America's Third Parties 2008 -- let's discuss

[Krackels]

You can probably guess my view of third parties, but I'd like to discuss the third parties that will be running in this year's General Election and what affect it will or will not have on the Presidential race.


So apparently Bob Barr's running on the Libertarian ticket.

Is the seatbelt guy running on the green party ticket (I always forget his name)?

What other candidates might be running?

What percentage of the vote are they expected to get? Where is their base?

Who will they be stealing votes from?

Will they assure a Democratic or Republican win?

I want to discuss...

[jmichna]

Here's what I've seen as far as Third Parties:
Boston Tea Party
P - Charles Jay
VP - Thomas L. Knapp

Constitution Party
P - Chuck Baldwin
VP - Darrell Castle

Green party
P - Cynthia McKinney
VP - Rosa Clemente

Libertarian Party
P - Bob Barr
VP - Wayne Allyn Root

Party for Socialism and Liberation
P - Gloria La Riva

Prohibition party
P - Gene Amondson

Reform Party
P - Ted Weill
VP - Frank McEnulty

Socialist Party USA
P - Brian Moore
VP - Stewart Alexander

Socialist Workers Party
P - Roger Calero
VP - Alyson Kennedy

Independents include:
Alan Keyes (Wow! Guess the Repubs were no longer Conservative enough for Alan Keyes!)
Jackson Kirk Grimes
Frank Moore
Ralph Nader (the "seat belt" guy as you refer to him?)
Kelcey Wilson


Now, with regard to Third Parties and their influence on elections, Teddy Roosevelt (I man I deeply respect and admire) ran under the Bull Moose Party, against Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) and Howard Taft (Republican). Ol' TR probably came as close to winning under a third party as anyone in American history, winning six states and over 27% of the popular vote.

There is no question that the incumbent, Taft, was a mediocre (if not poor) president and that Roosevelt was disenchanted with the Republican Party for refusing to nominate Teddy over the incumbent.

But the end result was that TR's popular campaign resulted in Woodrow Wilson getting elected president. Wilson was arguably the first "socialist-leaning" president... along with a Democrat-controlled Congress, he created the FTC and the Federal Reserve system, enacted the Federal Farm Loan Act, and a number of antitrust acts and tariffs. He also is - I believe - chiefly responsible for getting the US involved in WWI, and instigated the Utopian "League of Nations" (precursor to the UN)... he was bitterly disappointed when the US refused to join.

In other words, a deservedly popular third party candidate running in 1912 changed the course of American history through who did get elected (Wilson). Wilson proved he would grow the Federal government at the expense of the states (re The Fed and the FTC), overstep constitutional constraints on Federal controls over free market businesses. He also set us on a course to remain embroiled in European conflicts.

Things Wilson started led directly to further socialistic programs enacted by FDR, in knee-jerk reaction to the Great Depression, and LBJ (a great topic for another thread). Our country has not been the same since.

More recently, people who were disenchanted with Bush the Elder, in 1992 voted in considerable numbers for Ross Perot, as a protest vote of their unhappiness with the economy under Bush, and Bush going back on his promise to not raise taxes. Perot was going to run things differently, run the country as if it were a business. Something like 20 million disenchanted, mostly Conservative, voters cast their ballot for Perot; he took almost 19% of the popular vote. Even I voted for Perot!

The result was William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd president of the United States, elected by 43% of the popular vote. Bush the Elder got 37% of the popular vote, and was absolutely crushed in the Electoral College vote.

Again, US history was changed by the running of a third party candidate. IMO, Clinton was a mediocre president at best, who did not act in the best interests of the US (think China, Kosovo, military spending cuts, USS Cole response, first attack on NYC Twin Towers, Exec Order 13083, response to attacks on US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, just off the top of my head). In retrospect, a GHWBush second term would mostly likey have served the country much better.

Then Perot ran again, in 1996... getting fewer votes, but nonetheless ensuring poor old Bob Dole had zero chance of winning.

So after all that, because of Ross Perot, we get Al Gore (mated to Clinton as his veep) running in 2000, which led to J F'n Kerry in 2004, and now ZeroBama in 2008. And the Republicans are no longer Conservatives, instead filling the shoes (and political positions) that traditional, liberal Democrats would have filled in the 1960s and 1970s.

We are truly screwed.

[AZXD]

IMO, they will not be stealing votes .... Those who vote for these people will just be fighting a loosing battle against a system that needs a serious overhaul ... As in trashed and start over.

