When All Around You Go Short, It Pays to Go Long

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Democrats vilify Republicans as arithmetically-impaired, fundamentalist Randian social Darwinists. Republicans cast Democrats as godless, spendthrift, entitlement-sucking socialists. The extremes of both parties flame each other with such withering intensity that moderates are incinerated in the crossfire.

Independents went to the dance, kissed both boys, listened to their promises, but are playing coy as to which one (if either) they'll go home with. There's a very impolite word for that kind of date. I'm not going to use it, but do keep it in mind.

Independents are angry that the conventions offered them so little specificity and exact detail to make up their minds. What are they expecting? Paul Ryan found out just how draconian specifics can be when the fact-checker zombies come back to feast on his flesh. So has President Obama when he extemporaneously gotcha'ed himself in the "you didn't build this" line. Unpinch your nostrils my rabbity independent friends and inhale the partisan air. It may stink a bit, but it won't kill you. It is in fact, the best we have to breathe. A short guide to full bodied respiration follows ...

Is anybody surprised to learn that presidents don't dig ditches?

Presidents don’t perform “the mission” any more than Barack Obama pulled the trigger on Osama bin Laden.  But presidents DO make big things happen. They say go and Seal Team Six went. They are executive change agents. They paint with broad brushes, create mandates, which they hand over to the legislative, judicial and military branches to execute the details. That’s their jobs, even after they are on the job. That’s our system.

On the campaign trail or the Oval Office, the president is Preacher One. That’s our process. Expecting anything else is like asking for Christ to climb on the cross for a repeat performance. Human history, not just American history, offers poor job security for messiahs. We need to grow up, stop expecting them and definitely, we need to stop throwing them under the bus as soon as we grow the least bit impatient with their progress. We need to start thinking more longterm and allow history, economics and law to unfold in their own time. If we keep making midcourse corrections to molify the "election-deciding independents," if we keep jerking the rudder every two years, we’ll get nowhere anybody wants to be. 

Which is exactly where we are now. And it's all thanks to you.

This is some tough love for you independents out there.

Perhaps your independency is meant to signal your disenfranchisement with to the process. You hate the sectarian nature of both parties. You feel by staying emotionally and intellectually detached from it and above the fray, that you’re doing yourself and your country a favor. Permit me, respectfully, but you’re not. You’re not the solution. You’re the problem. Perhaps you’re even more the problem than the “radical extremes” of both parties.

What do people expect? You weigh in behind a new president, a Democrat, with a Democratic Senate and House who start out to do exactly what they detailed on the campaign trail. Less than two years in, you-we-the electorate panic, reverse course and pull up a sea-trove of new, wet Republican fish for the House and split the balance in the Senate by one vote. And somehow, miraculously you still expect things to get done? Who is to blame for this? The President? The Congress you elected? No, my friends—you are.

Remember, we haven’t had a government by fiat since we were ruled by King George. Divided, polarized Executive and Legislative teams say exactly one thing about us. That we don’t really want change, only lip-service and pissing matches. Or that in less than 24 months, we grew forgetful and impatient and changed our minds. And by we, I mean you. By voting solid Democrat, I supported and support the Democratic agenda. I have friends and family, solid Republicans, who’d stood their ground just as firmly as if their guy had been in.

The Democratic agenda in the first two years of his presidency was Obamacare and Financial reform. I struggled with anger as I learned how these pieces of legislature got diluted. The how and when was relatively easy to spot if you follow the news closely. I just didn’t understand “the why” until now.  

Sitting Democrats panicked. They know you better than I do and that you’d be scared. They knew that what they were planning was “radical” enough that they had a real chance of going down in flames in the midterms, so both bills were riddled with compromises, not to make better law, but to make faster more expedient passage of law. These seasoned politicians knew they had to push it out the legislative alimentary canal and onto the books, before the sphincter of American panic closed and we were mired in governmental constipation. Which is exactly where we are now.

Everybody feels strong, enematic reform of government is needed. So let’s do it. Vote Republican or vote Democrat this November 6th. The choices are clear and distinct. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see them.

• One side believes that all people have the right to their own marital and reproductive choices.
• The other side believes that we’re morally obligated to shape marital and reproductive choices to traditional values.
• One side believes government’s mandate to serve is more important than what it costs upfront.
• The other side believes that government should be scaled down to serve only what it can afford upfront.
• One choice is a longterm investment model of the government of for and by the people.
• The other is a short-term business efficiency/private equity capital model.
• The other side believes business needs more government sense and oversight.
• One side believes government needs more business sense and oversight.
• One side is going to reform Medicare by making $716B cuts through phased cost efficiencies and economies of scale.
• The other side plans to make the same $716 B of cuts in Medicare by phasing in privatization.

And so on … The choices really are stark and clear. So make one. And while you do, ponder, election cycle after election cycle, why there isn’t an Independent Ticket? Simple—because there is no real independent agenda.  There is just independent indecision and impatience. So vote a ticket. Don’t split it. Whichever way you go, make a decision, go all the way and stick with it. Because I guarantee if you send President Obama back with a Republican legislature, nothing is ever going to get done. If you send (ahem) President Romney to the White House with a Democratic legislature, nothing is going to get done. Perhaps that’s the way you want it. I don’t.

In 2008, after Bush trounced Kerry, I had a conversation with my Republican brother. He said he'd voted for Bush, even though he’d made it clear that after the first four years, he hated Bush.  The reason for this distaste—unlike my fiscal conservative brother, Bush, (who’d squandered the Clinton surplus), was no fiscal conservative. Why, I asked him? You have a good, solid man running in opposition, a statesman and war vet.  My brother conceded that Kerry was a good man and not what he’d been portrayed as by the Swiftboaters.  My brother’s argument for his vote:

"It’s just been four years. You don't switch horses in midstream."

His argument for Bush. Mine for Obama.

So do your homework, then make a decision already and stick with it long enough for your choice to have an impact. It’s just donkey/elephant/horse sense and it's your civic duty to do so.