Bringing Third Part Ideas Back To America

Peggy Noonan:

Right now the Republicans and Democrats in Washington seem, from the outside, to be an elite colluding against the voter. They’re in agreement: immigration should not be controlled but increased, spending will increase, etc.
Are there some dramatic differences? Yes. But both parties act as if they see them not as important questions (gay marriage, for instance) but as wedge issues. Which is, actually, abusive of people on both sides of the question. If it’s a serious issue, face it. Don’t play with it.
I don’t see any potential party, or potential candidate, on the scene right now who can harness the disaffection of growing portions of the electorate. But a new group or entity that could define the problem correctly–that sees the big divide not as something between the parties but between America’s ruling elite and its people–would be making long strides in putting third party ideas in play in America again.

She’s got a point. Read the whole thing.
From my perspective, the best a third party can hope for is to steal enough voters away from one of the two major parties to cause a shift in the principles and ideals of that party. I don’t think any third party will ever grow to the point of being on par with the D’s and R’s because before that could happen either the D’s or the R’s would assimilate the third party and makes it’s ideas their own.

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  • http://Array Bat One

    From the ever astute Wretchard at the Belmont Club:

    The two party system has traditionally been a way through which voters could control policy outcomes by performing arithmetic operations on the partisan composition of the Legislature and the Executive. It was a kind of symbolic calculus in which ballot tickets were notation for political promises. Voters selected tickets and thereby selected the desired political outcomes through them; the correspondence was never exact but as long as it was “good enough” the calculus worked. What may be happening is that the voters no longer believe the calculus works.

    Any perceived breakdown in the political calculus creates an opportunity for political entrepreneurs to create an alternative set of tickets and thereby get things working again. Whether this will actually succeed in a governmental structure designed along majority/minority lines remains to be seen. A large part of the problem is that the world truly did change on September 11, 2001; not in the sense of what happened on that day but in the sense of what that day revealed about the changes that had already taken place. Yet the political vocabulary of the West has not yet evolved to articulate the problems of the new age nor to deal with them. But the process is beginning.

    Meanwhile the Unity ’08 website informs us that,

    Unity08 believes that neither of today’s major parties reflects the aspirations, fears or will of the majority of Americans. Both have polarized and alienated the people. Both are unduly influenced by single-issue groups. Both are excessively dominated by money…

    We believe that, while the leaders of both major parties are well-intentioned people, they are trapped in a flawed system — and that the two major parties are today simply neither relevant to the issues and challenges of the 21st century nor effective in addressing them.

    As a result, most Americans have not been enthusiastic about the choices for President in recent elections, the key issues they ran on, or the manner in which the campaigns were conducted.”

    Excuse me! More people voted in the last presidential election than ever before in our history. And this is taken to indicate a lack of enthusiasm? Color me more than a little suspicious.

    Perhaps I’m being a bit too cynical here, but this seems to be more of a move by disaffected Democrat centrists to ward off a complete takeover of the Party by the more radical MoveOn/DU crowd, and hopefully pick up a few disaffected centrist Republicans in the process.

    I can’t wait for the day that the federal government starts to apply truth-in-advertising requirements on the political process.

  • http://SayAnythingBlog.com The_Whistler_ofnd

    Rasmussen Reports

    The latest Rasmussen Reports national opinion survey finds that 44% of Americans say they would vote for a Democrat if the Presidential Election were held today. Just 32% would vote for a Republican. Those figures are likely a reflection of unhappiness with the Bush Administration rather than a commentary on prospective candidates from either party (see crosstabs).

    The survey also asked respondents how they would vote if “a third party candidate ran in 2008 and promised to build a barrier along the Mexican border and make enforcement of immigration law his top priority.”

    With that option, support fell sharply for both major parties. The Democrats still come out on top with support from 31% of Americans. The third party candidate moved into a virtual tie at 30% while the GOP fell to 21%.

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