I recently had a column on the unaffiliated among us and how I felt that was a bit of a waste. So I got a couple of calls from my friends that are independent voters wondering if I was referencing them.
I asked them if I had used the term independent and they said no. I actually have a purpose when I use one word over another and this is a good example.
Unaffiliated is to me a person with no set of overarching political beliefs and thus has few points of contact with the rest of his political brethren- he acts as something of a sniper of ideas, targeting things he does not like but with no army of ideas himself.
Some like our newspaper publisher who took me a bit to task are by need and design, professionally unaffiliated, which is actually quite different and falls more in line with the mission of being an arbiter or a messenger. Clearly he has a set of ideas and principals which he discussed that have a cogent theme and a process: this is an affiliation for a system of ideas.
Independents often have quite a number of well formed ideas they just cannot find a group that articulates them to their satisfaction. They do make alliances when the issues meet their belief system.
Perhaps for me, we should substitute the word adrift for my use of the term unaffiliated.
