Don’t waste your vote!

The Democratic Party: an incompetent opposition party. 

Democratic politicians have failed to present an alternative set of coherent policies on America’s big problems, again.  Two (of many) examples: 

·        In the face of a ticking entitlement time bomb, the Dems have offered no alternative reform. 

·        In the face of the Administration’s three-year fiasco in Iraq, the Dems also lack an alternative policy. 

An extraordinary consensus has crystallized: People on all points on the political spectrum agree: The Democratic Party has no ideas.  Bruce Reed, Clinton Domestic Policy Advisor, reported in a biting assessment:

“For five years, Republicans trashed Democrats as bereft of ideas. Now that they see Democrats up by 10 points, Republicans are rushing to claim the mantle of no ideas for themselves. Caught by surprise, Democratic consultants quickly fired back: Hey, we had no ideas first.”  (“No Idea: Republicans unveil their new line for the fall”, Slate, March 22, 2006)

Look closer to see that the “leadership” of Democratic politicians is little more than carping, ankle-biting and – now, with their scurrilous race-bating demagoguery in the Alito hearings – character assassination.  Carping, ankle biting and character assassination are poor substitutes for pointing a new direction, for leadership. 

Why the incompetence?

Surprisingly, the Dems have a good excuse. Republican politicians have already co-opted all big Democratic initiatives.  They’ve plucked all low hanging fruit from the Democrats’ socialist tree:

·        The Bush Administration’s new pharmaceutical entitlement represents an $18 trillion unsecured obligation and the biggest new entitlement since Medicare in the Johnson Administration. 

·        The Republicans’ spending binge eclipsed even the non-defense, discretionary spending increase of the Johnson Administration.

·        No Child Left Behind is the greatest intrusion of federal money and power into the state governments’ K-12 school systems since the establishment of the Department of Education in the Carter Administration. 

·        Modern GOP policy further eroded Big Citizen in favor of Big Government in several other ways: steel tariffs, (unlawful) barriers to Canadian lumber, hijacking of homeland security funds for pork, wasteful and immoral farm subsidies, a porcine transportation bill, the new small-business-killing regulations of Sarbanes-Oxley, a fresh assault on Americans’ first amendment rights in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and, of course, yet two more escalations in the insane “war on drugs”. 

While Republicans talk like Libertarians, they walk (govern) like Democrats. 

This is not to say that major party politicians don’t believe in anything; they passionately believe in power.  They agree with each other (and disagree with Libertarians) that the government should control our lives; they disagree about who should control the government. 

Thanks to gerrymandering, only a protest vote is possible.

Our bipartisan political establishment has thoroughly corrupted California’s political process.  The outcomes of all of California’s elections in November for Congress, state senate and state assembly are predictable: All incumbents will win and all open seats will be filled by candidates of the same party of the retiring politicians.  So, at best, voting for a (predictably) losing Republicrat or Demopublican amounts to voting for a protest candidate – with a muddled protest message.  At worse, voting for them means endorsement of social chaos and fiscal irresponsibility. 

The Libertarian Party: America’s opposition party

So, please don’t waste your vote on Republicrat or Demopublican politicians.  They swim in the same moral and intellectual cesspool.  (And based on results, they think it’s a Jacuzzi.) 

The Libertarian Party offers credible alternatives on all the serious threats that America faces today.  The LP’s policy is based on the return of your life to you.  We call this “freedom”.  All else is intrigue.