The WSJ (via RCP) has a great article out today on where the tide of voter anger is emanating from, and why the Dems lame attempts to blame the GOP keep missing the mark:

In American politics, people tend to think of “radicals” as those on the ideological fringes of the left or right. But what happens when the radicals are smack in the middle of the political spectrum?

That may be the picture we’re looking at today. Many of those seriously estranged from the political system and its practitioners appear to sit in the political center. They are shaping this year’s campaign, but equally important is the question of what happens to them after the election Nov. 2, and especially on the road toward the next presidential campaign in 2012.

Two big forces are driving this year’s congressional campaign, and pushing it in the direction of Republicans. The first is an exceptionally high level of intensity among conservatives and core Republican voters, who give every sign of showing up in high numbers on Election Day.

But the other big force is political independents—voters who have no particular allegiance to either party and who don’t tend to have strong ideological leanings. These are the voters who drifted toward the Democrats in 2006, allowing them to take over control of the House from Republicans. Then they jumped firmly onto Barack Obama’s bandwagon in 2008, ousting Republicans from the White House and making Mr. Obama the first Democrat to win a majority of the national vote since Jimmy Carter.

Now they have turned again, and are pushing the system the other way. “For the third national election in a row, independent voters may be poised to vote out the party in power,” summarized the Pew Research Center in a recent study of independent voters.

The fact is, the independents are doing exactly want they need to do – they keep throwing the bums out until they pay attention and get it right. That is why there is a huge shift to the GOP, while there is no support for the GOP. The only thing acceptable to independents (and their unique brand of conservatism) is small, lean government doing the minimal required, maximizing personal responsibility and choice (everyone must deal with their poor decisions) and working TOGETHER with respect and professionalism on common ground. The more to the fringe a party goes, the more they get whacked for missing the point.

This is not a cycle where social conservatism as the rule of law will be making a big come back. Social conservatism is best handled by the family, not schools or courts or bureaucracies. It is an individual choice as to how far down any path someone wishes to travel. The path and the distance will not be mandated, measured or monitored by government. Their will be no punishment for those who stray as long as they only impact themselves.

The caricature used by the WSJ (itself a tool of the rotten Political Industrial Complex) is classic elitist:

These independent voters have become something like a band of nomad marauders, roaming across the American political landscape, hungry, angry and taking out their frustrations on the villages of the Democrats and Republicans in turn.

The fact that their fury is aimed more at Democrats this year shouldn’t leave Republicans thinking they have won the permanent allegiance of these nomads, who, lest we forget, were just two years ago pillaging the land of George W. Bush.

We hold the keys to who shall get those cherished seats in DC. We are the managers, the civil servants are paid to make things work. When they fail we do not maraud, we fire and replace with someone new. We do not roam. We give a party a chance, supporting them when they are on track (Iraq, Afghanistan) and pulling back when they go to far (government take over of health care). We are not nomads – we have never left the center. It is easy to project on others, but the fact is those who wandered into the fringes where government became a tool for people to shape how others live are the ones who ran off the reservation.

Zealots never understand the concept of common ground. The corrupting power of DC turns people interested in solutions into demi-gods only interested in expanding their power base. We are not confused, but we can be brutal when it comes to failure.

Mostly they want solutions—economic and job-creating solutions—and they seem to think Democrats have failed to provide them. They also thought that of Republicans previously. And they seem to think this failure to produce in Washington is, at least in some measure, the result of both parties being in the thrall of “special interests,” a term with various definitions.

I think the old paradigm was failure was due to polarizing special interests – who tilted solutions out of balance and made things worse instead of better (which is the precise definition that each failed attempt at government-based solutions have met to varying degrees). The current definition includes the conclusion government-solutions are the last bastion of the incompetents. That it is best to let people, families and communities work out the solutions and keep the feds out of the picture. Failure now is to not unleash the potential of the American people. Failure now is to not check the cancer of the bloated and over reaching bureaucracy. It is a libertarian America, going back to its roots.

This ain’t rocket science. We don’t want more government of any flavor or interest. We want our hard earned money back and government shrunk down to its minimum required size. And I am sure we will debate what that size is for decades to come.