A Third Party Election

Alongside today's news that Edwards and Rudy are dropping out comes word that Ralph Nader, accomplice to Bush's 2000 election theft, is exploring another run.  It's pretty clear he waited until Edwards bowed out, as they both fit, to some extent, the same mold.  Except Edwards knew when to bow out with some dignity left, while Nader seems ready to screw things up again.

What's interesting, though, is that this could make 2008 a third party election.  If Mike Bloomberg ends up running and if Ron Paul, realizing he has several million dollars of online donations left after losing the Republican race, decides to run as well, things could get interesting.

While the Democratic race is still fairly wide-open, it's becoming increasingly clear that John McCain will end up with the GOP nomination.  McCain and Paul present drastically different views of conservatism, just as either Clinton or Obama and Nader do on the liberal side.  Bloomberg, having been a member of both parties, can provide something interesting to attract voters from both sides  - drawing from the left for his social stances and from the right for his business experience and managerial skills.

While this is drastically oversimplifying things, let's say most of Paul's supporters stick with him in a third party run and that some (although definitely not all) of Edward's supporters go to Nader.  Who does Bloomberg get?  He'll likely pick up some of Romney's supporters on the GOP side and a few Hillary or Obama supporters regardless of who wins the nomination.  Nader and Paul will cut down the votes of the eventual Democratic and Republican nominees.  And if McCain is the Republican candidate, there's a good chance many of the evangelical conservatives who supported Huckabee will be less likely to vote.

What does this all boil down to?  It's still not likely by any stretch, but for the first time in decades there's a very small, but finite chance that an independent could make it to the White House.

Bloomberg, and Bush's Post-Modern Presidency

I really don't see how anyone can look at the overwhelming blizzard of abuses, crimes, and foolhardy errors that have constituted the Bush years and then decide that what they're really sick of is partisanship:

... The forty per cent of the American electorate who regard themselves as Independents would also benefit. Their number has been growing in recent years, and they are increasingly joined in political sympathy by Republicans and Democrats who find their parties captive to a base, fringe, or interest group with which they have little in common. We are living through one of those recurring moments—1912, 1980, and 1992 were others—when disgust with the two big parties stirs a longing for an outsider of upright character, untainted by dirty money or political dealmaking.

Maybe I'm wrong in thinking that voters are sick of what I'm sick of, which is the actions of the current executive, and the actions of Republicans in the House and Senate (and now apparently the Supreme Court). If pressed, I could draw up a specific, and fairly inclusive, list of grievances against BushCo and against the GOP and other enablers. But maybe that's just because I'm on the high side of the news-awareness bell curve.

I can see how, in someone who doesn't spend a fairly significant portion of their waking life reading and digesting news information (this is a class issue as well, by the way; a good portion of the population doesn't have the leisure time or spare energy), my fairly specific dissatisfaction could manifest in a general 'screw the government' sort of feeling.

That it's so difficult for a casual news observer to distinguish between radicals and anti-radicals is also a damning comment on our broken media discourse. After all, most politicians sound the same as one another, they all yell and point when they get angry, and mostly they only are seen on television disagreeing with one another.

Too often, our politicians are quoted side by side making mutually contradictory claims, and too often the media fails to point out factual falsehoods (because to point out a negative about a candidate or official without pointing out a symmetrical negative for the other side would be 'biased' and 'partisan,' perhaps).

I recall a commentator on CNN who, after the Bush/Kerry debates said that it would take a team of Kennedy School of Government fact checkers a week to verify or refute all the truth claims made in the debate. And in terms of substantive discussion, that was apparently it for CNN. All that CNN was prepared to do was identify truly glaring factual inaccuracies. The rest was about who was more effective in their message delivery, the little tics, the gaffes. Coverage shifted over to 'Spin Alley,' a name suggesting fluctuation between two poles, existing simultaneously without cancelling each other out, matter and anti-matter.

It's understandable for people to get sick of it. The lack of attention to substantive policy difference makes mainstream political discourse a cross between a beauty contest and a shouting match. The media itself isn't the least bit interested in changing the dynamic; it makes for good television (Crossfire! Liberal, conservative--debate!). It took Jon Stewart making his own good television to get the show off the air.

