Anderson Cooper The Journalist

There are many American voters who simply want one thing:  competent, responsible behavior from their elected officials.  The Republican and Democrat parties, however, are doing their best to send these voters rebounding from one party to the other, with no actual place to land.  Rather than embracing these voters and speaking to their needs, both established American parties are doing their best to impose upon the people the values the parties WANT them to have, which are namely the values of the respective party leaders, rather than the grass-root support voters are looking to lend to whoever will listen.

Dierdre "Dede" Scozzafava

The scenario is playing out again today, Election Day in the United States, most explicitly in upstate New York, as discussed on Tuesday’s AC360.  Republican party leaders there nominated a candidate who represented the values of their locality.  Conservatives from out of the area, such as commentator Rush Limbaugh and failed vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, rushed in to object, effectively crippling the campaign of Republican Dede Scozzafava, who has suspended her own campaign and is now supporting the Democrat candidate.  Republicans, meanwhile, are backing a candidate supported by out-of-area conservatives who has been imposed upoon them.

What’s most germane is that no one is addressing the needs of, nor even listening to, the voters.  Voters are angry, frustrated and looking for answers.  Instead, they are getting rhetoric from the extreme ends of both parties, which amazingly are trying to grow themselves while at the same time aggressively shrinking the diversity of their voices.  In doing so, they are missing what is most relevant.

In the 2008 election, support swung over to the Democrats, not because of a sincere love for them from voters.  It was mostly out of dissatisfaction with a Republican majority that had ineffectively ruled for the past decade.  Now, in President Barack Obama’s first year, the voters are swinging back towards the middle, flirting with a return to the Republican side.

The reason why is simple:  dissatisfaction with an impotent Democrat majority.  Voters are looking for real answers, not hypothetical ones, and they are not getting them.  Rather than answers to how they are going to put their children through college, they get rhetoric on whether Thomas Jefferson would have supported health care.  With all due respect for what was once a simpler and more clear-cut time in America, its citizens really no longer care about Thomas Jefferson’s philosophical leanings.  What they do care about are real answers to their very real questions, usually centered around how to pay the bills.

Amazingly, neither predominant political party in the United States gets and understands this.  As a result, voters will continue swinging on the pendulum, going from one party to the other, and , in essence, being left hanging in the political winds generated by much hot air but little else. – George Curcio