Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson is actively seeking to break away from the Democrats and support an independent candidate in future elections.

"It's time to think about an independent candidacy," he told an editorial meeting at the New York-based Nation. "The present arrangement is not working."

I think the problem is Jesse Jackson. Somehow I find it difficult to imagine the Great Apologizer really breaking ranks and doing anything interesting. No, I fear that the Rev. is indulging in what we used to call, on the South Side of Chicago, "selling wolf tickets." He's blustering, scowling, uttering dark threats that he can't and won't back up, threats that he really doesn't expect anybody to take seriously -- but hey, you never know. There's no downside, and what the hell, something might shake loose -- a job for a crony, maybe, and at the very least, a little ink for an old palooka who once upon a time coulda been a contender.

This threatened rejection reminds me of the great WEB duBois who turned roundly on the party his people supported back in the early 1900's:

: The Negro race needs justice and is given charity, needs leadership and is given cowardice and apology.

Americans Want Third Major Political Party

April 25, 2006

(Angus Reid Global Scan) – Many adults in the United States believe there should be a viable alternative to Republicans and Democrats, according to a poll by Princeton Survey Research Associates for the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. 53 per cent of respondents believe there should be a third major political party in the country, up three points since June 2004.

Hard on the heels of the Angus Reid poll you wrote about in your Vox Populi (anybody listening?) post comes this poll from the rascally redstate researchers at 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%. [Emphasis mine.]

Given that taking any poll too seriously is dangerous to one's sanity; combining the results of this poll with the poll downblog is just a wee bit disturbing. What I mean is, if there really is a yen amongst us plebes for a third party, what kind of third party is it? Personally, I'm four-square against any plan to wall off our southern border. Plus, I'm sure I'd look terrible in a silver shirt.

... 30 per cent of respondents would support a third party candidate who promised to build a barrier along the Mexican border and make enforcement of immigration law his top priority. In a separate sample, 28 per cent of respondents said they would vote for a third party contender who promised universal health care.

How would you vote in the 2008 presidential election if a third party candidate ran and promised to build a barrier along the Mexican border and make enforcement of immigration law his top priority?

How would you vote in the 2008 presidential election if a third party candidate ran and promised universal health care?

It's a phantasm, of course -- but poetic justice would be served, because of all the Democratic party's supposed constitutencies, the black south has been more thoroughly abandoned than any other by the national party elite, not only as personified by el Rahmbo, but by its own DLC New South patrons as well.

Rahm's recent bitch-slap of Dean for spreading Internet donor dough too thin has this deeper message: "Screw the blacks -- where can they go anyway?" And so a Dixie statewide rebuild is out of the question.

If you're Black and live in the South, Rahm's message for you is -- better move to a swing state where you can help us win prez votes, like Ohio and Florida. Otherwise we got no further use for you, outside your handful of slam-dunk gerrymandered Southern congressional districts.

Now both of these pieces of donkery have fouled the people's nest, and neither has any appeal for a broad public. So what's to be done? Nothing will happen inside either moiety of the party without a serious outside challenge -- so first on the order of battle must be a huge mass movement.

Well, it's there -- it's called the job site rebellion. The Latino immigrant community fired the first shot on May Day. I nominate this radical job rights movement as the basis for a serious, plate-shifting, third-party come-together. Talk about a broad constituency -- from the Ecuadorian immigrant getting shat on 'cause he's illegal, to the Seattle anglo mom who can't get flex hours plus day care to fit.

A jobster party -- a populist party for globalized America -- that would tear up the pea patch a bit, dontcha think?

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 55 percent of those surveyed said they are inclined to look around for someone new rather than support their incumbent members of Congress this fall, the highest level of anti-incumbency since the 1994 midterm elections that dethroned Democrats on Capitol Hill.

So where are the independent candidates? Why ain't third party-type thangs happening?

Cliché wisdom is in order here -- it's always quietest before the storm.

In a poll conducted for the group, Princeton Survey Research Associates found that more than four-fifths of Americans agreed with the statement that the nation "has become so polarized that Washington can't seem to make progress.

Their guess is the middle isn't something best approached party-wise, from the left or right, but best sat right down on.

There's more:

The Unity08 effort is challenging the widespread belief among political experts that the most effective third parties need a vivid and compelling leader to coalesce around, such as Roosevelt or Perot. The organizers of the new effort are trying to build the party and then find a candidate to lead it.

Even as a life-long neo-barnburner donk, I'm backing ya Todd. Death to war donkery!

• Cut the payroll tax for everyone who makes less than 100K per.
• Raise the minimum wage and tie it to inflation.
• Single-payer. Right now.

