News India-Times

The resurrection of John McCain, the Barack Obama insurgency, the fall (and rise) of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the rise (and fall and rise) of Mike Huckabee - pundits, pollsters and other supposedly expert observers have largely missed them all. In fact, there's a simple reason why the chattering classes have so consistently called this election wrong. They're missing the most important dynamic of this race: the appearance of a crucially important new bloc of voters who are clamoring for bold, nonpartisan solutions and are disgusted with today's Washington politics. But the candidates themselves are missing something, too - a bold, simple and overwhelmingly popular idea that would upend the presidential race.

Voters today aren't just fed up with the status quo; they're furious. In a Gallup poll last month, only 24 percent of Americans said they were satisfied with the state of the country - one of the lowest readings ever recorded. And it's not just George W. Bush they're mad at. Public approval ratings for the Democratic-controlled Congress are even lower than the president's. According to a 2006 poll taken by my former firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, 61 percent of voters say the two major parties are failing, and a survey last year by the Republican pollster Frank Luntz showed that 81 percent of voters would consider voting for an independent this year.

We don't know yet whether a credible third party candidate will try to take advantage of these trends. (My former client, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has certainly sometimes seemed tempted.) But either way, this anger with the status quo has already had a profound, if unrecognized, impact on the race. Ultimately, it will determine who the next president will be.

So who are these angry voters? I call them "restless and anxious moderates," or RAMs. Most come from the third of the electorate that identifies itself as independent, but some Democrats and Republicans have also joined this new bloc. These voters tend to be practical, non ideological and unabashedly results-oriented people such as Gary Butler, 60, who lives in Show Low, Ariz. Both parties, he says, "are way too far apart, and nobody is looking out for the good of the people."

"Address my life and the problems I face in my terms," another RAM told me. "Cut political rhetoric, cut political fighting, cut the game-playing, stop the five-point programs; just address my issues in a real-world, straightforward way."