Peculiarly enough, a hypothetical third party for independents would look like Progressives on steroids

I do love the way my liberal Facebook friends make me aware of things I wouldn’t otherwise notice.  One of those things is a Matt Miller op-ed in the Washington Post, which imagines the perfect speech a dream independent candidate would give.  As Miller describes it:

This is one columnist’s stab at what a candidate might sound like if he or she were trying to appeal to the majority of voters in the middle of the electorate who feel both parties are failing us.

This dream speech, the one Miller imagines appealing to “the majority of voters in the middle of the electorate,” goes on for five looonnnggg screens.  I stopped reading halfway through the second paragraph.  Why?  Because of the sentence I highlighted:

I’m running for president as an independent because we need to change the debate if we’re going to change the country.  Neither of our two major parties has a strategy for solving our biggest problems; they have strategies for winning elections, which isn’t the same thing. Democrats and Republicans will tell you, as I do, that they want to make America competitive again, keep faith with our deepest values of fairness and opportunity, and fix our broken political system. But the Democrats’ timid half-measures and the Republicans’ mindless anti-government creed can’t begin to get us there.

If you’ll allow me to translate that emphasized sentence, Miller is saying that the solution to our nation’s problems is to ignore anything the Republicans say and, instead, go full throttle on the Progressive agenda.  That is the only way to understand his statement that the Democrats are too timid to implement full measures, while everything that the Republicans propose is mindlessly stupid.  Presumably, he then goes on for several more screens to explain precisely how he’d implement this hyper-Progressive agenda.

In what logical universe does Miller exist that makes him think that moving to the left of Left will “appeal to the majority of voters in the middle of the electorate”?  You can see why I stopped reading right about there.  Anyone who cannot recognize his own ideological blindness probably will not think or write well enough to justify the time I would have to spend reading his article.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News