I saw your web site and thought you might be interested in my Green Party nomination for the 2nd Congressional District in Utah. I'm challenging the Blue Dog incumbent pro-war Democrat Rep. Jim Matheson [shown at left; Matheson is the guy with the necktie -- Ed.]. Please check out www.bristerforcongress.org and let me know what you think.

Peace,

Bob Brister

...By and large, the left has the power to sink and destroy any democratic campaign. Ie, there's enough voters with views to the left of the democratic candidates on issues from "lets go to war" to the environment and probably a bunch more I could list ... there's enough of these voters that if they decide to abandon the democratic candidates and instead support their own candidate, then the Dems are just dead.

In fact really, in a lot of cases if people voted for who they really liked in a three-way race, the centrist dems would probably finish 3rd. But either way, the left can deliberately kill any democratic campaign by not voting for it. Their margins of victory over Republicans just aren't big enough to sustain the loss of support from the left.

Considering this, their position is just amazing to me. Instead of trying to form a real coalition between the dems and the left that could win and govern, instead they seem to hate and attack the left with much more evidence and virulence than I usually see directed towards the right.

In me at least, there's a growing feeling that wants to say I'll never vote Democrat again. And if that became widespread, the Dems would go the way of the Whigs as a political party.

Someday we gotta do it. We gotta cut lose from the Dems, because frankly they suck. There's a combined good benefit between building a party on the left that really would fight for ordinary americans, and also the benefit of flushing the Dems down the toilet of history.

Come on people. Don't be fooled by a Dem party that's as much built on fear (if you don't vote for us, the Republicans will win) as the Republicans are....

I. The two parties together form a homeostatic system.

The two parties contend fiercely for the spoils of office, but at the most fundamental level they collude in maintaining the American social order and carrying out the purposes of its dominant elements. This collusion is usually not consciously acknowledged or understood by activists and adherents within the parties, but it is nonetheless real.

II. The system is not static; it is in motion.

The American political order is remarkably stable, but it is a stability in motion rather than a stability in stasis. It is not the purpose of our masters to maintain the status quo, but to expand their own wealth and power at our expense, and the expense of ordinary people everywhere in the world. Hereafter, we will refer to this purpose of expansion as the Empire Project.

III. It is moving in the wrong direction.

The Empire Project is going forward like gangbusters, don't you agree?

IV. The Democrats are helping move it; they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The Democratic Party, in spite of its humanitarian handwringing, does not oppose or retard the Empire Project, or make any serious attempt to do so. Indeed, it provides vital assistance in advancing the Project, not least by absorbing and neutralizing the energies of people who sincerely believe that they are opposing it. Once more, this aspect of the Democratic Party's structural function is not consciously understood, much less intended, by the vast majority of the party's apparatus and supporters, but once more, it is nevertheless quite real, as any clear-sighted person can attest who has watched the eternally-recurring Co-optation of Activists, a process as dependable as the running of the shad or the swallows' return to Capistrano.

V. The system must be disrupted. Instability is desperately needed.

Since the stability of the American political order is a stability-in-motion, and its motion consists in the furtherance of the Empire Project, it follows that those who oppose the Project are obliged to disrupt the stability of the system as best they can.

I have a few ideas about how to create instability, though these hardly rise to the dignity of theses:

1. Third parties create instability, which is why the big-party apparatchiks hate and fear them so. Dynamical analysis of a two-body system is straightforward, but it becomes very hard in a many-body system. The reliable verities of two-party politics become unreliable when there are more players on the field.
2. If either of the major parties declines to the point of insignificance, that will create instability. Each party is full of fault lines and mutually antagonistic and suspicious elements, kept in the containment vessel only by their loathing of the Greater Evil in the other party. Remove the external pressure of the other party, and the remaining party will explode like a deep-sea fish brought too suddenly to the surface.
3. But the very best kind of instability arises when people get sick of the electoral game and take their political energies elsewhere. What our masters, and their administrative cadre in the parties, hate and fear more than anything else is a thoroughly riled and irate public, no longer content to express its dissatisfaction only in the decent obscurity of the voting booth. It hardly matters what exactly you do, as long as you get out in the street and block traffic, paint slogans on walls, boycott your classes, and generally raise hell.

Ran across this piece of journalistic naifishness on a dem echo chamber site called Alternet and just had to share:

Are the Dems committing fraud to keep a peace candidate off the ballot?

To which I had to chortle - Is the Pope a bear? It goes on to detail the usual dem ballot shenanigans, the kind that went on all through 2004, as if this were some new and rare case of democrat party electoral skullduggery instead of business as usual. Amazing!

I hope he's already answered this question in the affirmative, and I've just missed it.

