Corporate Republicans v. Corporate Democrats

This certainly reinforces my own preference for Edwards. Unfortunately it also means that our corporate “news” media will step up their efforts to squash him. Expect more stories of the haircut / mansion type.

Has he apologized for his DLC membership and according Senate career like he’s apologized for his vote to go to Iraq?

Nogo: None of them, really.

I like him too. However, it will be difficult for him to win, since women, gays, African-Americans, and other minorities now dominate the Democratic Party, and they support the centrist, DLC crowd so long as their interests are met-vide the Clintons (both of them). This is the case in my home state of Wisconsin, where a rather weak, middling govenor is nevertheless considered a “white African-American” and other such accolades, and it has been gaining in the country as a whole since the sixties-with increasingly disastrous results.
I am sorry to have said this. I would like to vote for a female or gay or minority candidate, but where is the radical one? Except Obama ( another choice) there does not appear to be one.

John Edwards opposes same sex marriage.

As opposed to which Dem candidates who support same?

What a load of silly rubish!

Uh oh, he said the “M” word. It took, what, two weeks after Dean said media conglomerates should be broken up before he became angry-crazy-Howard-Dean. Either Edwards wasn’t paying attention, or he now sees himself as a long enough shot that he should get in his jabs while he still has some sliver of the spotlight.

“or he now sees himself as a long enough shot that he should get in his jabs”

I thought the same – he’s gotta push the rhetoric a little more radical to to distinguish himself, and try to get some attention, as he’s been at #3 for a while.

I initially liked Edwards and thought he’d be running stronger. But when I hear or read the candidates’ words, they pretty much all strike me as pandering doofuses. Edwards, also, isn’t exactly for single payer healthcare.

Maybe it’s necessary, to get elected. Clinton, Obama, and Edwards are pretty disappointing, though.

Any one of them is much less likely, compared to the Republicans, to start another unprovoked war and kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, so IMO you’ve absolutely gotta vote for one of these idiots.

luci- goes without saying. I’m not wild about Hillary (politically- as far as ability and character go I rather admire her) but would run to the polls to vote for her in the general election.

Dennis Kucinich?

An honest question here. Given the cynical and sour commentary above, what precisely would the folks here support? I’m in the information gathering stage myself. The one luxury that we can’t afford is above-it-all posturing. I would have thought that 8 years of the disastrous Bush administration would have been a sufficient lesson on the folly of asserting that there are no real options in the US, as the two major parties arethesamething. An inability to mount an effective defence against insane recklessness is not equivalent to insane recklessness.

I still think the best preventative for US military action is divided government — make the president persuade a congress in which one or both houses are controlled by the other party. Obviously this is imperfect, but it’s a useful limiting factor.

Are you quite sure about that? I wouldn’t be.

Do you think President Gore would have decided to invade Iraq? Bear in mind that Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and every other neocon on earth would have played no role in a Gore administration.

Cryptic Ned/ejh: Never mind Gore v. Bush, the top Republican candidates are insanely hawkish. Romney says he wants to “double Guantanamo,” in those exact words; Giuliani thinks diplomacy only gets you attacked, all I have to say about McCain is the Regents did “Barbara Ann” first, and I can’t bring myself to watch Fred Thompson’s speech on Iran but I’ll be surprised if it’s much different. The Republicans are crazy.

Ned, I’d remind you that Lieberman would have been VP in a Gore administration, and that Gore believed, as late as late 2000, that it had been a mistake not to depose Saddam in 1991.

… The choice for our party could not be more clear. We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats, just swapping the Washington insiders of one party for the Washington insiders of the other.

Right — because Bill Clinton’s presidency was such a corporate-drive disaster for the country. Sounds like Edwards is taking a page for Gore’s playbook — run against the most only successful democratic administration in the last third of a century. Not as dumb when Edwards does it than it was when Gore did it (given Gore was, you know, actually a big part of the ‘the power’ structure that he claimed to be running against). But still dumb.

So which of the three? Henry has outlined the reasons why Edwards would be my least favorite candidate (although, to be honest, I suspect Edwards populist, anti-corporate rhetoric is more posturing than substance — I doubt he’d govern that way. But fortunately it’s really unlikely we’re going to have to worry about that).

I had hopes for Obama, but they don’t seem to be panning out. I never liked Hillary, and I really don’t like the idea of another familial succession at all, but there you go. If I could hold my nose and vote for Gore, I can do it for Hillary, too.

As an outsider who’s been following US Presidential Elections for nearly 40 years as something of a spectator sport, all I can say is if the Democrats couldn’t win in 2000 when everything was in their favour, and lost again in 2004 when they mobilized to the maximum to try and get rid of Bush, I wouldn’t be surprised if they missed out again this time. A Republican victory seems highly unlikely if one is objective, yet nothing surprises me now, especially after Bush’s re-election following the disaster of Iraq.

