The third-party stump speech we need

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.

My fellow alienated Americans:

How’s this for something different? I want to raise your taxes, cut spending on programs you like, and force you to rethink how we run our schools, banks, armies, hospitals and elections. And I want you to cheer when I’m done. Because if you embrace the “decade of renewal” I’m calling for, we’ll emerge with a more competitive, sustainable and just America — the kind of America we all want to leave to our children.

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. Both parties are prisoner to interest groups and ideological litmus tests that prevent them from blending the best of liberal and conservative thinking. And neither party trusts you enough to lay out the facts and explain the steps we need to take to truly fix things — in fact, their pollsters tell them that if they do, you’ll vote them out.

Well, I’m happy to take on that job. I won’t give you the usual pabulum about how we’re going to “save the American Dream” or restore our supremacy as the sole superpower. The loss of our economic dominance was at some point inevitable. We’ve had quite a run since World War II, when we were the only economy left standing, and others were bound to start catching up. The spread of capitalism is helping hundreds of millions of people rise out of poverty in India and China. That’s a fantastic thing for humanity. And if we manage it right, that can also be a positive thing for the United States, because the growing wealth of nations means billions of new customers for the kind of goods and services America ingenuity can produce.

We can make this an era of opportunities, not threats. But only if we think differently. When the changes reshaping the global economy are dramatic, incremental responses won’t suffice. We need a bold agenda equal to the scale of our challenges.

I believe that it will take seven big domestic initiatives to get America back on track. Bear with me if I go a little deep on the details, because that’s the only way for you to see what I mean.

1. Fix the economy. Our economy is working off a massive hangover of debt that makes this recession and recovery different from those we’ve gone through before. That means we need to make major moves to get jobs and growth back to anything like what we think of as normal. It also means that, for a couple years, worries about the budget deficit have to take a backseat to spurring growth. Fix the economy, and it’ll be easier to fix the budget.