As for further comment ... I'll wait and see what others have to say before I give a more detailed response.

[Reeek]

My wish before I die is that we eliminate all parties and let whomever and as many people run based on their published stance toward social and fiscal issues and of course based on their so called promises.

There would be no line to toe and all the debate would be over individuals and not how they stack up against a party's litmus test.

All the forum "debates" and fervor could then be directed toward the individual candidates from DAY ONE rather than waiting to see who the friggin party chooses before we all take sides and champion someone who we may not have even supported through the primaries. It's like being an automatic sheep once you rally behind the "chosen one" even if you didn't "choose" them yourself.

Maybe this forum would get boring however since we wouldn't have the Right versus Left which is really the meat and potatoes behind most of these threads anyway . . .

Just imagine if the electoral college and delegates or super gelagates weren't deciding a political race for us?

I know it's a dream but it's not a a dream that I believe would be the end of the United States.

[jmichna]

Originally Posted by Reeek

My wish before I die is that we eliminate all parties and let whomever and as many people run based on their published stance toward social and fiscal issues and of course based on their so called promises.....

Reeek,
I don't know if would agree that parties be eliminated, as I think we'd end up with a European style election with a dozen parties' factions ("parties" essentially being fund raising groups for the individual candidates) juggling and angling for power and advantage, and coalitions being made and broken as the political winds blow.

I would be happy if the respective party's nominees were just truthful, and DID all publish their positions - all of them -- with no quibbling or waffling words, across maybe 20-25 key issues. No BS'ing, give us your position, and your reasoning.

In doing so, no candidate will match up 100% position-for-position for ANY voter... we will each need to evaluate and assess the overall positions for each candidate, and decide who best represents us, and then vote for them.

This could be done at the primary level, indeed, is how I think primaries should be run. In the Chicago area, the last real chance to make a change happen actually occurs in the Democrat primary, since a Republican will not win in February/March (Chicago's mayoral elections... Chicago has not had a Republican mayor since 1931) or in November (general elections). You try to elect the best Democrat to the ticket, since he/she will be elected come fall.

I think another way to cut through the crap that results from how primaries and caucuses are currently run, is to pick a single day for ALL primaries and caucuses to be held. This would be done hand-in-glove with the candidates' stated positions in writing.

Then let the respective parties could sort through the results and conduct their conventions. Party conventions would actually be important decision making events, and not coronation ceremonies.

The whole thing would take much less time, cost much less money, be less aggravating. And, I think, you would enable people to understand exactly what they are voting for, both at the primary elections and the presidential election.

[JeffXD]

Originally Posted by jmichna

Now, with regard to Third Parties and their influence on elections, Teddy Roosevelt (I man I deeply respect and admire) ran under the Bull Moose Party, against Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) and Howard Taft (Republican). Ol' TR probably came as close to winning under a third party as anyone in American history, winning six states and over 27% of the popular vote.

There is no question that the incumbent, Taft, was a mediocre (if not poor) president and that Roosevelt was disenchanted with the Republican Party for refusing to nominate Teddy over the incumbent.

But the end result was that TR's popular campaign resulted in Woodrow Wilson getting elected president. Wilson was arguably the first "socialist-leaning" president... along with a Democrat-controlled Congress, he created the FTC and the Federal Reserve system, enacted the Federal Farm Loan Act, and a number of antitrust acts and tariffs. He also is - I believe - chiefly responsible for getting the US involved in WWI, and instigated the Utopian "League of Nations" (precursor to the UN)... he was bitterly disappointed when the US refused to join.

In other words, a deservedly popular third party candidate running in 1912 changed the course of American history through who did get elected (Wilson). Wilson proved he would grow the Federal government at the expense of the states (re The Fed and the FTC), overstep constitutional constraints on Federal controls over free market businesses. He also set us on a course to remain embroiled in European conflicts.

Things Wilson started led directly to further socialistic programs enacted by FDR, in knee-jerk reaction to the Great Depression, and LBJ (a great topic for another thread). Our country has not been the same since.

