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What do people want from Bush?

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Lord_Morningstar
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Posted: Sat 11 Mar , 2006 10:28 pm
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The Party system comes from this principle – if five people need to regularly vote on something, and three of those people agree to support certain positions that they don’t agree with (say, ¼ or 1/3 of the time), then they are assured of winning ¾ or 2/3 of the time. Parties rose worldwide within a few decades of stable and representative legislatures, and sometime seven faster. Look at how the various Shi’ite groups are currently collapsing into one party in Iraq.

That being said, I don’t think that the American Party system is that good, and I blame two things – first-past-the-post voting, and campaign financing laws and practice. These combine to create two unassailable parties in a pure two-party system. While the instability associated with a multi-party system can be annoying, pure two-party is a bit bland and unrepresentative.

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The Watcher
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Posted: Sat 11 Mar , 2006 10:39 pm
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yovargas wrote:
the onion wrote:
"Universal health care, the war in Iraq, civil liberties, a living wage, gun control—we're not even close to a consensus within our own ranks," Kennedy said. "And even if we were, we wouldn't know how to implement that consensus."
Good! I know that's terrible politically and it makes calling oneself a Democrat more or less meaningless (except dislike of Bush), the idea of distilling a vast array of complex, diverse, unrelated issues into two stances - Dem or Rep - is completely absurd! What in the world does gun control have to do with health care? Why should I have to pick one party for both positions? It sucks! I never understood the "party system". An individual should tell me their individual stances on varying positions and I pick the one whose set of stances matches mine most closely. I hate essentially being forced to pick between a measly two sets of platforms as if the massive complexity of running a government could be so neatly and evenly split. Damn you two-party system!


[/osgilliation]
Chill, yovi!! One can support individual candidates without becoming a member of any party. You need to tackle those that are most important to you yourself, and then vote accordingly. That is the problem with ALL political parties, even in those countries with many more to pick from than our limited two party system (and yes, I acknowledge that there are more than two here as well, but they simply do not matter until they can persuade more people to their cause and also stop getting bogged down into extreme viewpoints.)

No party is perfect, in my opinion, I have ALWAYS maintained my position as an indie, partly because I believe that there is already too much power and money that is allowed to political causes in this country, and that power corrupts.

My serious answer would be that ALL politcal candidates have a cap on what could be spent on different levels of campaings for office. The advantages of privilage and wealth and corporate sponsers and PACS should be wiped out. It the messages were sincere, the money would not be needed in any case. We could get all of the hystrionics and morally hot topics out of politics and back where they belonged, and start electing politicians - people there in office designed to represent the will of those doing the electing to govern and legislate, not make issues out of nothing, and not to set their own personal agendas on an unwilling populace.

In today's standards, there is no such thing as an ethical and moral political candidate in this country. Period. They all have agendas, and power and greed are by far the tops of the lists of achievements that these people are after. They are not after concilliation of positions, working together, compromise, give and take, battling the most difficult issues confronting us - they want to fight. It disgusts me.

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yovargas
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Posted: Sun 12 Mar , 2006 2:05 am
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The Watcher wrote:
yovargas wrote:
the onion wrote:
"Universal health care, the war in Iraq, civil liberties, a living wage, gun control—we're not even close to a consensus within our own ranks," Kennedy said. "And even if we were, we wouldn't know how to implement that consensus."
Good! I know that's terrible politically and it makes calling oneself a Democrat more or less meaningless (except dislike of Bush), the idea of distilling a vast array of complex, diverse, unrelated issues into two stances - Dem or Rep - is completely absurd! What in the world does gun control have to do with health care? Why should I have to pick one party for both positions? It sucks! I never understood the "party system". An individual should tell me their individual stances on varying positions and I pick the one whose set of stances matches mine most closely. I hate essentially being forced to pick between a measly two sets of platforms as if the massive complexity of running a government could be so neatly and evenly split. Damn you two-party system!


[/osgilliation]
Chill, yovi!! One can support individual candidates without becoming a member of any party.
Certainly, and I plan on doing that. My annoyance lies with the cultural perception that the less-united-than-the-Republican Democratic party makes the Dems laughable or whatever. To me, the notion indicates that people in general do put the party over the individual leading to religious-like affiliations with one side or the other. While I can understand why politicians need the notion of parties, the citizens should be so damn concerned with that BS. Sure, the Reps are more of a united front then the Dems and that makes them more succesful politically, but does it actually make them more represantitive of the people's actual beliefs?


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Lord_Morningstar
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Posted: Sun 12 Mar , 2006 2:11 am
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I don't quite get where you're coming from. What's the alternative?

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yovargas
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Posted: Sun 12 Mar , 2006 2:16 am
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For the people, doesn't a "divided" party, one that isn't completely uniform on every major issue, doesn't that just mean more options to choose from? Why would having a broader choice of stances supported avaiable to choose from be a bad thing?


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Lord_Morningstar
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Posted: Sun 12 Mar , 2006 2:50 am
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Ah, so you are criticising party discipline rather than party politics in general. I tend to agree with you that too much discipline is a bad thing, although ultimatley a Democratic or Republican Administration must be able to clearly state what they will do in office. One of the problems the Dems faced in 2004 is that they couldn't really do that.

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