I am riveted listening to Mickey Edwards, Director of the Aspen Institute, who is talking on C-SPAN about executive privilege and power. His assertion is that, in order to select the next president, we need to ask the candidates the most important question: what does each believe are the limits of power of the office of president?
He makes the case that , and he blames the news media and the schools for causing us to lose focus of how the Constitution has laid out governmental powers.
He emphasized the criticality of the president's reaching across the aisles to all leaders, especially in a time of gridlock. This made me recall a personal expectation I had for this time in history: that gridlock would be good for our country because it would force this kind of dialogue -- a sharing of power. Instead, President Bush has done with Congress what he has done elsewhere (especially in foreign policy): acted unilaterally.
Bush's unilateral action seems to be reflective of a core cognitive limitation to hold paradoxes in his mind. It is as if he's saying, "All this collaboration and multilateralism is too hard... I'm the decider!"
What a mess.
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I think you raise an important issue. In some ways the whole political map is being reorganized by the fact that 40% of voters are identifying themselves as independent. In that contexts, independents not having the right to vote at every level (which is the case in 18 states at the federal level, 22 at the congressional and many more where the parties are figuring out how to close down primaries)is a denial of the most basic of rights.
Independentvoting.org is sponsoring an open letter to Pres-elect Obama (who knows the open primaries issue well, for w/o it he wouldn't be president) to support open primaries. Please sign it and urge others to do so as well.
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/independentvoting.html
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