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By Robert Price
Saturday, Feb 04 2012 10:00 PM
If you are disappointed, annoyed or fed up with the Democratic and Republican parties to the point of abandonment, you have a growing number of friends.
More Californians than ever are choosing to register as "little i" independents -- "decline to state" in California's electoral vernacular. And, as a result, fewer voters are registering with the major parties.
One registered California voter in five is now officially unaffiliated, double the number that declined to state a party preference in 1995. The percentage of independent voters isn't quite that great in Kern County -- 57,270, or 18 percent -- but the number of "declines" here has increased 33 percent in just four years. Both parties, locally, have taken a hit in registration, but the Republicans have suffered most: Democrats have lost a single percentage point over the past four years, but Republicans more than 4 points.
How is this possible in Kern County, still as red a county as exists in California? I haunted a local Starbucks one morning last week and asked customers if they had any idea. Most did.
"If people have previously held membership in a political party, and now they're independent, it's because their party has let them down," said Esteban Balikian, hunkered over a laptop with a large cup of tea. "Some of them feel like they've been betrayed."
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They saw the smoke of the firebombs, heard the screams, felt the outrage of injustice -- and they acted on it. Janie Forsythe McKinney, a white girl then just 12, rushed water to the victims of a bus bombing targeting civil rights activists in Anniston, Ala., in 1961. Claude Liggins, a black college student then 20, was so troubled by what he saw of the incident on television that he joined the Freedom Riders, a group that stood up to racial segregation by riding buses throughout the South -- and he spent a month and a half in a Jackson, Miss., jail for his trouble.
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If you are a committed Republican and you are gnashing your teeth over the flawed candidates elbowing for position in the quest to unseat a vulnerable president, you may be amenable to today's fantasy: President Kevin McCarthy.
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Out in front of the new Bakersfield Federal Courthouse last week, a work crew was building the forms for a substantial concrete pour: a 2-1/2-foot wall that one day soon will bear the name of a giant of jurisprudence.
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The tragic Jan. 6 hot-air balloon accident in New Zealand that killed 11 people caught my eye for reasons that go beyond the normal but unflattering human attraction to awful spectacles. Hot-air balloon accidents, rare as they are, stand out for me amid the daily onslaught of dreadful headlines because I've been there. My wife and I lived through an experience that, but for a millisecond of time, another 20 feet of altitude and the grace of God, may well have ended as badly as the catastrophe in Wellington.
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Suicide among members of the U.S. armed forces is so grimly pervasive that the number of men and women in uniform who take their own lives is now roughly equal to the number killed in action. Each branch of service maintains a suicide-prevention office, and the Pentagon conducts an ongoing evaluation of causes and intervention strategies. And yet one U.S. facility alone, the Army's Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, has seen 30 soldier suicides in the past three years, including 12 in 2011.
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Pessimism is all the rage right now. The half-dozen candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination know that "Things are looking up!" leaves a lot to be desired as a challenger's campaign slogan. So they bounce between negativism and buoyant energy, leavening their scorn with all the campaign-trail charisma they can muster. Ronald Reagan wrote the book on that approach in 1980, and Bill Clinton dusted it off with great effectiveness in 1992.
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Editorial Page Editor Robert Price is the host on "Californian Radio" Tuesday.
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What America really needs is more end-of-year awards and retrospectives. That's how our media-driven, 24-7 culture processes the change of calendars. It's how we put the past 12 months to bed: We remember, categorize, rank and move on. It's like a mental health exercise.
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Newt Gingrich is just what America needs. As a campaigner, I mean. In an era when the TV sound bite has nearly been rendered extinct by 140-character Twitter tweets, it's reassuring, in a masochistic kind of way, to hear Gingrich threaten us with a series of Lincoln-Douglas-style debates between himself and President Obama.
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Ask any elementary school teacher about the many ways a kid can mangle the Pledge of Allegiance. It's pretty funny. "One nation under God" occasionally becomes "One Asian none are God" and "with liberty and justice for all" becomes "with liver tea and just us four all." I remember wondering whether indivisibility was anything like invisibility, which was at least a concept a comic book-loving kid could comprehend. Maybe some of my fellow fourth-graders fully grasped the fact that they were promising to be faithful to the founding principles of their country, but I believe the true weight of the Pledge only slowly dawned on most of us.
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It'll probably change tomorrow, because that's been the nature of the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, but a scant 30 days before the Iowa caucuses, Newt Gingrich seems to be on pretty solid ground. One recent poll had Florida voters favoring the former House speaker by an astonishing 24 points over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, with Herman Cain and Rick Perry well back.
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I did it again: I responded to a chain email that contained a laughably false claim. I supplied the offending forwarder with links to fact-checking organizations that had debunked the invented accusation. The sender seemed to take offense: Clearly, if I dared question her, I must be a (fill in the name of the political ideology you hate most). And besides, she wrote, "Whether or not it's technically true doesn't matter -- it's a message that needs to get out."