Do you think President Gore would have decided to invade Iraq?

Democrats like to say this as if it – a hypothetical point – meant something. How many of their representatives voted against the invasion? How many of them opposed it at the last election? How many of their leading contenders now are clearly unwilling to go to war with Iran?

I know, of course, what will happen, because it’s what always happens and it’s why the Democrats are as piss-poor as they are. Who will be the lesser evil in 2008?

Edward is in third place. This means supporting him only splits away support to one of the two leading candidates, probably Obama. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was Edward’s intention – I mean, politicians aren’t stupid. Are we to believe that they will never try to game the system with a little tactical campaigning?

You need to fix your primaries to select the dominant winner. This winner would have a better chance in the presidental election, as can be seen from experience: 1972 for the democrats (McGovern won the primary with a tiny plurality, Humphrey was probably the dominant winner. McGovern went on to lose with a landslide to Nixon) 1964 for the republicans (Goldwater won the primary, Scranton was most likely dominant, Goldwater lost the presidental to Johnson, again with a landslide – the biggest ever in the US).

I’m not wild about Hillary (politically- as far as ability and character go I rather admire her) but would run to the polls to vote for her in the general election.

I don’t know what state you vote in, Steve, but unless it’s one of the dozen or so battleground states, your vote doesn’t matter anyway, as your state’s electoral votes are essentially already decided.

The silver lining of living in a non-battleground state is that there’s then no excuse not to vote for a candidate you actually like, assuming, that is, there’s some minor party or independent candidate who more closely approximates your political views than Hillary Clinton (or whoever is the Democratic nominee).

I don’t know what state you vote in, Steve, but unless it’s one of the dozen or so battleground states, your vote doesn’t matter anyway, as your state’s electoral votes are essentially already decided.

Unless everybody takes this sort of advice, in which case they’re not. Vote, you eedjit.

Um, that last paragraph was badly worded, and to be clearer I meant “A small third party in the UK may at the moment look to be an illusory choice, but it seems to be more of a choice than the ever-optimistic Mr Nader in the US, since in the UK there is at least an historical precedent for a major party political shift”.

Ben, I live in one of the two swingiest of all the states- Ohio. Neener neener! ;)

Katherine’s question is good, but my time to type this is limited, so I hope someone else answers.

It seems to me that Hilary is the odd woman out among the Democratic candidates. If you are a Democrat concerned with either getting out of Iraq, or rising inequality, then Hilary is the worst candidate. She is the most prowar, or least antiwar of the group, though Dodd and Biden are almost as bad neither has much of a chance. Much of the measures encouraging concentration of wealth were put in place during her husbands administration, and its obvious she can’t or doesn’t want to deliver on some sort of national health care plan.

Contrawise, if you are a prowar or conservative Democrat, Hilary really should be your candidate. She is also probably the least positioned of the non-fringe candidate for the general election.

On the other hand, Obama and Edwards strike me as similar in their current positions. Obama has something of a better public record, and Edwards currently is willing to use stronger anti-war and anti-inequality rhetoric. Obama seems more concerned with clean elections, and Edwards with reducing poverty. Both can give good speeches. But they are more similar than either are to Hilary.

From the standpoint of a non-DLC Democrat, why not wait until the early primaries, then support whoever emerges then as the strongest non-Hilary candidate? In the meantime you can give money to both, and perhaps to Gravel and Kucinich as well. That would seem to be the best strategy.

Well I couldn’t let this pass without comment:

“since women, gays, African-Americans, and other minorities now dominate the Democratic Party, and they support the centrist, DLC crowd so long as their interests are met-vide the Clintons”

This is maybe the silliest depiction of American political reality that I have seen ever. It implies that the only inhabitants of the progressive movement are straight white men. This is loony. Whatever your own opinion may be on choice, civil rights, gay marriage, the notion that women, minorities and gays gravitate towards the DLC because that is where they are pandered to is to turn reality on its head. The motto of the typical DLCer on all these topics might as well be “Not so fast!” because after all pushing too far might offend some “values voter”.

That women and minorities support Clinton is despite her ties to the “centrist, DLC crowd” and certainly not because of them.

Is there a whiff of revolutionary vanguardism in the air? Or simply a new version of White Man’s Burden?

Democrats like to say this as if it – a hypothetical point – meant something. How many of their representatives voted against the invasion?

A majority of them. In both houses.
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“What I don’t understand is the reasoning behind requiring people to register, when they vote, an affiliation to a particular party.”

