Wednesday, April 16, 2008

New Homes for Old Pols

Third parties have two pools of potential voters to recruit from. The first pool is people who either already belong to a party but are dissatisfied with it or consider themselves independents. These are voters who clearly have some degree of interest in politics and already have experience with the process. The second pool is composed of the disinterested masses who do not vote at all. People don't vote for all sorts of reasons -- some definitely do feel alienated and disenfranchised by the two party system and thus have reason to be interested in a third party alternative -- but I think the majority of people don't vote because they are busy with their daily lives and don't follow politics very closely. Those who have been reading this blog for a while know I belonged to that category myself for a long time. It is arguably easier to recruit an active voter to join a new party than it is to convince a non-voter to join the process. "Why don't you start voting so you can support a candidate like me who has virtually no chance of winning?" That's not a great selling point.

Since smaller political parties really do need to court current voters, nominating an established candidate formerly associated with another party can seem like a very appealing prospect. Established candidates have name recognition -- if you doubt that is a powerful thing, remember how great Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson did in the early presidential polls. Established candidates are also seasoned campaigners with useful experience, contacts, and perhaps even an existing organization. There is, however, a big potential downside to welcoming in such candidates. People don't always leave parties for purely ideological reasons. Sometimes they leave because they don't agree with the party leadership on organizational matters or simply don't get along with a particular person or group of people within the party. This being the case, it's possible that an established candidate can leave one party and join another armed with the very same set of ideas and beliefs. The new party, then, risks being hijacked by the candidate -- this seems to be just what happened to the Reform Party when Pat Buchanan joined it and ultimately became its presidential candidate in 2000.

Several of the potential presidential candidates competing for small party nominations are already well-known politicians. Alan Keyes has left the Republican Party and strongly hinted that he wants to become the Constitution Party's presidential candidate. We'll know more after the Constitution Party Convention next week. I don't know enough about the Constitution Party to judge whether Keyes fits there, but one Mississippi CP member is already saying, "No Thanks, Alan Keyes." At least the title of his blog post is polite. Mike Gravel has also left the Democratic Party and is now seeking the Libertarian Party's nomination. This is more than a little wild. Gravel surely has some libertarian leanings when it comes to foreign policy, individual liberties, and abolishing the IRS, but I've never thought of him as someone who wants to drastically reduce social spending like many Libertarians want to do. To tell you the truth, I thought Gravel was much more likely to join the Green Party than to become a Libertarian. Instead, another former Democrat has become the likely Green nominee: Cynthia McKinney, a former Congresswoman from Georgia. She gained some notoriety for hitting a police officer in 2006 -- I had an impression of her being a mentally unbalanced individual probably entirely due to the media coverage of this incident. She actually seems to be quite a good and downright levelheaded speaker, however, and she has done very well in the Green primaries so far. Judging from how the Greens have embraced her, perhaps McKinney's crossover makes the most sense.

In any case, Keyes and Gravel and McKinney are at least bringing some attention to three minor parties. McKinney will probably be a presidential candidate in the general election. We'll have to see about Keyes and Gravel. I imagine that there are a lot of people who right now perceive Keyes and Gravel as being Buchanan-esque hijackers and will oppose their nominations for the long-term good of their parties, but I think both Keyes and Gravel could win over a lot of people if their voices are allowed to be heard. I don't know enough about the other candidates from the smaller parties, but I'm willing to bet Monopoly money that at least a few aren't any more "ideologically pure" than Keyes or Gravel. Ideological purity and political parties just don't seem to go very well together.

Monday, April 7, 2008

Let Ralph Nader Run in Peace

I don't care much for the team mentality that many Democrats and Republicans adopt. Voting for someone only because she belongs to your party or vilifying someone else only because he is of the other party are the acts of an automaton, especially considering that "Democrat" and "Republican" have become almost useless labels given the different factions that exist in each party and the geographical variations in ideology that seem to be accepted by both parties (for example, pro-life Democrats can be commonly found in conservative areas and pro-choice Republicans are prevalent in liberal areas). I personally think there are a lot of people like me who would vote for different parties if presented with different sets of candidates. We consider the differences among the candidates to be more profound than the differences among the parties, and we don't like the idea of voting for candidates we don't believe in on the assumption that they'll tow the party line once enshrined in office. The party faithful expect us to ultimately pick a side; indeed, sometimes they act as if they feel that their parties have some sort of right to our votes.

This attitude of entitlement is often displayed in Democrats who blame Ralph Nader for Al Gore's loss to George W. Bush in 2000. That intensely close presidential election left a bad taste in many mouths. Allegations of election fraud and government conspiracy still circulate to this day -- it's a pity that a fair and full recount of the vote in Florida was not allowed to take place given the importance of the occasion. Still, it's one thing to protest at what you perceive as a stolen election, a fraudulent result; it's quite another to tear into someone who is exercising his right to seek office and those who are exercising their rights to vote for the candidate of their choice. Nader has been enveloped in a cyclone of bitterness spawned perhaps above all else by sour grapes. Those who argue that Nader votes would have voted for Gore instead of Bush are in all likelihood right, but how can the preference of those voters for Nader over Gore be dismissed and pushed aside? Nader voters could have voted for Gore or Bush or someone else; they chose not to. Gore has no right to any votes that were not cast for him.

