Go ahead, throw your vote away!

I am your President Clin-TONN!

 

Third party candidates won two elections for Clinton (Perot siphoned off enough votes to keep Clinton from getting a majority of the vote) and the first one for G.W. Bush (Anyone doubt that all of Nader's votes going to Gore wouldn't have helped?). George Wallace also helped Nixon win in 1968.

Sounds like they're powerful enough.

 

Clinton won because he wore Raybans and played sax on Arsenio.

 

All Nader's votes? Hell, all he needed was 538 of them.

And that, of course, is one of the main obstacles to third-party success: The notion that the candidate could cost someone the election. If you're a Dem, even if you don't like your candidate, you'd rather have him in there than his opponent, and vice versa.

 

The upcoming 2008 election seems like the logical time for a third party candidate, if one were ever to emerge. But that person has to begin that campaign now. Get people rallied behind the idea so that support builds for a candidate early instead of just a leftover forming a campaign.

Perot and the Reform party could have been an excellent start despite Perot's failures. Had the party built up, got more push for senate/congressional seats, then it could be looked at as a viable option today. I think Ventura is still the biggest win the party has had.

The problem boils down to funding for the presidency. Repubs and Dems have a solid cash flow, and get FEC money each year. Without some solid support in states, some wins somewhere, the party won't attract the big names, the money won't be there and nothing will change.

And let's face it, as much as everyone talks about campaign reform, it will never be reformed enough for a third party to benefit, because the two big guys like it that way.

 

The Democrats and Republicans agree on a few things, teaming up to beat back any serious attempt at launching a third party is No. 1 on the list.

I'd love to see it happen, hell I've voted Libertarian a few times over the years, but I just don't see the two main parties allowing it.

 

The first time. The second, it;s because he wasnt 90 years old and his right arm worked

 

Actually, it was that plus people looked around and thought: Shit, this ain't been so bad.


I just don't know how you go about getting that third-party guy in office. The system is soooooo stacked against it at this point that it's just impossible. You simply can't get the exposure due to the cost, can't get on TV even for the debates without the exposure and can't get elected, no matter how great your ideas, without the ads or the debates.

If it's ever going to work, it's going to have to be a guy who comes along at just the right time with just the right image and message and has the right bank account.

 

Going back a bit, but don't forget 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt got a flea up his butt about Taft and ran in a snit against him and Wilson, sucking off more than enough votes to not only elect Wilson (only the second Democratic president elected since Buchanan in 1856), but make Taft the answer to a trivia question...

Name the only presidential nominee from one of the two major parties to finish BEHIND his rival and a third-party candidate.

As for a viable third-party candidate, it's been mentioned before, but the system is stacked overwhelmingly against it. On top of that, the media -- with it's incessant fixation on the horse-race/money-grabbing elements of campaigns -- has this annoying habit of marginalizing anyone with the audacity to try staging a serious campaign. This has the effect of taking the air out of the sails before the ship leaves the dock.

 

Whenever people get on this third party kick, I find it interesting that the complete and total apathy and laziness of over half the electorate is never cited as a reason.

Americans, by a pretty solid majority, cannot be bothered to choose between two middle-aged white men once every four years. What makes people think they're going to embrace more parties and more candidates?

And someone is going to come along and say that more candidates would equal more diversity and more participation, and I would point them toward house and senate races and state legislature races and ballot referenda that get less participation than presidential elections.

 

. . . yeah, this is what he need . . . have Bloomy run, so we're stuck with Lobbyin' Fred, or Mitt the Twit, and a Supreme Court further stacked with all-business-all-the-time-and screw-you-little-man
flunkies.

Great.

And again . . . thanks, Ralph, you egomaniacal turd.