Well I am not sure what the intent of this question. Nobody has to declare a party to vote in a General Election. And the requirement to be a registered party member in primaries is a protection against hijacking a ballot line. Different states make it more or less difficult to get your party an official ballot line, but once earned you don’t want some outside faction to simply take it over on election day for a free pass to the General.

That is when Nader ran as a Green he at least had to get backing from existing Greens. They had a choice as to whether to risk their hard earned automatic ballot position. Of course they lost that bet. A very foolish move by the way. Greens had a chance to create a new nationwide party working from the ground up, instead they put their entire future into the hands of an egomaniac who was not particularly sympathetic to their platform and who went out of his way to ignore their input after the nomination. Nader used the Greens like Kleenix. Well at least he used them twice before disposal – pretty much the closest he ever got to being green himself.

Bruce, I think your second post displays the total difference in the way of thinking about this. As a comparison, to help out, in the UK no one has to register a party affiliation at all on the electoral register -in fact, there is no way to do so. The people who make the decisions on the policies of a particular party, and leadership of that party are the members of the party, who have applied for membership and paid their (small) dues. The system of party governance is entirely separate from the electoral register/voter registration structure.

Yes, Steve, but the point is that affiliation (or not) is a part of the voter registration structure. Whether it “allows” you to register as an independent or not, the party structure is intimately linked with the government structure. I am curious as to why this would be, and whether people think it acts as a stifling effect on the growth and development of alternatives to the Republican and Democratic parties.

GMT, in the Senate, 29 Democrats voted for the Iraq war, including Clinton and Edwards, and 21 against. In the House, 126) of the Democrats voted against the war, while 81 voted for. So while a majority of Democrats in both houses voted against the war, a majority of Democrats in the Senate did not.

That may be an excuse, but it’s not a reason. What’s wrong with voting in whichever primary you chose, without having to change any previous formal declaration? Works perfectly fine in lots of states.

Ignacio and Steve, again perhaps I am not making myself clear, or perhaps I am just underestimating the fundamental difference in approaches here. Or perhaps I’m just missing myself the fundamental point of what I’m asking – here’s another go – why primaries, then? Ignacio is saying that it is practical so as to allow for eligibility to vote in primaries – so the question is then, why primaries as the US system has them? I guess to me it seems an odd sort of system that effectively means two rounds of presidential elections – one to elect the candidate and one to elect the president.

Again, the whole system of primaries seems to institutionalise the two parties, which is oddly unique in western political systems, to my knowledge, and very rarely seems to be commented on. I’ve never heard any explanation as to why local elections commissions or any other governmental structure should be so formally linked together with internal party political governance.

Again, the whole system of primaries seems to institutionalise the two parties, which is oddly unique in western political systems, to my knowledge, and very rarely seems to be commented on. I’ve never heard any explanation as to why local elections commissions or any other governmental structure should be so formally linked together with internal party political governance.

Very good questions! Steve Labonne is absolutely correct that the system is rigged by the two parties. The history of how that came about has many parts. Important factors include periodic challenges to the two major parties (most notably the Populists in the 1890s, the Bull Moose/Progressives in the 1910s and 1920s, and George Wallace in 1968). Each of these challenges provoked a wave of tightening of ballot access laws.

During the Cold War, American political scientists suggested that a two-party system was a precondition for a stable democracy. Otherwise, you ended up with Italy or Weimar Germany.

Meanwhile, the courts began to recognize a state interest in maintaining the two-party system (not surprising as many judges started their careers as partisans for one or the other of the major parties).

Meanwhile, the extraordinary provincialism of even civically active Americans over most of the last 75 years or so (it was actually quite different before, as Dan Rodgers has shown in Atlantic Crossings) has led most people who bother to think about it to believe that the two-party system is simply a result of FPTP, despite the fact that the other Anglophone democracies have FPTP (or partly FPTP) systems and all are much friendlier to minor parties.

The notion that reasonable political discourse is defined by the positions of the two major parties is an important part of modern American political culture and also helps ease popular acceptance of the two-party system.

Not every state requires a declaration of party affiliation to vote in a primary.

In Minnesota, for instance, you are merely required to vote in only one party’s primary — all candidates for all parties are on one ballot. If you try to vote for candidates from more than one party, though, your ballot can’t be counted.

Don’t Louisiana and Washington have nonpartisan primaries (the top two vote-getters go on to the general election regardless of affiliation)?

67: Louisiana do, as far as I’m aware, but only for the state primaries. Used to be the same for national ones, but was changed recently.

No, Jim. S. Canada has multiple parties under FPTP, but that’s also due to geographic segmentation. Australia has two and a half primary parties (ALP versus Liberal and Nationals) plus smaller blocs like the Greens. But Australia uses preferential voting instead. And proportional voting in the senate is good at giving minor parties a chance.

