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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TideGlider who wrote (46565)	9/14/2008 6:57:03 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	2 Recommendations Respond to of 224744

Ken won't be happy:Independents swing toward McCain By: John P. Avlon, politico.com September 14, 2008 Independent voters — the largest and fastest-growing segment of the American electorate — were always going to determine the winner of this election. And in contrast to past contests like 2004, where independents viewed the choice between President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry as a vote for the candidate they disliked least, independents had a dream campaign in ‘08: two compelling nominees who ran against the polarizing establishments of their own parties with explicitly post-partisan appeals. It was a year in which Karl Rove’s play-to-the-base politics seemed to be on the ash heap of history. In the wake of Sarah Palin, John McCain has opened up a 15-point lead among independents, according to a new Gallup Poll — and Barack Obama has a real problem. Since the GOP convention and his selection of the Alaska governor as his running mate, McCain has changed a months-long tie among independents into a 52 to 37 percent advantage. Support for McCain among self-described "conservative Democrats" has jumped 10 points, to 25 percent, signaling the shift among swing voters to McCain. The candidate’s surge tracks the script the campaign had written for the party convention. Joe Lieberman’s sleepy but substantively centrist speech was the preamble to McCain reframing the Republican Party around national security, fiscal conservatism and corruption reform. The result: he elevation of the independent maverick. Both McCain and Palin avoided almost any mention of the right-wing social issues that are a wedge between the GOP and most Independents’ political beliefs. Palin may prove to be a deeply polarizing figure to swing voters and suburban women, but for the time being she has shaken up Independents’ assumptions about the GOP—on the surface, it does not look like Dick Cheney’s party anymore. McCain’s credibility with independents goes back more than a decade, and it’s far deeper than a veep pick. McCain was independents’ favorite political figure for most of this decade — he fought against Karl Rove in 2000 and Tom DeLay’s pork-barrel-spending, corrupt conservative Congress in the road up to ’06. He has a heroic record of reaching across the aisle to forge bipartisan compromise against an ideological establishment that encouraged the opposite. For independents, this is profile-in-courage-type stuff. But independents’ identification with John McCain suffered when he began this presidential campaign with a political embrace of the Bush administration and rapprochement with Jerry Falwell and others on the right whom McCain described in 2000 as “agents of intolerance.” Obama’s campaign is confronting a political reality that Democrats have a difficult time dealing with: that America is essentially a center-right nation. Winning a national election comes down to winning over independents and centrists in swing states. And the professional partisans in the Republican Party needs to appreciate that John McCain is leading a broader resurgence of the Republican brand because of his independence, not in spite of it. John P. Avlon is the author of “Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics.” He served as chief speechwriter and deputy policy director for Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. www.politico.com