Face it, friends. ALL WE'VE GOT is TWO parties.
And, frankly, that's about all there is, for the foreseeable future. ANY third party that pops up IS GOING TO BE NOTHING BUT A SPOILER. I don't care how it's spun or excused or whined about. I don't care if there's a galaxy's worth of wishing and hoping. What IS, IS.
I almost hate to be a hard-ass about it, my apologies in advance. But dammit, what will it take to get through on this? One would think that this, now, is the direct result of all of that inter-party division we suffered last year. You do that? You get THIS. It's the classic "if, then" proposition some of us heard discussed in science class and even in some math classes. If you add 2 and 2, then you get 4. ALWAYS. And those who try to insist that if you add 1 and 2, you get the desired and assumed answer of 4, too. Only better! Because belief or faith or something or other. And dammit, that's just plain ol' fucking WRONG!!!!!
And I'm sorry to yell here, too. Probably why some of our DU brothers and sisters find me totally boorish. (And rightly so!) But sometimes, I've gotta say, I envy the GOP. You know that old cliche, "Democrats fall in love, republi-CONS fall in line"? Well, THEY fall in line, and THEY WIN. All while we continue fighting with each other, locked out of power - AGAIN.
And take a lesson from the GOP. And Ross Perot. Those of us old enough to have been around during the 1992 and 1996 campaigns, That good ol' rich wanker Ross Perot got in there, too, on a ridiculous ego trip many of us on our side saw through. Enough other suckers on the opposite side of the aisle didn't that his presence on the ballot as a third party spoiler effectively robbed George HW Bush first, and then Bob Dole four years later, of the win they might otherwise have scored. If those gone rogue had avoided falling in love with the renegade, and folded into the mainstream candidate, we would not have had a President Bill Clinton.
Old crank that I am by now, I'm old enough to remember some of this as far back as when I was in high school and joined the Student Coalition for Humphrey/Muskie. I wasn't old enough to vote yet, and neither were the "upperclassmen", but I remember they were all for Gene McCarthy, a renegade Democrat pulling votes away from Vice President Humphrey, but with no realistic or practical chances of actually winning the nomination and being party standard-bearer. There were other things complicating the picture, too, and I'm sure I wasn't old enough or involved enough to know all the details. Like LBJ's unpopular Vietnam policies that Humphrey was seen as willing to continue. HOWEVER, with some place else to go instead of sticking with the team, enough Democrats were romanced away from Humphrey/Muskie - and as bad as you thought Hubert Humphrey was, well, guess who we wound up with instead? Richard Nixon. The republi-CON. Think we learned anything from that? The GOP sure did. Divide And Conquer. That's what they learned.
I don't want to "fall in love." I want to WIN. Falling in love takes your mind and your heart way high up into the clouds, when you really need to be firmly feet-on-the-ground and eyes-wide-open and working in the real world. Sometimes it's harsh and cold but that's often where the reality is. No starry-eyed fantasy Eden for me. I found that, through the years ever since I've been old enough to vote, I tended to go for the practical over the romantic, the realistic over the appealing-but-unrealistic.
Head over heart. Because at least for me, through years of experience, I've learned that my heart is more likely than not to lead me astray. I remember getting an offer from another station in town, a bigger AM pop rock station that offered me an actual Monday-through-Friday on-air shift, rather than the FM rocker where I'd finally achieved my dream of being hired. But I was hired as a weekender, and that was that. When the other station came along with a rock-solid offer of a full-time job and better money, the FMer started offering lots of promises of full time something-or-other, at sometime-or-other in the future somewhere. And a lesser raise. But they were the FM station I'd always loved and wanted to work for. I decided to take the bird in the hand instead of the lovebirds beating around the bush somewhere. One of the full-time DJs stopped me in the hall and grabbed me by the shoulders. "Don't do it! You have to stay! Go with your heart!" My heart told me to stay. My head said "Leave! Don't trust the promises from the wanker and the snake of a new PD you instinctively don't trust. Grab the firm offer and run-don't walk before they change their minds." So I did. Within a year later, I was morning drive anchor (they'd originally hired me for middays) and titled (news director). And over at the FM, they never did open anything up for another full-time news shift, and really nothing had changed the way they'd hinted might happen.
Picking a president is a head-over-heart decision, too. Seems to me, at least. In all my years, that's how it seems to have played out, from what I've observed, anyway.
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