Since Nader has recently decided to seek the presidency once again in 2008, his critics have again arisen in protest, some angrily and some derisively. I strongly doubt that Nader will be the next president of the United States, but nonetheless I feel he deserves as much respect as any other candidate. His road as an independent candidate will be more difficult than that traveled by the Republican and Democratic nominees; indeed, it is probably harder for a Nader to win 2% of the vote than it is for a Republican or Democrat to garner enough votes to win the election. He has as much right to voice his ideas wherever he can find listeners as anyone else. I don't deny that someone who officially runs for president three times probably really likes national attention, but I suspect the other candidates like that attention to some extent as well. Nader is surely not the only one feeding an ego on the campaign trail, so I don't think he should be the singled out for ego-related criticism. It is shameful that running for office can be widely considered a shameful act.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

The Company You Keep

In the small town where I live, politics is still very personal. In a typical campaign season, it isn't only the candidates themselves who will canvas neighborhoods, going from door to door armed with a few prepared words and a flyer. Almost inevitably, the candidate's spouse or child or parent will be drafted into the effort as well. Some campaigns make it almost seem like their true "candidate" is not just the person running for office, the name on the ticket, but also that person's entire family and other associates. Too often for my taste local candidates seem to seek votes based on where they went to school, the churches they attend, and the roles their friends and family members play in the community.

National politics is more issue-oriented, but the idea that a candidate's worth depends in part on the people who are related to or otherwise associate closely with that candidate has nonetheless affected the current presidential race. There have been too many muckraking stories about the candidates' inner circles to list them all in a single blog post; few, if any, candidates avoided having their character called into question due to the actions of some person connected to them. I've often had difficulty deciding what to take out of these type of stories. They may be truthful but yet they are often surely promulgated in order to taint a particular campaign. Take the story that emerged last year concerning Rudy Giuliani's current wife as an example. She has been accused of repeatedly demonstrating a surgical stapling technique on live dogs to potential medical customers as part of her former job at U.S. Surgical. Following the procedure, the dogs would be put down having fulfilled their "purpose" in the sales presentation. This is an ugly story, but how does it help us judge Giuliani as a presidential candidate? I suppose one line of thinking is to assume that since Giuliani showed a lack of judgment by choosing to marry a monster he would also show a lack of judgment when making political decisions. I can't quite adopt that line of thinking -- otherwise sensible people often seem to make decisions that often seem questionable to the people around them when it comes to love and relationships. Would you choose not to promote someone who was superb at his job just because he married someone awful? I don't think I could do that personally. At any rate, Mayor Giuliani may not have even known about his girlfriend's past when he married her. I've never been married, but somehow I doubt "dog torture for profit" is a topic that comes up very often during a typical courtship. That's a bomb that gets dropped a few years into a marriage, I imagine. This story is quite typical of its type. On one hand, the details are ugly enough to sway some votes, but on the other hand the degree of separation between the candidate and the acts mentioned is great enough that most people would simply shrug it off. A few votes here and there can ultimately have a big impact on a race, though.

The latest candidate to run into trouble because of the company he keeps is Barack Obama. Obama's patriotism and racial views have come under question merely because the former preacher at Obama's church, Jeremiah Wright, has a history of making controversial political and racial statements. The attention accorded to Wright's statements created enough furor that Obama ultimately decided to deliver a speech to explain his close relationship with Wright and the differences in their views. It was an effective speech, I thought, but I very much wonder if it is wise to hold presidential candidates accountable for the words of everyone around them. Granted, Obama has acknowledged that Wright has been an important influence in his life, but they remain two very different men. To be honest, I don't really hear the acerbic words of the firebrand Wright reflected in Obama's speeches at all. Some of their ideas are similar, but the manner in which they are expressed are worlds apart. Manner inevitably influences interpretation. Contrast Wright's infamous sound bite "God damn America!" with Obama's message of "Let's change America and make it better" (my paraphrase). Both statements acknowledge that America isn't perfect, but Wright's message seems to focus on what he thinks is wrong with America today and what wrongs he believes that America has committed in the past while Obama instead focuses on what America could be in the future. Obama's view of the present and past seems a fair bit rosier than Wright's view as well.

I think judging the politicians based on their own actions and their own words is the best policy a voter can adopt. Like Obama, I have family members with racial views I don't personally subscribe to. I've never distanced myself from them -- in fact, I believe they have a right to those views, though I also exercise my right to argue with them from time to time. Indeed, I don't think I personally know anyone who agrees with me on most issues that are important to me. If the same rules applied to me as some would like to see applied to presidential candidates, then I would be saddled with an enormous host of views that I don't personally hold or even have any sympathy with. If the same rules applied to everyone, then anyone with a family member who does something wrong of his or her own free will should be accused of being a bad sister or a bad parent or a bad husband or a bad third cousin twice removed, and, by association, a bad person. I don't think you can judge people effectively based on the company they keep. At the very least, you would surely need to study the dynamics of each individual relationship to discover the nature of the sympathy of sentiments that exists between two people -- to understand to what extent Obama and Wright see eye to eye, we would need to listen in on their private conversations, not just their public speeches. Since we don't have that kind of access (nor should we), I think Barack Obama should be the #1 authority on what Barack Obama believes.