19-0

That was the score of the response to the October 5 post asking which option you prefer between supporting the current national parties and a new independent party. The total number of unduplicated votes for the Indy party on both the Daily Blank and Facebook was 19. No one voted for the Redemlicrats; a few people voted for “none of the above” which is how I plan to vote next month.

What does this tell us? I think it tells us we are in the last decade of the dominance of the two big parties. Things are broken. They are fixing nothing. There are more registered Independents than R’s or D’s according to a recent Pew survey. The Tea Party is rising and this relatively liberal audience is just as fed up.

Bring it on I say. Then maybe we’ll address the real problems. We now spend far more time discussing “don’t ask/don’t tell” than we do with the wars themselves. I don’t mean to minimize the importance of that issue, but each day the New York Times lists the names, ranks, ages and home towns of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. There were seven yesterday. The oldest was 22; there were two 19-year-olds.

We all know they died for access to oil, and yet Congress has no energy to address energy. Did you read Tom Friedman’s recent column on Congress’ unwillingness to commit one billion dollars over five years to speed development of cutting edge energy research? That’s $200 million dollars per year. What does that buy? I believe that pays for 200 foot soldiers in Afghanistan for one year. At the current pace we will have another few hundred dead teenagers in that perpetual Western death-trap of a country over the next year.

But I’m sure the Democrats and Republican have a secret plan to make this all make sense, right?

So if you could choose…

If you could choose to invest your time, voice, money, interest – whatever -- into one of the following political options, which would you choose?

Option 1 and 1a would be to support either the Democratic or Republican parties as they are today. That is: large, old, highly established organizations, with complicated hierarchical structures, increasingly dominated by the extreme end of one side of the political spectrum. Each is in the debt of numerous very large special interest groups, upon which they depends for billions of dollars in order to feed their machines. The two parties have alternated control of the country for 150 years.

They traded power 3-4 times just since WWII, a period of time in which the country peaked probably 35 years ago. In the subsequent years they have involved the country in 4-5 wars (depending on what you count), and the national debt has soared to alarming levels, all as they have changed the rules to make it easier for them to retain power. As the country’s problems multiplied, they have been frozen in inaction for 40 years arguing and fighting over largely tangential issues in an increasing partisan fashion. Meanwhile it’s been 37 years since the first oil boycott and there is still no national policy to decrease dependence on imported oil.

Option 2 is to throw your support to a new, third political party. Let’s call it the Independent party. (Roughly as many people in the U.S. today call themselves Independents as self-identify as either Republicans or Democrats.) The Indies would stand for moderate policies close to what used to be thought of as those of liberal Republicans or conservative Democrats, before those terms became oxymorons.

The leadership for the Indies would come from a loose association of very high profile, wealthy individuals, who, while they might also be politicians, are better known for their accomplishments in the private sector.

The Indies will show themselves to be pragmatic politically, and unafraid to bring difficult issues the country faces to the forefront of the debate, while offering realistic, achievable, measurable ideas for solving problems.

Some of these very public people might not be in your Top Ten, but even if you dislike them it is quite possible you dislike them for non-political reason. For example, you might not have a problem with his record as a mayor but dislike Michael Bloomberg for his billionaire’s aloofness.

So those are your choices. I’m sure everyone reading this can think of a couple of things that make this a Hobson’s Choice (Thomas Hobson, above), given the number of unknowns and the hypothetical nature of Option 2. But the big picture is correct, isn’t it?

It’s not really a very difficult choice once you see that Options 1 and 1a are not really two separate choices. They represent just one choice because the two parties have conspired to create a political monopoly, and they have absolutely no reason to change anything. There have no competition today.

You can have chocolate or vanilla, but if you want Chunky Money, or even good old-fashioned strawberry, you are shit-out-of-luck mates.

So which would you choose?

Pledge to America

I was listening to a bunch of Republican policy wonks on NPR the other day, mostly discussing the upcoming elections and the Republican party's new "Pledge to America." One of them, a policy guy from one of the Washington conservative think tanks said, "No one can read the Pledge to America and still say that the Republican party has no ideas!"

So I decided to read it. All I can say is that, "I think I'll scratch my ass now" is also an idea, and it offers just about as much insight into how the GOP plans to balance the budget as their pledge does.

You can read it here, but a better use of your time would be to read Tom Friedman's column from this past Tuesday, which talks about the kind of leadership this county really needs, but will probably never get. (I'm starting to feel about the nation's future they way I feel about pro football; i.e., like a Brown's fan. We haven't won anything since '64 -- so long it's hard to remember what victory feels like.)

Those zany Dems II

That was such an interesting exchange let’s try to keep it going. And as much as I enjoyed the South Carolina travel log, I want to pick up on Hankster’s point that people don’t vote for people whom they perceive are looking down on them, it’s “the Dem’s black cloud” as he put it.

However, I believe the majority of non-investment-banker American’s know both parties look down on them. All the candidates are well-educated millionaires; even Barack made nearly $5 million last year. And they know neither party is going to do anything meaningful for them. Neither party will take on the corporate oligarchy that feeds and sustains them, nor tackle any important issue facing the nation.

But they think Republicans (at least until the current administration) will do a better job of maintaining a strong military and protecting the homeland, and probably little else that might screw up their lives.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are born scolds and meddlers. They won’t let you smoke anywhere, you have to accept a gay couple’s marriage as the same as yours, the woods are for hikers and skiers, not for guns, ATVs or snowmobiles, somebody else’s kid gets preference at the college your kid wants to attend, no dodge ball on the playground, no religion of any kind in school, and everyone is a victim.

I’m not saying these positions are wrong – in fact I favor a number of them -- but they are frequently being forced on an unwilling population, and the Democrats have a way of making you feel that if you don’t agree, you are a reactionary clod; someone to be bullied into submission or pitied as a fool. This gets old quickly.

A better strategy would be for the Democrats to pick a really large national problem, one that all Americans can accept as an appropriate target for our national attention and treasure. Then they need to find a way to come together as a party and agree on a plan to address this problem as a party. In this way they will distract attention from their not-so-latent social-engineering addiction and stand in clear contrast to the Republicans, who seem to have had no agenda of any kind since about 1982.

Do you think this is a strategy that could work? Then what is the issue?