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Talk/Talk

Most weekends from 2006 - 2010 CUIP's president Jacqueline Salit and strategist and philosopher Fred Newman watched the political talk shows and discuss them.

Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, February 22, 2009 after watching selections from “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” and a Charlie Rose interview.  Read more

For an archive of these conversations click here.

To order Talk/Talk: Making (Non) Sense of an Irrational World click here.


POLITICS OF POSSIBILITY:

Fred Newman and Independent Politics

Newman was a pioneer in the development of independent politics in the United States starting in the late 1970s.

Bringing keen analytic and engineering skills to the electoral arena, Newman had a major hand in the creation of a series of unorthodox coalitions, campaigns, and organizations, including the national Reform Party, the Patriot Party, the Independence Party of New York, and Lenora Fulani’s groundbreaking independent presidential run in 1988, when she became the first woman and first African American presidential candidate to appear on the ballot in all 50 states. He was instrumental in securing the Independence Party’s backing of Michael Bloomberg's mayoral runs in 2001, 2005 and 2009. In 2001, the Independence Party (IP) vote provided Bloomberg with his margin of victory. Newman also had a hand in the Independence Party’s campaigns for Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), Governor George Pataki’s bid for the IP line in 2002, and the IP’s endorsement of Ralph Nader in 2004.

Newman worked closely with Jacqueline Salit, the publisher of The Neo-Independent magazine (for which Newman was a contributing editor) and President of the Committee for a Unified Independent Party, Inc. Together with Salit, he produces a popular weekly commentary entitled Talk/Talk, a conversation following the Sunday morning political talk shows.

Newman was a driving force behind several of the party’s key statewide and local initiatives, including nonpartisan municipal elections in New York City and the all-independents primary (an initiative to open the Independence Party’s statewide primaries to New York’s 2.2 million unaffiliated voters).


 

Featured Video: Feeling Powerless
Annual Lecture, March 3, 2004


Deliberately Unsystematic Thoughts on a New Way of Running a Country

by Fred Newman and
Lois Holzman

Originally published as Chapter 4 in The End of Knowing: A new development way of learning (Routledge, 1997)

The conclusion to Gergen's succinct characterization of the postmodem era that we quoted in chapter 2 (p. 23) is the distinctly political metaphor, "The center fails to hold." The formulation (from Yeats's "The Second Coming") is in this context substantively apt, for postmodemism makes "compromise as Truth" structurally meaningless (given that there is no Truth). Furthermore, it is formally appropriate in the sense that the issue of whether there can be a developmental way to continue knowing and, if not, what lies ahead for our species is, in our opinion, ultimately a political matter.  Read more