I’m having computer issues and am having to work on an old s-l-o-w computer that I keep for emergencies. I hate slow computers.
This post by Greg Sargent is the best thing I’ve read today. He points to a bobblehead calling for a third party to take the middle ground between the Dems and Republicans … but this mythical third party looks a whole lot like the Democratic party we have already.
Matt Yglesias weighs in on the same issue, quoting an article by Matt Miller. Here is Miller —
Or take health care. Republicans say the answer is to repeal President Obama’s reforms — but they won’t offer plans to insure more than 3 million of the 50 million Americans who lack coverage. Yet Democrats want to micromanage providers, protect the trial lawyers who bankroll their campaigns, and fully insulate people from the costs of their own care, assuring that there’s no consumer brake on runaway costs. Again, Democrats and Republicans can’t solve the problem.
Matt:
Democrats wrote and passed a major health care bill back in 2010. It they wanted to “fully insulate people from the costs of their own care†that would have been a good opportunity to do this. But they didn’t. I’m not sure how people with centrist views expect to see the political system respond to them if they fail to acknowledge it when their views are adopted. There obviously are important ideological litmus tests in American politics, of which the absolute prohibition on Republicans raising taxes strikes me as the most consequential, but it’s hard to talk about them if you won’t identify them precisely.
Daydream believing about a third party from the left is at least understandable. Indeed, Naderite critiques of the content of policies favored by moderate Democrats are largely correct, although I think they underestimate the structural roadblocks to progressive policy in the United States, and they’re completely wrong about believing that third parties have any chance of solving the problem. But at least the critique is coherent in its own way. The Miller/Friedman dream for moderate Democratic policies to be advanced by a billionaire dreamboat who would be able to get his policies enacted in every last detail through sheer force of centrist wisdom, by contrast, it just pathetic.
Pathetic, and possibly channeling the ghost of David Broder.
“I’m not sure how people with centrist views expect to see the political system respond to them if they fail to acknowledge it when their views are adopted”
This, of course, has been the problem with Miller’s thinking all along – the unshakeable but thoroughly false assumption that something cannot be centrist if the Republicans claim they hate it.
I love those columns where imbeciles like Friedman or Brooks pine for a 3rd Party Centrist candidate. It reminds of that Jimmy Buffett song, where he writes an ad for a new lover:
“If you like Pina Colada’s, and getting caught in the rain…”
If these imbeciles would look, ‘It’s their own lovin President.”
They just never knew, “That he liked Pina Colada’s, and getting caught in the rain…”
Assholes.
If you want a progressive breakthrough via third-party politics, then make the third party be a rightist party. Use the Perot/Nader effect to your advantage.
Therefore the Democrats, if they have any sense, should quietly fund the Libertarians; and similarly the Republicans should be quietly funding the Greens.
It’s a sorry state: our party isn’t extreme enough; theirs hijacked wholly by the insane fringe.