BLOOMBERG FOR PRESIDENT.

by Ben Smith

This isn't the first time that Bloomberg has privately flirted with a 2008 bid. But what makes a Bloomberg candidacy look increasingly real is that he has also begun to think about the mechanics of running. New York p.r. eminence Howard Rubenstein recalls Bloomberg putting a price tag on his Oval Office ambition at a dinner party in April: "I could easily put up half a billion," the mayor had said, naming a figure over one-third higher than the Bush campaign's spending in 2004.

...Unlike Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, and George Pataki--and like another diminutive self-made billionaire--Bloomberg is thinking of running as an Independent.

My hope -- Lieb loses the primary, wins the general, and is welcomed back by the poxed swine now at the party's Washington hub. Then we all can launch for higher ground and leave this infested horror of hackery to its bloody crimes in the name of humanity.

I must be missing some neurological circuit, because I just don't see why anybody should get upset about this, except maybe a Democratic Party careerist, like, say, Rahm Emanuel, or Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. Taking money from the Devil seems admirably clever on the part of the Greens.

It's obvious why the Rethugs are contributing to the Greens -- they're feeling so triumphalist that they figure, hey, why not pick up all the marbles? Thirty years of hegemony have bred up a generation of Republican Alphonses who don't understand how deeply they depend on the Gaston the Democrat. They want to mug Gaston and send him to jail and take the few coppers he has in his threadbare pockets. (If they succeed, by the way, I will be right there with them in the courtroom, urging the judge to throw the book at Gaston and ship him off to Devil's Island.)

Once Gaston is gone -- and it can't happen too soon -- then Alphonse will find himself in difficulties. That's the nature of symbiosis. But the more aggressive and adventurist Republicans don't understand this, and so they want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Or at least they're willing to flirt with the possibility -- I don't suppose any of them really think that a third party could ever grow to the point that it would upset the Alphonse-Gaston machine in any structural way. In their own way, they're as deeply mired in crackpot realism as their mirror images in the Democratic Party, and very likely they just see this as a short-term tactic to squeak Santorum back into office.

Either way, the Green Party is poised to take advantage of this short-sighted Republican strategy. What's not to like about this scenario?

It's like a flashback to his National Merit Nader's-Raiders elite prog squad balderdash.

This review might as well have been written by George Gilder, if Georgie bothered to frown on mediocrity as well as rah-rah "innovative start-uppers."

It's great how Ralph gets the donks so worked up, but it's still caveat emptor on some of his back-shelf items.

According to the Dallas Morning News:

Democrats are preparing a media and campaign offensive against the independent, planning in part to portray him as a racist.

The blitz is aimed at not only stopping Mr. Friedman from poaching Mr. Bell's base voters but also at exciting Democrats who could determine the outcome of local races, as well as statewide contests.... The escalating rhetoric shows an increasing urgency as the [incumbent Republican] governor's challengers attempt to break from the pack with fewer than four weeks left until Election Day....

[The anti-Friedman] ads... will air on radio stations with large black audiences....

[Friedman] demonstrated that he does not understand school finance or taxes, nor does he have any intention of trying to do so....

Molly's reasoning is of course the usual: if the incumbent is re-elected the world will come to an end. I dunno, maybe Matt Stoller still believes that, but I wonder who else does?

Green Party, Democrats form alliance to back Farrell
By Susan Haigh, AP Political Writer | October 23, 2006

HARTFORD, Conn. --With polls showing a tight matchup in this year's 4th Congressional District race, the Green Party is withdrawing its candidate and throwing support to Democrat Diane Farrell.

"We decided to have a strategic alliance with the Democratic Party because we believed this was the quickest way to achieve peace in the Middle East," said John Sieh, treasurer for Richard Duffee, the Green Party's 4th District candidate.

I particularly love the idea that an "alliance" -- really, of course, a surrender -- to the Democratic Party will help bring "peace in the Middle East." Yep, that's always been a really high priority for the Democrats, hasn't it?

http://brickburner.blogs.com/my_weblog/2007/06/looking_for_a_s.html

Both parties in 2008, as my Green Party pal pointed out, must be challenged. And I don't think an all-out fifty state campaign is the best approach to holding them accountable. As a minority, we may not be able to beat the Republicans, but we sure as hell have the ability to put tangible pressure of the Democrats. And that's why we ought to focus our efforts on two states only: Ohio and Florida....

The 2008 election is for the Democrats to lose. Let's spoil it.

• No more purple fingers for me!
• Purple finger nyet!
• Vote never again!
• March on occupied Washington
• Block the smurf voting stations!
• No more November line dancing!
• End the great American mockocracy!

www.naderexplore08.org

Their reply came immediately -- "Thank you for signing on to challenge corporate power in this election year."