William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt had once been friends. But when the Republican Party met in Chicago to choose its presidential candidate in June 1912, the nomination battle between the two men was brutal, personal—and ultimately fatal to the party's chances for victory in November. Taft declared Roosevelt to be "the greatest menace to our institutions that we have had in a long time." Roosevelt saw Taft as the agent of "the forces of reaction and of political crookedness." The resulting floor fight in the aptly named Chicago Coliseum lived up to the prediction of the Irish-American humorist Finley Peter Dunne that the convention would be "a combynation iv th' Chicago fire, Saint Bartholomew's massacree, the battle iv th' Boyne, th' life iv Jesse James, an' th' night iv th' big wind."
For years, the tensions within the Grand Old Party had been building over the issue of government regulation. During his presidency, Roosevelt had advocated a "Square Deal" between capital and labor in American society. By the time he left the White House in March 1909, Roosevelt believed that the federal government must do more to supervise large corporations, improve the lot of women and children who worked long hours for low wages in industry, and conserve natural resources. "When I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service," he said in August 1910. Roosevelt was especially critical of the state and federal courts for overturning reform legislation as unconstitutional, and he said that such decisions were "fundamentally hostile to every species of real popular government."
Roosevelt's burgeoning crusade for more active government reflected his loss of faith in William Howard Taft, whom the former Rough Rider had chosen as his successor. As president, Taft had sided with the conservative wing of the party, which had opposed Roosevelt's reforms at every turn. For his part, Taft believed Roosevelt had stretched the power of the executive branch too far. As a lawyer and former federal judge, Taft had nothing but disdain for his predecessor's jaundiced view of the judiciary. "The regret which he certainly expressed that the courts had the power to set aside statutes," wrote the president, "was an attack upon our system at the very point where I think it is the strongest."
Tensions deepened in 1912, when Roosevelt began advocating the recall of judicial decisions through popular vote. With the courts tamed as an enemy to reform, Roosevelt then would press forward "to see that the wage-worker, the small producer, the ordinary consumer, shall get their fair share of the benefit of business prosperity." To enact his program, Roosevelt signaled that he would accept another term as president and seek the nomination of the Republican Party.
These ambitions revealed, Taft and his fellow conservatives deemed Roosevelt a dangerous radical. Once in power for a third term, they said, Roosevelt would be a perpetual chief executive. Roosevelt had become the most dangerous man in American history, said Taft, "because of his hold upon the less intelligent voters and the discontented." The social justice that Roosevelt sought involved, in Taft's opinion, "a forced division of property, and that means socialism."
Taft dominated the Republican Party machinery in many states, but a few state primaries gave the voters a chance to express themselves. The president and his former friend took to the hustings, and across the country in the spring of 1912 the campaign rhetoric escalated. Roosevelt described Taft as a "puzzlewit," while the president labeled Roosevelt a "honeyfugler." Driven to distraction under Roosevelt's attacks, Taft said in Massachusetts, "I was a man of straw; but I have been a man of straw long enough; every man who has blood in his body and who has been misrepresented as I have is forced to fight." A delighted Roosevelt supporter commented that "Taft certainly made a great mistake when he began to ‘fight back.' He has too big a paunch to have much of a punch, while a free-for-all, slap-bang, kick-him-in-the-belly, is just nuts for the chief."
Roosevelt won all the Republican primaries against Taft except in Massachusetts. Taft dominated the caucuses that sent delegates to the state conventions. When the voting was done, neither man had the 540 delegates needed to win. Roosevelt had 411, Taft had 367 and minor candidates had 46, leaving 254 up for grabs. The Republican National Committee, dominated by the Taft forces, awarded 235 delegates to the president and 19 to Roosevelt, thereby ensuring Taft's renomination. Roosevelt believed himself entitled to 72 delegates from Arizona, California, Texas and Washington that had been given to Taft. Firm in his conviction that the nomination was being stolen from him, Roosevelt decided to break the precedent that kept the candidates away from the national convention and lead his forces to Chicago in person. The night before the proceedings Roosevelt told cheering supporters that there was "a great moral issue" at stake and he should have "sixty to eighty lawfully elected delegates" added to his total. Otherwise, he said, the contested delegates should not vote. Roosevelt ended his speech declaring: "Fearless of the future; unheeding of our individual fates; with unflinching hearts and undimmed eyes; we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!"
The convention was not Armageddon, but to observers it seemed a close second. Shouts of "liar" and cries of "steamroller" punctuated the proceedings. One pro-Taft observer said that "a tension pervaded the Coliseum breathing the general feeling that a parting of the ways was imminent." William Allen White, the famous Kansas editor, looked down from the press tables "into the human caldron that was boiling all around me."
On the first day, the Roosevelt forces lost a test vote on the temporary chairman. Taft's man, Elihu Root, prevailed. Roosevelt's supporters tried to have 72 of their delegates substituted for Taft partisans on the list of those officially allowed to take part in the convention. When that initiative failed, Roosevelt knew that he could not win, and had earlier rejected the idea of a compromise third candidate. "I'll name the compromise candidate. He'll be me. I'll name the compromise platform. It will be our platform." With that, he bolted from the party and instructed his delegates not to take part in the voting; Taft easily won on the first ballot. Roosevelt, meanwhile, said he was going "to nominate for the presidency a Progressive on a Progressive platform."
In August, Roosevelt did just that, running as the candidate of the Progressive Party. Both he and Taft lost to the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, that November. Yet, for Republicans who supported Taft, the electoral defeat was worth the ideological victory. As a Republican observed during the campaign: "We can't elect Taft & we must do anything to elect Wilson so as to defeat Roosevelt."
That outcome would resonate for decades. In its week of controversy and recrimination in Chicago, the Republican Party became the party of smaller government and less regulation—and it held to these convictions through the New Deal of the 1930s and beyond.
Lewis L. Gould is the author of Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics.