There's ambivalence to objective truth; theirs a post-modern feeling that the truth is unknowable and that things can be two mutually exclusive ways at once. Maybe it's best just to call it doublethink. And Bush and his supporters have been disconcertingly open about their post-modern thinking:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

That's a post-modern stance (in the sense where post-modern can mean "counter-enlighment". There are so many senses of post-modern that it's best to specify). When Bush and Cheney say, as they often do, that only History will be able to judge their Administration, they are really concurring with the above. The un-named aide quoted is just, you know, articulater.

Post-modernism made some sense when applied to literary conceits like Justice, Virtue, Love, and all the rest, but it is a terrible paradigm under which to build a functioning government, composed of bureaucrats and cops. It's nonsense to say that truth is unknowable in the context of governance. The government must operate under the premise that truth is knowable, or government policy is governed by nothing but competition to see which narrative is the most compelling.

There are a few issues where one side or the other is objectively correct, and they can prove it. There are a great many other issues where an objective observer would say that the preponderance of the evidence tilts one way or the other.

I don't know that anyone (except maybe that Bush aide) would disagree with that assertion, and yet our media often seems to operate on the premise that all viewpoints are created equal. That stance, more than anything, creates the conditions that I think will consistently allow a sufficiently visible third-party candidate who can "bridge the divide" to claim ten to twenty percent of the vote.

The main way to be 'visible' without joining a party is to have tons of your own dough to pour into television ads. That's what Ross Perot did in '92, and that's what Bloomberg will do if he ultimately decides to make a run. Hell, he may get more than 20%. Perot got 18, and he sure wasn't a popular and effective city administrator with a record of effective compromise.

The question, if Bloomberg runs, is who he will pull more votes from, the Republican or the Dem. To me, it looks likely to be a negative for the Democrats. So what Bloomberg needs to consider, if he's conscientious, is whether he wants to help someone like Giuliani or Thompson ascend the throne of George the Second. I hope he doesn't run. If it looked like he would help the Democrats, I would be pulling for him all the way. I say this because I am not a political post-modernist--I think the Democrats have superior ideas and positions, and as a result, I want them to win.

Mike Bloomberg: Punk

Please, please, please spare us a Mike Bloomberg presidential run. Please. Can you imagine it? Twelve months, or more, of that smarmy centrist bilge dripping out of our TV screens -- Mike Bloomberg! A Better Way -- until by November his Holy Moderate Image is encrusted all over the living room floor. People's dogs will lick it up and get sick. (That's right, America: Mike Bloomberg HATES YOUR DOG.) Between the vapid television and the veterinary bills, this will drive many good people insane.

And oh, God, can you imagine Harvard. Holy shit. We are just the kind of place that swoons for this sort of smirking self-assured Sensible Governance. Bloomberg embodies everything Harvard's political class dreams of: respectability, seriousness, and fucking boatloads of money. I can see the IOP now! All aflutter with grinning moderates ("Unity08!"), holding breathless forums about Mike Bloomberg: The Paradigm-Shifting Candidate, heaving and palpitating from all the nonpartisan excitement. Every political douchebag you know will have a Bloomberg button on his polo shirt; and naturally, the collar will be popped.

...There are two things that bother me about a Bloomberg candidacy. The first is that, being a multigazillionaire, he apparently has the privilege to inject himself right into a general election without first subjecting himself to primary voters or, well, anyone. But that's a financial fact of life. The second, and more serious, thing is how totally free of ideas he seems to be; Bloomberg, in contrast to most independent candidates historically, would add NOTHING of interest to a presidential campaign. His intellectual system -- such as it is -- is a totally arbitrary junkheap of ideas grabbed from various ideologies and arranged purely for expediency. It's a pale imitation of a real political agenda, in much the same sense that American Idol imitates real music; this of course makes it pervasive and extremely dangerous.

There's a great quote from The Big Lebowski: "Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos."

The upside is, I don't think he'll run. Quote me on that. Bloomberg's shallow but he isn't stupid, and I think he realizes (or will realize soon) how futile an independent bid would be; not to mention the sizable possibility that, if things didn't go as planned, he'd become a national laughingstock. Ross Perot, bless his heart, never cared whether he was embarrassing himself -- but Bloomberg seems like the kind of self-important guy who would. When Tom Harkin describes him as "the little rich kid that if he can’t have it his way he’s going to take his little balls and go home", I'm sure the Senator's on to something.

Nevertheless even the specter of his candidacy gives me the creeps, and it doesn't help that the TV pundits have already decided he's the Second Coming. Let's hope this fizzles, and sooner rather than later -- if nothing else, at least for the sake of our pets.