NP: The Police, Message In A Box

Didn't I say something awfully similar to this last week?

One thing I'm not sure about is this conclusion that 2004 buried the notion that you can win a general election without the swing voters. Too many other variables are in play (i.e., an incumbent, the war on terror) for that to be the only possible conclusion. The Democrats can lose an election despite winning the independents, but that's a different conclusion altogether.

I'm also not convinced that the playing field would be the same for an independent as it would for a coherent third party, but I guess that depends in large part on the candidate and the party platform. I lean toward the party principle, in particular with regard to the Internet as the grass in which the roots grow, because, to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, thirty people singing a chorus of "Alice's Restaurant" is a movement. And a movement is what it will take to break the current paradigm, as an individual, independent candidate could be dismissed as just an outlier and an outsider.