There Is No Third Choice This Election

Not since Ed Edwards ran against David Dukes for governor of Louisiana has a population been offered such a poor choice of candidates.  In 1992, it was a convicted felon former governor vs. a militant racist.  Now it's Republican vs. Republican.

  

And it's sad the best candidate that the Florida Democratic Party could come up with to unseat corrupt Republican governor Rick Scott is the spineless flip-flopping weasel former Republican governor Charlie Crist.

  

Yes, Crist is a political will o' the wind, lacking any real conviction beyond getting elected.  But he really was a far more progressive Republican, who really did, for the most part, stand for the common man in most decisions.  He did work to lower home insurance rates – and succeeded.  He did lower property taxes, no mean feat. And he did spend more on education per capita than Rick Scott ever did.  

  

And he did it all without violating Florida’s ‘Sunshine Law.’ which mandates that everything that state employees and elected officials do on the job are not only on the public record, but must be made readily accessible to public view.

  

Contrast that with Rick Scott, who ordered his staff to communicate only by private email accounts, in a thinly veiled attempt to circumvent Florida law.  Rick Scott’s first actions in office were to kill a federally funded rail project that would not have used any Florida tax dollars and would have created up to 10,000 jobs a year during construction and would have created nearly a thousand permanent jobs, and gutting the education budget by 1.3 billion dollars which decimated school systems across the state.

 

And now Scott has the gall to describe himself as “the Education governor,” based on the fact that he put some (but not all) of that money back a year later, AFTER programs were cancelled and teachers left the state for better paying jobs (or for jobs, period).

 

This year’s gubernatorial race is Republican versus Republican, and not very savory Republicans at that.  It’s totally corrupt versus morally bankrupt.
  

Many voters on the fence are considering voting for a third party candidate, Adrian Wyllie of the Libertarian Party,  in order to display their disgust for the choices.   They intend to send a message that they are not going to support totally unacceptable choices anymore.  At the very least, they feel that voting for a candidate that doesn’t make them want to vomit will help them sleep at night.

But the sad truth is that they will not be sending any messages.  Their third-party candidate won’t win.  Sorry, Wyllie.  Too many people are far too sensible to support the inadequacies of the Libertarian Party platform, which really boils down to “Government is the problem, so elect US to run the government so we can PROVE that!” 

 

If you think Scott is bad, wait until the Libertarians have reduced everything to a smoking ruin.  Hate the “Lexus lanes” on our highways?  Libertarians want to privatize ALL the roads, so you’d have to pay a toll to leave your driveway.  But the good news is that you’d be allowed to run your chemical waste dump in your backyard.  You’ll need the money to pay for your kid’s education, because Libertarians don’t want to pay for THAT, either.  Of course, they describe it as "individual liberty."

  

Most reasonable people would agree that your rights end where mine begin, and vice-versa.  But Libertarians are NOT reasonable people.  You don't want an oil refinery next to a school?  Too bad - if you feel that you can prove they've harmed you, you can sue them.  They are the party of throw the baby out with the bath-water.

 

The sad fact of the matter is that in this country, we do not have any adequate mechanism to vote against anything.  We can only vote for something else, and usually that something else is equally repugnant.

And the folks running the political campaigns are just fine with that. It's status quo.

 

Look, it’s a coin toss over who will win the race this November.  Almost all Republicans are going to vote for Scott, because that’s what they do these days.  Democrats are choking on having a Republican candidate, but many, and probably most, will vote the party ticket grudgingly.

 

The next biggest block – and in some places, the biggest voting block period – is the No-Party-Affiliation voters.  They aren’t Republicans, they aren’t Democrats, they aren’t Libertarians or Independents (which is a political party), they aren’t even necessarily liberal or conservative.  These are the voters who are going to decide the next governor.

And they’re going to get it wrong.
 
They will believe that they are going to send that message by voting for “someone else.”  The problem is that the “vote for someone else” really allows one of the two dominant party candidates to have more votes that the other.

Any vote that is not for Charlie Crist is effectively a vote for Rick Scott because Wyllie will not have enough votes to win.  At the very best, he'll come in at a distant third, and at worst he sucks enough support from Crist to pull him down to second place.

And we get four more year of Governor Sleazebag.

In an ideal world, we would have the ability to vote against a candidate.  We could vote “none of the above.” 

And with a binding none of the above vote, if that NOTA entry wins, both candidates are off the poll, and in 90 days there would be a new vote, where the candidates will have to offer different candidates if they intend to be on the ballot.  

  

I would expect that the first election would be a bloodbath, as most races would have to be re-created in under a month.  Both dinosaur parties would try to run the same old scum, and waste hundreds of millions of dollars to lose the election to an ideal.

 

No, we’ll probably never have a binding “none of the above” option. 

So let’s open up the primaries to all voters.
 
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but hear me out.

When George Washington warned us against the vagaries of political parties, he correctly predicted that each party would draw farther apart from its opposition.  At first, the parties would be fairly close together on most issues, but over time each would retreat from the central position that is the actual ideal.

Closed primary races contribute to that.  Just look at the recent GOP candidates: when voters rejected Republican candidates, the party response was, “Well, I guess they voted for the Democrat because our guy wasn’t conservative enough.”  Yes, it’s ludicrous, but the Democrats do the same thing, inching farther to the left.

 

That’s because left to their own devices, political parties do not pick the candidate most likely to win an election, they choose the candidate that most strongly reflects their ideals.  Which sounds fine, until you wind up with a ticket of clueless bozos to choose from.

If we opened the primaries to everyone, it means that we, the people - ALL the people – would get to choose the candidates.  And understand, we’d still be choosing Republican candidates during the Republican primary, and a Democratic candidate for the Democratic primary, and so on.  But come election day, we’d be choosing between candidates that ALL of us feel exemplify the best their party has to offer.

  

And the cost? Guess what - we are ALREADY paying for the primaries that most of us don't get to go to!  Opening the primaries allows us to get full value for our tax dollars.

 

And wouldn’t that be a better choice than simply trying to not vote for a scumbag?

But in the meantime, if you can't stand Rick Scott, you need to vote for Charlie Crist. Seriously.