The recent election of Scott Brown has highlighted the predominance of "no" as a political strategy. Brown's election, though blamed by democrats on the ineptitude of the Democratic candidate, is more a result of the promise that Brown made to stand athwart health care reform. His proposal is to tweak the current broken health care system. But this is really no proposal at all.
Brown is not alone in his perception of nothing as something. The Tea Party Movement has created a whole manifesto out of "don't." "Don't raise our taxes", "don't increase the deficit", "don't expand government." They are reminiscent of the Know Nothings, who rose to prominance in the mid 19th century in opposition to the influx of immigrants. They had no proposals, they simply wanted "Native Americans" (a term they used without irony whatsoever to refer to non-immigrants) to run the country.
Similarly, the tea party has no proposals as to how to solve the problems the country faces. Their Mission Statement states the following: "The impetus for the Tea Party movement is excessive government spending and taxation. Our mission is to attract, educate, organize, and mobilize our fellow citizens to secure public policy consistent with our three core values of Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government and Free Markets."
They go on to articulate a group of libertarian free market values whose sum is naught in terms of solid proposals about how to address the issues facing the country - health care, the economy, education, national security. Their answer is "leave everything alone," in the apparent belief that everything gets better all by itself. Even their proposed fixes amount to nothing more than "STOP!"
The core of this group is that segment of voters who term them selves "Independents", lauded by everyone as simple folks who are not interested in politics, but want to elect people from any party - or better yet no party at all - who say the things they want to hear. A year ago they elected Barack Obama. This year they voted for Scott Brown to stop Barack Obama.
Independents have become the voice of "change" in Amercian society. The change they seek however is not specified, or when specified is not stable. To Independents, change consists in saying "No." Whether it is to George Bush or Barak Obama the Independent's actions resemble the machinations of a two-year-old, not the maturity needs to address and resolve the problems this nation faces Powered by Qumana
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