Overall I would say that my feelings on this matter for today could best be compared to that feeling you get after you go to the bathroom after being constipated for days.
Living in the great blue state of Washington I knew there was no chance that a vote for McCain would matter in any manner at all that mattered and I was confident that Obama would win by default. Facing this I was further confronted by the fact that in most elections the choice one makes in the polling booth is often less a reflection of one’s true desire for one candidate as it is more a fear of what “the other guy” (otherwise known as the guy that all the idiots are voting for) will do if elected. With these two realizations I was confronted with a sudden freedom. Since my vote would have been primarily be a vote “against” a candidate that would hence be swallowed up one way or the other in the winner-takes-all electoral process I felt no need to express my choice by the commonly accepted terms of “this guy or that guy”. So as to exercise my own desires I chose not to be constrained by the presumed duopoly. I in fact did decide to vote for a third party candidate.
Since one could argue that the exercise of discarding a vote into the great vacuum of lesser party candidates is possibly a more noble cause than simply following rote political theater, I took this task very seriously. (You can thank me later for attempting to preserve the democratic system.) Once the choice had been made to vote for a third party candidate I was determined to make sure that my vote would be one vote that truly counted for not counting. The ballot lay on my desk for weeks at home while I researched each of the political parties and candidates I had available for my decision. I poured over data from Wikipedia and Google, I read bios and party histories. I had to ask myself some tough questions; Did I believe in redistributing wealth like the communists? Did I believe that there should be no government like the Libertarians? Did I buy into the xenophobia of the national socialist? Do I support strict immigration control like the Constitutionalists? What about the environment, was the green party right for me? Did I really believe the claims of the independent with the long scary hair that he had a perpetual motion machine that would solve the energy crisis?
I had always known that there is this great smorgasbord of political views available out there. Sure many taste bad, and ALL have a bitter aftertaste that makes them hard to swallow. However with this new freedom now I was no longer confined to a choice between a turd-sandwich and a giant douche. Now I could choose if I wanted a green pile of poo or a true red pile of shit. I could get my B.S. with our without immigrants or I could even choose a bonafide nut.
After much deliberation I could not decide if I should “throw my vote away” to the Constitutionalists or the Libertarians since in my heart I would consider myself a Constitutional-Libertarian. I figure they had both earned my vote after years of slaving away to preserve the illusion of an open democratic republic. In the end I firmly rested the final decision upon the fact that in the end my choice would not matter. I flipped a coin.
Flipping a coin elevates me only slightly above the generation that would base their choice on their favorite color.
Stop here unless you want to hear my “crazy” political tripe.
I won’t tell you which I finally voted for. It does not really matter. Not because my vote did not matter, but because your vote did not matter either. We have fought wars against regimes that dictated the existence of only one party by force of law. I find it pathetic then that we as a nation accept a only slightly better two party system willingly and with little dissent because it gives us an illusion of choice. Fundamentally we are a country ruled not by and for the people, but by and for the parties. We have allowed the two political parties to write their very existence into laws and regulations at every level of government. We permit the parties to determine election rules and redistricting. The very rules that govern how congress operates are controlled by the parties. The rules for even getting on the ballot in most states favor the two primary parties. The process that determines the ultimate “choices” in the quad-annual-lesser-of-two-evils decision that we end up with are run by the capricious rules of the parties themselves. With primaries (paid for by the tax payers) that are only counted in part (if you are lucky) or not at all (if you live in the wrong state) and caucuses that often digress into little more than semi-civilized cage matches between competing bullies operating as proxies for their respective candidates the two parties have little interest in reforming the system and offering anyone real choice.
Fundamentally the parties are not to blame it is the populous as a whole that accepts the situation and even promotes it. We like to see things in black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. As a christian centric culture this is how we have been brought up as a people to view the world. We require every candidate to have a position on every issue. Put all these things together with human nature and the desire to belong and what we end up with is a system where people are rarely if ever in full agreement with the person they support and more often only in close alignment on some core belief that the individual holds higher than other beliefs. We end up as a populous that is very amicable to manipulation. This is because once we settle upon a candidate we so strongly want to believe anything that they say we will gladly deceive ourselves. We remember the things that candidates say that agree with what we already believe and gloss over the things that conflict with our beliefs. When all this comes together, we stop hearing alternative opinions, we focus on the negatives of those we oppose and disregard the positives while focusing only on the positives of those we support and much to the delight of the two parties we stop thinking and looking for alternative solutions to problems.
As long as we continue to require every candidate to hold a position on every issue, as long as we allow the parties to control the election process, as long as we let extremists set the political agenda, as long as we accept a two party system we will have the choice that is no choice. Would you go to a restaurant with only two items on the menu? If you were presented with two bad choices in any other aspect of your life would you just accept them and not look for other options? Diminishing the power of the duo party is the real change we need and the only way to really put the country first.
How then do we do this? There are many places to start; primary election reform, instant run off elections, changes in rules regarding ballot registration, campaign finance reform, media buy rules, electoral college reform and voter education are just a start. I’ll be going into more details on these issues and my opinions on these in the future on my blog. In the end we the people will have to be the motive of change that seizes control from the parties and reforms our system to more closely resemble the democratic republic we were founded to be.