And ahh well, it made me kinda Weltschmertzy. Ralph's prolly about as grand a soul as our merit class produced between the dust bowl days and that morning in Dallas. But lets face it, the plane took off, Ralphy boy. Your day at the plate is past, as is mine, of course on a midget scale.

But hey, let's mount up anyway! What say you, fellow rad cliffhangers? Let's all take one last lap with Ralph -- him up there on the boob tube and You Tube, gadflying the Orthrians, and us down here in the digital cellar. Come on -- let's go virtual door to door, just this one more time. Do it for -- I don't know -- do it for -- Joan Baez.

"Poet, musician, and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Patti Smith and citizen activist Ralph Nader have for years used music and words to promote action-for a change. And we've just come across a remarkable newly released DVD. It's called-Awake From Your Slumber."

For comparison purposes, here are some other musicians' picks:

http://idolator.com/352714/is-your-favorite-musician-supporting-your-favorite-candidate

Mike Huckabee: Ted Nugent

John McCain: Burt Bacharach

Ron Paul: Krist Novoselic, Arlo Guthrie

Mitt Romney: Pat Boone, Donny Osmond, Marie Osmond

Hillary Clinton: Madonna, Carly Simon, Tony Bennett, Jon Bon Jovi, Melissa Etheridge, Carole King, Janet Jackson, Quincy Jones, 50 Cent, Mya, Timbaland, Barbra Streisand, Merle Haggard

Barack Obama: Babyface, the Goo Goo Dolls, Macy Gray, Ne-Yo, Will Smith, Usher, Stevie Wonder, Harry Connick Jr., Pete Wentz, Win Butler, will.i.am/the Black Eyed Peas, the Grateful Dead, Jeff Tweedy, Conor Oberst, Joanna Newsom, the Cool Kids, Stephan Jenkins, OK Go, Shudder to Think, Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam

Hallelujah! Let the liberal pants-shitting begin!

Nader announces on "Meet The Press".

Tim Russet...uh, Russert asks same old predictable lame-ass questions re: why are the last six years' deterioration in the US Govt not his fault.

Nader swats him like a fly. Whap!

Phew...what's that smell?

http://www.dailykos.com/search?offset=0&old_count=30&string=nader&type=both&sortby=relevance&search=Search&count=30&wayback=20160&wayfront=0

http://tinyurl.com/2fnf79

The interesting thing about the Kos response -- and the conventional-wisdom pwog response in general -- is that it takes two contradictory lines of argument, often in the same post, and even in the same sentence:

1) Nader's campaign is silly, because he won't get any votes.

2) Nader's campaign is "irresponsible" because he might -- yet again -- spoil things for the Democrats.

I wasn't on the scene at all, yer Honor! And besides, it was an accident -- and the other fella started it!

Ralph's raiders update:

http://www.votenader.org/blog/2008/04/07/shameful/

The lead:

"It is just shameful that prominent American liberals continue to support the corrupt Democratic Party"

The list:

"Eric Alterman, Medea Benjamin, David Corn, Ariana Huffington, Robert Kuttner, Victor Navasky, Harold Meyerson, Morton Mintz, Wes Boyd, John Nichols, Katha Pollitt, Jesse Jackson, Matthew Rothschild, Bernie Sanders, Micah Sifry, Robert McChesney, James Fallows, Markos Moulitsas and Katrina vanden Heuvel (pictured here)."

The Katwoman would be my choice to picture out of this group 'hanging of loft bats' too.

The money graph analysis:

"These prominent American liberals apparently have learned nothing from the political leverage generated by the small third parties in the 19th century who pioneered the social justice movements that delivered the goods that we take for granted today "

National poll results -- the Nader effect:

• McCain 45 percent
• Clinton 39 percent
• Nader 6 percent

• McCain 44 percent
• Obama 39 percent
• Nader 5 percent

Who makes the sign of the N?

NADER NADER NADER!

Nodemsatol is not a complete cure, but it is a vital component of any healthy regimen. It can relieve social constipation, alleviate cognitive dissonance and provide an active alternative to people who feel their treatment plan presently consists of a kick to the crotch followed by a kick to the teeth. It is neither legal nor illegal, but it is definitely not an officially approved remedy and can frequently be difficult to put into effect. Side effects may include externally inflicted red-baiting, inducements to fatuity, sanctimonious lectures, harassment by urine sample fetishists and accusations of mental illness. Benefits may include fewer sightings of puckered, inflamed donkey sphincters, surge abatement, bankster remediation and a diet that excludes endocrine disruptors.

Isn't it time to give it a try?