The Free Press, Mankato, MN

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April 11, 2010

Your View: A party for the radical centrists

Michael Burger, Mankato

— I want a different tea party that will be a tea party of the radical center. A tea party of innovation that will empower independents and centrists to change politics. A tea party that can’t be bought by special interest money or lobbyist money.

Larry Diamond of Stanford University said, “If you don’t get government right, it is very hard to get anything else right that government needs to deal with. We have to rethink in some basic ways how our political institutions work, because they are increasingly incapable of delivering effective solutions any longer.”

A definition of a broken system is very simple. It is a system in which Republicans will be voted out for doing the right thing (raising taxes when needed) and Democrats will be voted out for doing the right thing (cutting services when needed). When the political system punishes lawmakers for doing the right thing, it’s broken.

We need political innovation that takes the dis-empowered radical center and enables it to act. To act unconstrained by the two major parties, special interest groups, and an ideology that ties our politics in knots.

This radical center will be “radical” in its desire for a departure from “politics as usual.” That radical centrist tea party in Minnesota is the Independence Party.

 

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