Who Are The Independents?

Ruy Teixeira says Obama is irrationally fixated on them:

[I]ndependents are the Rorschach test of U.S. politics—you see in them what your beliefs and preferences incline you to see. Obama and his team want to see teeming hordes of voters who are above the partisan allure of party, untroubled by the bad economy (or, at least, not planning to vote on that basis), and pining for a Washington where the parties, darn it, just work together. So that’s what they see.

Please. I'm not privy to how Obama thinks, but this has to be a caricature. What if he just considers that many pragmatic non-ideological Americans are deeply worried about the short-term economy and the long-term debt and are trying to find a reasonable leader whom they can trust to thread the needle through both problems. Forget the taxonomies. These people exist and I'm one of them. Do I find Palin or Perry or Romney more plausible on these questions than Obama? Nope. Do I want Obama to go all left-populist on me? No. Call me an Independent if you like, i.e. someone who has shfted support from one party and president to the other over time, depending on my flawed judgment. But what I really am is just someone trying to be an adult and looking for an adult to echo this in office.

Far from dismaying me on this front since he took office, Obama has been a rock. And I'm sick to death of all this ideological posturing and told-you-sos.