[Vision2020] Third party support

[Joan Opyr]

Tim says:
>
>Planet Reality?
>Reality is that GW is going to take Idaho by a 10-18% margin.
>
>So, if you believe that we need more choices, why waste your vote on Kerry 
>when he has no chance here?
>Picking the strongest third party candidate and voting for him/her will at 
>least encourage the folks who actually may succeed in giving us more 
>choices in the future.
>Voting for a candidate you don't particularly like and who's sure to lose 
>the state doesn't improve anything.


Well, Tim, I suppose I'll be voting for Kerry because he represents the best 
of my limited options.  I don't support Lyndon LaRouche, or the 
Libertarians, or the Reform Party, or the American Taxpayers' Party, and I 
certainly can't envision ever voting for anyone the Natural Law Party 
vomited up.  Kerry is not my dream candidate, but we agree on enough that I 
would feel comfortable with him in the Oval Office.  I supported Howard Dean 
in the primaries, and then John Edwards, but Kerry won fair and square, and 
I am, first and foremost, a Democrat.  Come November, I will unite with the 
rest of the party.  You might call this lock-step toadyism; I call it party 
politics.  As The Rolling Stones said, "You can't always get what you want, 
but if you try sometime, you might just find, you get what you need."

Kerry served his country honorably in Vietnam, an important factor for me, 
and despite the Bush campaign's misleading multi-million dollar smear ads, 
Kerry's Senate record shows that he is strong on defense.  We disagree on 
NAFTA and on the gay marriage issue, but I can live with his positions on 
both.  I wholeheartedly support Kerry's call for a return to fiscal 
responsibility.  He's already begun to assemble the remnants of the Clinton 
economic team, and they are sketching out plans for balancing the federal 
budget, reducing our untenable trade deficit, and stemming the hemmorhage of 
high tech and manufacturing jobs.  So, though Kerry is not charismatic or 
especially visionary, I do think he's bright and competent, and those 
qualities alone would make for a marked improvement over our current 
governance.

About third party possibilities: there are a variety of reasons why I'm not 
voting for Ralph Nader, though his views on many issues are much closer to 
my own than Kerry's.  For one thing, this year Ralph is running for himself. 
  He's not representing the Green Party, and the Green Party, at present, is 
the only third party I'd care to support.  (And I only support them insofar 
as I think the Democrats have strayed too far from progressivism.)  Ralph 
is, I think, vainly and egotistically running the risk of a 2000 
repeat--drawing off just enough progressives in battleground states to give 
Bush the electoral edge.  That, in my opinion, is the nightmare scenario.

As for my Democratic vote not counting in Idaho, to put it impolitely, 
bullsh*t.  Democrats have been elected to statewide office within living 
memory.  When I moved to Idaho, Democrat Cecil Andrus was governor and 
Democrat Larry LaRocco was our District 1 Congressman.  No single party in 
any state has a lock on the electorate forever.  (When I was growing up in 
the South, the Democrats had a stranglehold on the region.  No Republican 
could even get a look in.  My, how unpleasantly times have changed.)  The 
pendulum swings, and I will continue to do my one-person, one-vote part to 
give it a push in the right direction.  George W. Bush will probably carry 
this state, though perhaps not by the margin you suggest.  I won't help him, 
however, and I'll use my vote this year, just as in 2000, to give the 
Democratic candidate the popular majority.  As one of the half million 
voters who gave Al Gore the popular if not the electoral mandate, my 
conscience is clear.  That might not count for you, Tim, but it counts for 
me.

Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment

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