Americans, who will you be voting for as President in 2004?

[Joshua F]

I'm with Pat B., there is no real Democrat Or Republican parties anymore, they left their root traditions/ideas behind. Sounds like a Church I knew.

I wonder what politics would be like without political parties...

[Joe Zollars]

"There isn't a dimesworth of difference between the two." George Wallace on the differences between the Democrat Party and the GOP.

Joe Zollars

[Ephraem]

There are a lot of differences and a lot of similarities between the Democratic and Republican parties. To say they are the same is just lazy, or at best, overlooking the many differences.

Even if you disagree, there are definitely HUGE differences between the neo-con hegemenist ideologues of the Bush/Cheney administration and the Kerry/Edwards ticket. Huge.

[Hexapsalms]

All the parties are going leftwards as the years go by. They are merely following the crowds, not leading them, as society itself runs helter-skelter to the left and ultimate dissolution. My family all used to be staunch Democrats but about the mid-1970's we began switching to the Republicans. Now we're not sure about them either, as they play with leftist issues. Maybe it's time for a KING.

I might have been somewhat interested in the Democratic candidate this time around had they fielded someone who was not a Ted Kennedy protege. I can't stand Chappaquidick Teddie--what an amoral opportunist. How can I trust his friends? The way the Democrats have been running their campaign makes me think that the Democratic party has turned into Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters. Aside from the strong perception I get of Kerry that he would enthusiastically play Neville Chamberlain and declare "peace in our time" when there can be no peace, I couldn't vote for any Demo candidate anyway, because a vote for a Democratic candidate is a vote for their party--their WHOLE platform--which does far too much social engineering, far too much twisting apart the most basic understandings of right and wrong. I can never again vote for them in good conscience.

In this campaign, they play a lot on people's ignorance--here's an example:

Have you seen the John Kerry commercial in which George Bush pledges to help Seniors on Medicare and "the very next day imposes a 17% premium increase - the biggest in history"? That ad is a stoke of genius on Kerry's part and will surely gain him many votes among the uninformed.

As it turns out the 17% increase was not imposed by President Bush but was mandated by the "balanced budget agreement" signed by President Clinton, voted into law by Senator John Kerry, and was scheduled to come into effect during the Bush administration. President Bush had no authority to reverse what had been voted into law by Senator Kerry during the Clinton administration.

This whole election makes me ill. These are strange times.

[Joe Zollars]

Hexaplasms, I agree completely and BTW sharp eye! I shall have to pass that one along to CP party HQ in PA.

Ephraem, I agree there are differences, but what are those differences? how are they so huge? The point is the rapid swing to the left to pick up swing voters has left us paleoconservatives out in the cold. We have nowhere left to turn, except the third party option or to return to a Monarchy.

But the overarching point is that the DNC and GOP sit at the same point on the political spectrum. They are like Kentucky and Indiana and the borderdisputes that have historically happened between the two. But Kentucky and Indiana do not represent the whole of America, neither historically or geographically. Both parties have taken the constitution torn it to shreds and then thrown the remains to the dogs. For Constitutionally minded PaleoConservatives, there is no longer a difference other than the name on the letterhead.

Joe Zollars

[Joshua F]

The reason why the parties have moved closer to each other in the US can be explained in a fairly straightforward way by using an economic model. Picture a town, with two grocery stores, one on the north end and one on the south, Abe's and Bill's:

|A|------------------------------------------|B|

Assuming people always shop at the closest store, Abe moves closer to Bill to get more of the business:

------------------------|A|------------------|B|

Bill then moves across the street from Abe:

-------------------|B||A|-----------------------

And you have two parties in a Pareto equilibrium - neither side has the whole market, but they can't move left or right without giving some of their market share up. Shifts to the left or right can still happen though, for instance:

a big new subdivision goes up on the left:

-------------------------------|B||A|-----------------------

and now Abe or Bill could both move further left to take advantage of the new market.

Although at some point in time the two American parties may have been quite different, this model shows how they gravitate towards the center of the political landscape. Changes towards the left, or the right, in recent years can be attributed to changes in the political landscape; for instance, Environics has modelled value-change in the United States and Canada and while their "landscape" is more complicated than a left/right spectrum, it's quite clear that values in both countries are changing in some important ways, mostly inter-generationally. This will manifest politically in a far more obvious fashion over the next 20 years as very different generations change political roles.

It's also clear that the US is becoming increasingly polarized. This challenges the legitimacy of the two party system by creating a fundamental divergence between the strategically optimal platform and the values of most voters. While the parties sit squarely in the center of the political spectrum, for strategic reasons, the standard deviation of voters from that mean is huge - most voters are not centrists, and fall more than a few degrees to the left or right. This results in almost everyone settling for sub-optimal (from their perspective) representation.

This is always a problem with a representative government, but the strains on this form of democracy are directly proportional to the polarization of the body politic, as more people find themselves disagreeing with "their" parties' platform. At the same time, the barriers to entry in the political arena are so high that things will have to get very bad before they can get better, that is, before winning platforms will be more representative.

Essentially, representative government is facing an emerging legitimacy crisis in most western constitutional democracies as the tensions between the strategies it takes to get elected and actual representativeness increase. The products of this tension are ever increasing resentment and mistrust of politicians, and instability in political institutions. In Canada, we are witnessing the decline of political parties, increasing distrust of politicians, and a turn to non governmental organizations for the representation of specific political interests in the political process.

[Ephraem]

In this campaign, they play a lot on people's ignorance--here's an example:

Have you seen the John Kerry commercial in which George Bush pledges to help Seniors on Medicare and "the very next day imposes a 17% premium increase - the biggest in history"? That ad is a stoke of genius on Kerry's part and will surely gain him many votes among the uninformed.

As it turns out the 17% increase was not imposed by President Bush but was mandated by the "balanced budget agreement" signed by President Clinton, voted into law by Senator John Kerry, and was scheduled to come into effect during the Bush administration. President Bush had no authority to reverse what had been voted into law by Senator Kerry during the Clinton administration.

Actually, you are being played by somebody as well, by repeating a distortion and misrepresentation of the facts. According to factcheck.org--the nonpartisan website that Dick Cheney touted in the debate--the cause is something else:

"The Department of Health and Human Services bases the estimate on the previous year's expenditures, and then factors in any new changes while accounting for the overall inflated cost of healthcare. This year's estimate for 2005 reflects the changes in spending that resulted from the President's Medicare bill, and also from other factors.

Bush's Medicare bill does account for 9.9 percentage points of the total 17.4% increase in premiums, according to Medicare actuaries."

The whole thing about the Balance Budget Act (which by the way was supported by Republicans and Democrats and passed 85-15... oh yeah, like everything is Clinton's fault. :ohvey: ) has little to do with the increase in premiums. It has a lot more to do with the currennt economic situation and Bush's Medicare Modernization Act.

http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx@DocID=257.html