With the backdrop of Obama’s shallow rhetoric about unity and hope, Stanley Fish takes aim at “Independent Voters” with an excellent piece in the NYT:

Against Independent Voters – Stanley Fish

[…]

Floating independently above the fray and inhabiting the marketplace of ideas as if were a shopping bazaar rather than a battlefield is an unnatural condition. The natural condition is to be political. To be political is to believe something, and to believe something is to believe that those who believe something else are wrong, and after all you don’t want people who believe (and would do) the wrong things running your government. So you organize with other like-minded folks and smite the enemy (verbally) hip and thigh. You join a party.

What do independent voters do? Well, most of all, they talk about the virtue of being an independent voter. When they are asked to explain what that means, they say, “I can’t stand the partisan atmosphere that has infected our politics” (forgetting that politics is partisan by definition); or “we like to make up our own minds and don’t want anyone telling us what to do (as if Democrats and Republicans were sheep eager to go over whatever cliff the leadership brings them to) or (and this was a favorite of those interviewed in Iowa and New Hampshire), “We vote the person rather than the party.”

And offers them timely advice:

If you are really interested in the way things should go in the country, come off the high pedestal and join the rest of us in the nurturing (and, yes, dirty) soil of the partisan free-for-all.

Worth multiple reads, even though he ends on a poor note, misidentifying Nader supporters with independents (Nader supporters were and are hard-core partisans and should be proud of that for the very reasons he outlines).

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