GOP floundered (BY ROBERT MOORE, Coloradoan) More than 61,000 Republicans voted in Larimer County in the Nov. 4 election, compared to 50,600 Democrats and 54,000 unaffiliated voters. Despite the huge partisan disadvantage, Democratic candidates for president, U.S. Senate and Congress all carried the county by healthy margins.
  

POLITICAL REFORM

Is good governance gone? (LA Daily News) we'd like to see open primaries adopted. Voters should be able to chose from among all the candidates running - not just their party - a chance that would help break up the 120 Club, which is our dysfunctional Legislature.

POLITISOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS

• Blagogate (Jeffery T. Kuhner, Washington Times) Blagogate is about more than a brazen attempt by the Democratic governor to leverage a U.S. Senate seat in exchange for campaign contributions or a lucrative job for him and his wife. It is about a political culture in which bribery, influence-peddling, cronyism, abuse of power and misuse of public funds are widely practiced.
  
• Obama Triangulates His 'Base' (By Brent Budowsky, Consortium News.com) Since his election on Nov. 4, Barack Obama has appeared more interested in cultivating and appeasing political opponents than thanking the tens of millions of Americans who backed him – and building on their grassroots support.
  
• Catching up and thinking about tolerance (The Phoenix) While I commend their intellectual effort and attempt at compassion, I have to caution liberals and progressives about being too inclusive.
  
• Conservatism v. Liberalism Part V: The history of…: 'Independence'-making the case for It and agains (by Hassan Giordano, Baltimore Independent Examiner)
  
• How Historic a Victory? (By Michael Tomasky, New York Review of Books) Obama's win was strong enough that he didn't even need California (55 electoral votes) and New York (31). He could have spotted McCain those 86 navy-blue electoral votes, which he was never in danger of losing, and still finished with 279. It was, to use a nontechnical term on which political scientists and laypersons could surely agree, a wipeout. But was it, to use a technical term about which political scientists are more persnickety, a realignment?
  

TODAY'S NEWS HEADLINES for INDEPENDENT VOTERS

INDEPENDENT VOTERS

• California needs a GOP for 2009, not 1977 (By Peter Schrag, Sac Bee) The self-marginalization has been far greater among Republicans, who exclude independent voters from their primaries, who have made no effort to reach out to California's fast-growing minorities, Latinos especially, or for that matter to women.
  
• Political parties must work together (LETTER News Times - CT) Instead of trying to recruit the unaffiliated voter to your party's dogma, it's time to listen to the unaffiliated voter's message.
  

OPEN PRIMARIES/POLITICAL REFORM

• ‘Open primary’ may be headed to 2010 ballot (Capitol Weekly) One view of the partisan paralysis gripping the California Legislature is that it could be eased by embracing open primary elections, in which voters can cast ballots for any candidate regardless of party affiliation.
  
• Give us good governance! (Press Telegram - Long Beach CA) The Legislature, chosen by party fiat in gerrymandered districts, can't decide whether to raise taxes, cut services or tie its shoelaces.... Voters last month decided they'd been gerrymandered enough, and new districts based on criteria other than party affiliation will see the light of day. To that, we'd add that open primaries should be adopted. A vote for the candidate - not the party - would help break up the 120 Club, which is our dysfunctional Legislature. 
  
• Electoral College could be weakened - Two Atlanta lawmakers want measure to let popular vote decide presidential elections. Other states have voted on similar bills. (By James Salzer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
  

POLITISOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS

• Obama’s Ideology and Pragmatism: More Common Law Than We Might Think (By Scott Payne, The Moderate Voice) The very notion of sternly pragmatic and ideological camps in itself smacks of gross over-simplification.
  
• The Pragmatist (by CHRISTOPHER HAYES, The Nation)
  
• State of Disgrace (by David Moberg, The New Republic) Why has Illinois always been so corrupt? In a word: adaptability. The simple answer is that the state's political machines--both Democratic and Republican--have become so adaptable and have so deeply influenced the state and local political culture that reformers, despite periodic victories, just don't have a shot. 
  
• Is "Ideology" Bad When it Comes to Foreign Policy? (Shadi Hamid, Huffington Post) In the realm of foreign policy, "Ideology" is getting a bad name. "Pragmatism" is, apparently, all the rage.
  

NEW YORK POLITICS

• Bronx Boro President Carrion Will Run For Comptroller (Gothamist)
  
• Bronx Beep Carrion Gets a White House Post (Gothamist)
  

TODAY'S NEWS HEADLINES for INDEPENDENT VOTERS

INDEPENDENT VOTERS

• Scapegoating the Social Right (RAMESH PONNURU, National Review) Avlon is mistaken in thinking both that all centrists are social liberals and fiscal conservatives and that all people who talk about “the center” have this type of voter in mind.
• Record Turnout for Harvey Milk March (Beyond Chron: San Francisco's Alternative Online Daily News) The recent passage of Proposition 8 calls into question whether the campaign bothered to learn how queers defeated Prop 6 thirty years earlier. A cautious, poll-driven campaign that kept gay couples out of the limelight de-sensitized the subject – allowing the other side to scare swing voters with emotional appeals about “the children.” In stark contrast to Harvey Milk sticking his neck out by campaigning across the state, SF Mayor Gavin Newsom was reduced to campaigning in “safe” areas – not willing to step out of his own comfort zone to engage the opposition.