1912 Republican Convention | History & Archaeology | Smithsonian Magazine

[Reeek]

Originally Posted by jmichna

Reeek,
I don't know if would agree that parties be eliminated, as I think we'd end up with a European style election with a dozen parties' factions ("parties" essentially being fund raising groups for the individual candidates) juggling and angling for power and advantage, and coalitions being made and broken as the political winds blow.

I would be happy if the respective party's nominees were just truthful, and DID all publish their positions - all of them -- with no quibbling or waffling words, across maybe 20-25 key issues. No BS'ing, give us your position, and your reasoning.

In doing so, no candidate will match up 100% position-for-position for ANY voter... we will each need to evaluate and assess the overall positions for each candidate, and decide who best represents us, and then vote for them.

This could be done at the primary level, indeed, is how I think primaries should be run. In the Chicago area, the last real chance to make a change happen actually occurs in the Democrat primary, since a Republican will not win in February/March (Chicago's mayoral elections... Chicago has not had a Republican mayor since 1931) or in November (general elections). You try to elect the best Democrat to the ticket, since he/she will be elected come fall.

I think another way to cut through the crap that results from how primaries and caucuses are currently run, is to pick a single day for ALL primaries and caucuses to be held. This would be done hand-in-glove with the candidates' stated positions in writing.

Then let the respective parties could sort through the results and conduct their conventions. Party conventions would actually be important decision making events, and not coronation ceremonies.

The whole thing would take much less time, cost much less money, be less aggravating. And, I think, you would enable people to understand exactly what they are voting for, both at the primary elections and the presidential election.

Good points - I confess I haven't really given a new or different process any real deep thought and your notion is as as good as any I could come up with. Anything to minimize the herding effect toward a "chosen one" that we don't really get a lot of say about.

Afterall, I think there is a decent consensus that this is again, one of those elections where the two choices are troubling but it's all we have.

[Cannibul]

Either John Sidney McCain III or Barack Hussein Obama will be elected President in November. No matter how hard the third party candidates try.

So IMHO you have two choices. You can vote for one of the two main party candidates or you can piss your vote away.

I'm not happy with either Sidney or Hussein. But I feel that one of them will be much more harmful for the country than the other. And I feel that I HAVE to do what I can to keep the harmful one from being elected.

[AZXD]

Originally Posted by Cannibul

Either John Sidney McCain III or Barack Hussein Obama will be elected President in November. No matter how hard the third party candidates try.

So IMHO you have two choices. You can vote for one of the two main party candidates or you can piss your vote away.

I'm not happy with either Sidney or Hussein. But I feel that one of them will be much more harmful for the country than the other. And I feel that I HAVE to do what I can to keep the harmful one from being elected.

I agree with all of it!!!

+1000

[FLSTFI Dave]

Originally Posted by Cannibul

Either John Sidney McCain III or Barack Hussein Obama will be elected President in November. No matter how hard the third party candidates try.

So IMHO you have two choices. You can vote for one of the two main party candidates or you can piss your vote away.

I'm not happy with either Sidney or Hussein. But I feel that one of them will be much more harmful for the country than the other. And I feel that I HAVE to do what I can to keep the harmful one from being elected.

Originally Posted by AZXD

I agree with all of it!!!

+1000

I fully aree also....