Mike Thomas
today in the Sentinel, in a piece on the why Charlie Christ should run, Joe Lieberman-style, as an independent, since everybody hates him in his own (lunatic-captured) party:
"People are getting sick of the two-party system. They hate the failure of Democrats and Republicans to work together..."
Standard-issue, data-free Mike Thomas blabber.
Leave completely aside the fallacy here suggesting that popular frustration with politics is focused on PROCESS (failure of partisans "to work together") moreso than
RESULTS (failure per se). There's a critical, related question MT passes on altogether, and it's this:
Are the at-large voters' grasp of the BASIC FACTS of policy, politics and their own society up to snuff, such that the politico (i.e. Goodtime Charlie) who nestles best into the 'low-information' bosom of a general elections' Lowest Common Denominator should be assumed to necessarily have any of the real answers to the serious, even historic problems FL is saddled with?
{http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1478/}
The answer is of course, no. Broad, shallow popularity isn't proof of anything except broad, shallow popularity (good to have, but fleeting it would seem).
This question of serious potential drawbacks that tend to correlate with the broad approbation of a politician by our megastate's worst-informed and least-engaged voters (in sharp contrast to a similar approval at the hands of party-loyalist voters) is a handy problem for a newspaper man and slack-prone opinion columnist to dodge. This is b/c it's one that points the finger directly at a journalistic profession that
(a) is itself as 'low in the polls,' market-wise, as Crist now is in the GOP;
(b) is imploding under the weight of this and other failures {http://tinyurl.com/Am-Journism-Hedges};
(c) is doing a greater disservice to conservative (read: GOP) citizen/news consumers as its slouches to oblivion (http://tinyurl.com/2003-PIPA-Study); and
(d) remains nonetheless tasked by no less an authority than Thomas Jefferson with filling a vital, baseline function of a minimally-healthy democracy ("If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn't hesitate to choose the latter").
That's an awful lot to overlook, but there it is.
To Mike Thomas, Crist is the "best politician in Florida". But last I checked, part of being any kind of politician at all--let alone the 'best'--involves a knack for balancing the support of a political base (i.e., a dynamic giving voters access to meaningful signals regarding what the candidate stands for vision- and core values-wise), with a broader consensus- and compromise-seeking that, theoretically, yields concrete accomplishments.
Crist is only half a politician by that measure, and I don't see why that's necessarily a good thing. Steve Schale's not alone, but is among those who've observed for a while now that Charlie's Achilles Heel has always been precisely that the man HAS NO POLITICAL BASE. {http://tinyurl.com/Crist-sans-Base} Seems to me there's very solid reasons to be skeptical about someone who chooses to tread the boards of our graft-and-cynicism-choked public policy stage, wholly lacking the enthusiastic support of any broad base of engaged, enthusiastic 'common people'. And I think that consummate corporate shill Joe Lieberman is the perfect example of why that might be.
Might be worth a second's reflection that there are good reasons for closed political primaries to exist. Especially when the mainstream and state-politics news media sucks quite as hard as it does.
