Pretty Good Politics

The marsh was bright pink and very still this morning, except for a fast-moving speckle of birds. It feels like a shift change at a big factory - a new group of birds and animals moving in as the old ones pick up their lunch pails and head north.

(Photo by Jan)

Being in this middle state - not yet warm, no longer cold - has me thinking about political strategies. Like many of my generation, I adopted the dialectic as a core strategy in politics. I thought my job was to discern the "most correct" position on a given issue and work ceaselessly, some might have said obnoxiously, for its adoption.

The reason to be on the far edge of politics, in this view, is to occupy the best expression of ideals. I didn't expect my actual views to prevail.

I learned the politics of polarization in high school, when we demonstrated and sat in and had other types of fun, to ban the bomb and promote civil rights. In 11th grade American History, Mr Huntoon skipped the textbook's chapter on Roosevelt and the New Deal, because he said it was an era of shame when communists ran the US. I was also made to stand in the hall a lot, for expressing certain views. That poor teacher had no idea how much I loved his punishment.

(Photo by Jan)

Like many hormone-laden 16 year olds, I thrived on confrontation and searched constantly for extremes. Since I was accustomed to occupying the left-most space, I had a comeuppance in August of 1963 during the March on Washington. I could see that as a suburban white boy I was far distant from the cutting edge of that movement. I became a full time peace activist. And like many people, I gradually shifted my political goals from "total revolution" to mainstream adoption of some policies I care about.

In electoral politics, you sometimes pull harder than is really necessary, like a couple in bed fighting over a blanket, in anticipation of the other person's yank. I always vote for the Democrat, because I am always confronted with the need to counterweight the Republican. A two-party system is really difficult to dislodge for this reason - when you vote for a third party candidate, be it Nader or Perot, you run the risk of handing over the result to people whose views are furthest from your own.

(Photo by Jan)

In other words, many of us learned that voting for the candidate who most closely reflects our values may insure that those who least reflect our values come into power. You could see that here in Maine in the 2010 governors race, when I  voted for the Democrat instead of the Independent because I thought she was genuinely a better candidate. Because many people made the same mistake of promoting ideology over function, our current Tea Party embarrassment of a governor was elected - with only 39% of the vote.

Angus King, the former non-partisan governor running for Senate here, is proposing a different political strategy than the blanket tugging we're used to. King sees the middle as the best and maybe only place for creating change. The idea is to occupy a position between the two poles and force them towards the equator. I grew up thinking the exact opposite. And look where that kind of thinking got us.

King's independence is different from our two phony moderate Senators, Snowe and Collins. They are members of one extreme, but flirt with the language of moderation to pull voters towards them. The sham moderation of our Senators is what led to Olympia Snowe's departure from politics, because these days the person trying to look like she's in the middle only makes people at both ends of the spectrum mad at her. This is also Mitt's problem - trying to be on the right and in the middle at the same time.

Angus King

Angus King is not entirely free from the language of coy pandering, but overall, he's behaving like an independent, not a moderate. Third party candidates who yip and nip at the cuffs of the functioning politicos are excluded from power by their allegiance to purity. Moderates try to please everyone and please no one.

An authentic independent like King pays voters the compliment of assuming that we are all grown ups. He doesn't seem to be trying to convince me that he perfectly represents what I care about. Instead, I think he's likely to create actual change instead of frothy rhetoric, and what he'll do will be pretty good.

Perhaps Angus King is not an anomaly, but the start of a trend. I agree with my Democratic Congresswoman about 98% of the time. I think I'll agree with Senator King about 50 or 60% of the time. In exchange for dismounting from my political high horse, I am being offered a strategy for change in government by a guy standing on the center of the blanket, pulling the Democrats and Republicans at the edges towards him. Maybe enough of us have lived with the desolation of political deadlock to rise to King's challenge and vote for someone that few of us love but all of us like.