PRAGMATISM/IDEOLOGY

• Barack Obama: Pragmatist or Liberal? How About Both? (US News & World Report/Thomas Jefferson Street blog) I'm getting a bit tired of hearing about how Barack Obama's cabinet choices thus far have reflected a pragmatic approach to governing, rather than a liberal one. That's rather like saying that my lunch today will taste like chicken, rather than like purple.
• Shifting Landscapes: Obama & The Movement (By Max Uhlenbeck, Source: Left Turn, ZNet) Obama was able to accomplish this feat by building a coalition ranging from the far left to the center-right, and by utilizing a variety of new technologies (blogs, YouTube videos, social networking sites) to raise a record three quarters of a billion dollars, much of which was re-invested in staff and organizing infrastructure.

CENTER-LEFT

• 2008: An extraordinarily ordinary election or an historic shift? (Politicker ME) That's the real lesson of the 2008 election: For the first time since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, a credible case can be made that the United States is now a center-left country instead of a center-right country. moderate voters, by far the largest slice of the American electorate, chose Barack Obama by a 60 percent to 39 percent margin.
• The Real Rivalry In the Team: The Cabinet vs. The Campaign Promises (David Sirota, Huffington Post) In fact, there already is - it's no accident that the conservative noise machine from Karl Rove on down is praising Obama's appointments, and effectively creating that rightward pull. If there isn't similar progressive pressure now, don't be surprised if the debate - and thus the policy - starts slowly creeping right.

BOOK REVIEW

• The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life by Michael Lind: A Pragmatic Book for a Pragmatic Time (TPM Cafe) Regardless of where you fall on the progressive-idealistic/republican liberal-instrumental spectrum, it's clear that we desperately need to shift to a much more intensely pragmatic way of reasoning about democracy as a function of our national security goals.
• The evolution of American liberal internationalism (By Michael Lind, TPM Cafe) Both of the elements of traditional liberal internationalism -- the norm of nonintervention and the idea of a concert of all great powers, democratic or otherwise have been rejected by many self-described liberal internationalists since the end of the Cold War.
  

TODAY'S NEWS HEADLINES for INDEPENDENT VOTERS

INDEPENDENT VOTERS
Swingers: The New Voting Bloc That Could Change Politics Forever (Huffington Post) It wasn't the Democratic base that nominated Barack Obama; the establishment was solidly in line for the coronation of Hillary Clinton. But Swingers stepped in and turned Obama from an inspiring story to the real deal.... Find out if your state has open primaries and push your elected officials to make the switch if it doesn't.


OPEN PRIMARIES/POLITICAL REFORM

• Possible Solution to the Conflict Between Supporters of “Top-Two” and Minor Party and Independent Activists (Ballot Access News)
• The New York County Lawyers' Association's Election Law Committee will hold a public forum Thursday on the question of open primaries, and the line-up - from Independence Party attorney Harry Kresky to Post City Hall Bureau Chief David Seifman (acting as the moderator - is sure to make for a lively discussion. (NY Daily News/Daily Politics) CUIP's Jackie Salit also speaking in favor of open primaries...
  
• Prop. 11 won by not talking about redistricting (San Francisco Chronicle) instead of running a campaign about the glories of "communities of interest" and "geographically compact districts," the Prop. 11 team leaned on one of those evergreen slogans of California politics: "Let's throw the bums out."

WHAT'S IDEOLOGY GOT TO DO WITH IT?

• For Obama, moderates held key to election (Politico) these voters want a transformation in politics and government that is every bit as profound as those on the left. Yet they are often frustrated by what they see as a series of false policy choices, hemmed in by narrow and outdated ideological battles. Thus, for a transformation to take hold with the American middle, it must reflect the values of post-partisanship, pragmatism and patriotism.
• Third Way President Jonathan Cowan’s Statement on the Election of 2008 -- “A Moderate In Moderate’s Clothing” - Obamism and The Future of Progressive Politics (Third Way Press Release)
• Calling U.S. center-right gets it wrong (Atlanta Journal Constitution) Before the election, Republicans argued that Obama’s proposals on issues such as the economy and health care were so radical they amount to socialism. Now some of those same people argue that Obama ran as a centrist, and therefore has no mandate to pursue progressive policies (The day after the election, Karl Rove claimed, “Barack Obama understands this is a center-right country and he smartly and wisely ran a campaign that emphasized it.”). Both of these things cannot simultaneously be true.
• Obama from change agent to pragmatist (AP) Obama: "One of the dangers in a White House, based on my reading of history, is that you get wrapped up in group-think and everybody agrees with everything and there's no discussion and there are no dissenting views," he said. "So I am going to be welcoming a vigorous debate inside the White House.
• 18 Million Independents Voted for Obama (Independent Voting) In 1992 the independent movement in America was a center-right movement. In 2008, the independent movement is center-left. That's a shift...
  

Conversations on Independent Voters

Being independent is a fight. The media (trailing major party campaign strategies) recognizes us because we're the critical votes in any given election.

As a "true" independent, I get the sense that Gary Andres has never actually talked with real independent voters. He seems to get his stats and info from anonymous poll surveys. In the meantime, the world keeps turning, the independent movement keeps churning, and poor Mr. Andres is left in the dust... Or is it his job to put down independents and keep control of the category??? Independents are voters who vote for the person, not the party. Independent voters can't be categorized by ideology -- we break left, center and right. Independent voters are concerned about political corruption and the inability by the American people to affect social/political change.

Independend voters are self-defined.

So, define and categorize away! You won't come close to understanding what's happening in America now.