In my experience, FPTP is good at preventing votes from going to third parties. Take 2000, when you’ve got a choice between Gore, Nader, and Bush. You could have voted for Gore, but Nader is closer to where you stand, so you vote for him. Whoops – Bush wins the election instead. Bummer. But what’s worse is that your mates in the Democrat party starts blasting you for undue idealism and “wasting” your vote on Nader.

I don’t agree with this argument, but I’ve seen quite a few flame wars on this theme. It’s one way how FPTF reinforces a two-party system – by psychological blackmail.

I am sorry but do not Canada, France, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, et. al., have basically two main political parties?

You’re changing the issue here, Jim S.

The question is not: why are there only two predominant parties in the U.S.? The question is: why are minor parties so shut out of the U.S. system?

In each of the countries you mention, the role of minor parties is much greater and, in some cases, the identity of the two major parties is more fluid than in the U.S.

One other thing to note about primaries: they are a fairly recent development. Though some states have had presidential primaries much longer, only since the 1970s have they (more or less) determined who wins the parties’ presidential nominations. Before then, a much higher percentage of delegates were selected by other methods (both parties still have “super delegates,” mainly elected officials, who are not bound by primary voters). And conventions frequently took more than one ballot to nominate a candidate. Through the 1930s, the Democratic Party required a 2/3 majority of delegates to nominate a presidential candidate, which virtually guaranteed a multiple-ballot convention (and which gave the South a veto over presidential candidates). Primaries certainly played a role in earlier nomination processes, but they were not entirely determinate.

The larger point is that the Democratic and Republican Parties arguably began to be semi-official entities more than a century ago, but the primary system as we know it today is a lot more recent. It’s an important part of the two-party system today, but it did not bring that system about.

That comment about the Granita rather depends on the meaning of “democratic” in the arena of party leadership. There isn’t anyone arguing, I don’t think, for wider public participation in leadership selection, partly at least because party leaders become Prime Ministers not Presidents and partly be cause they have to be elected as MPs in their own right. So if you are talking about internal party politics needing to be more “democratic” then you get into the shark infested waters of imposing state rules on political parties, which in turn risks the very institutionalisation of parties that I’ve been wondering about in the US.

Also, I don’t think you can put all the blame for the entrenchment of the Republicrats on the system of primaries. There is also the small matter of the obscenely high financial barriers to entry to American politics.

I’m glad others have answered the question. I’ll just add a few points:

1. Don’t forget the presidential system. Heads of federal executive departments serve at the pleasure of the President, not of the legislature. Same with states and governors. If you don’t control the executive, you are shut out of power. That means the whole game is to get a President elected, and if you can’t be one of the two big presidential parties you might as well not play. A third party can’t even in theory use a small block of supporters in Congress to make a deal to sustain a government in return for getting some of its policies enacted, because a President as we are seeing now can govern effectively even with a hostile Congress.

2. As others have pointed out, the Democratic and Republican parties function more as arms of the US and state government than as political parties the way people in other countries understand the term. You become affiliated with them through the voter registration process, there are no memberships -their funds come entirely or almost entirely through corporate contributions- their candidate selection process is a matter of state law, they usually have guaranteed ballot access while other organizations are shut out.

3. Also in a strict legal sense, parties only exist at the state level, and elections are held only at the state level -the presidential election is really a series of state elections, for slates of electors. Its hard to work out what exactly the impact of this it, but it has one.

4. There is no US equivalent of the BBC or the CBC, and TV news consists to a large degree of propeganda. Its hard for political alternatives to flourish in this environment.

Latin American countries have similar systems to the US, in some cases deliberately modeled after the US. However most Latin American countries have introduced proportional representation and made some efforts recently to clean up their political process. The U.S. political system is now arguably less democratic than the systems in Argentina and Brazil.

Another note: coalitions are formed in multi-party systems after elections; they are effectively formed in the US system before the election.

People seem to be forgetting that this can cut in very different ways. The coalition system was used from the 1930s through the 1960s as a very, very effective mechanism for setting up the US social welfare network (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.)

Would anyone who claims that multi-party systems are intrinsically better care to defend the pathological Israeli system, for example?

Also in a strict legal sense, parties only exist at the state level

This is incorrect. Parties have national structures (i.e. the Democratic and Republican National Committees). And national parties have to register with the Federal Election Commission.

It is true that the presidential election consists of formally separate state systems of selecting electors.

Would anyone who claims that multi-party systems are intrinsically better care to defend the pathological Israeli system, for example?

The devil is in the details. Maybe the best multi-party system is better than the best single-party system. I don’t know for sure, though I suspect the best possible single-party system might be better than the best two-party system or the best N-party system. But how often do we get the best?

It depends on the details.