Liberty Maven

Note: This superb commentary regarding the current status of the two party system was submitted by Doug Lasken, an accomplished freelance author and English teacher in Los Angeles, California.

Where’s A Good Party?

by Doug Lasken

Perhaps the best adjective to describe our presidential conventions is “noisy.” You’d think, from the impact, that the noise was generated by a good percentage of the population, but the conventioneers at both events are just a tiny group that knows how to get heard.

One has to admit it’s been a good show this time because disapproval of President Bush is so widespread and profound that defeating his party is highly motivational, while die hard Republicans are motivated to salvage their banner. The fact is, though, that vast numbers of Americans view the two party system as a transparent scam, and they are looking for something better.

In a nutshell, the parties don’t stand for any clear-cut principles or practices.

The traditional wisdom, of course, is that Democrats hold the rich to their obligations to the little guy, oppose unnecessary war and want a sustainable, pleasant planet earth.

Republicans are supposed to believe in an independent mindset that thrives in a free marketplace unfettered by intrusive government. They are “fiscal conservatives,” advocates of a government run like a frugal household in which expenditures do not exceed income, and they believe in “family values” (a vague concept involving caring about one’s family).

It’s all bunk. Neither party represents any of those things.

Let’s start with the saintly Democrats. I trace my own disillusionment with the Democratic Party, and the two-party system, to 1964, when I voted for Democrat Lyndon Johnson to keep out war-monger Republican Barry Goldwater, only to see Johnson bomb Hanoi for three years. Now, of course, it’s Bush the warmonger in Iraq, but, as many Americans have noticed, the Democratic controlled Congress did nothing to stop the war. After all, the prominent Democratic movers and shakers (including Joe Biden), voted in 2002 to empower Bush to start it. True, Obama did not vote for the Iraq War Resolution , but he didn’t vote against it either, not being in the Senate at the time, and he did next to nothing as a senator to stop the war. Are we to accept him as anti-Iraq war simply because he’s a Democrat and he says he’s anti-Iraq war?

As for Democrats caring about the little guy in his struggle against corporate bullies, give me a break! The Denver convention’s $55 million cost was covered by 60 big corporations, all of them seeking legislative favor, both tax and regulatory. Here’s the short list (per the Center for Responsive Politics and ABC News, which was barred from covering the lavish corporate parties for delegates): AT&T, Qwest, Comcast, Motorola, Medtronic, Lilly, Merc, United Health Group, Us Bank, Wells Fargo, State farm, Allstate, Visa, Coca-cola, Coors and Lockheed Martin. Did you hear anything in Obama’s acceptance speech about this? Did it seem to bother him that insurance companies underwrote his kickoff to a campaign promising universal health care?

Now to the Republicans. Upholders of the ideal of self-reliance and the free marketplace? Hardly. Republicans invented corporate welfare, exemplified in the obscene handouts to Dick Cheney’s friends at Haliburton. Nor does the Administration’s now unfolding bailout of troubled financial giants exemplify frugality. These firms got into trouble by bilking the public. Now, at a cost of staggering debt, the government will maintain the firms, give golden parachutes to the CEO’s who presided over the rip-offs, and lavish lip-service on a public that twists in the wind. It’s yet another indicator of the collapse of clear party lines that it’s the Republicans who are putting up the strongest resistance to the Republican administration’s bailout, not the Democrats or Obama

Adherents of “family values”? Although it’s unclear what the phrase means, we can guess it has something to do with fidelity, sexual orientation, divorce, pregnancy, and child rearing. Does one really need to list all the prominent Republicans who have nothing special to claim in these areas? At least the Democrats tend to leave the subject alone.

At the Republican convention there were attempts to tack on additional meaning to “Republicanism.” The convention theme was “Country First!” The obvious question is, what’s second? People? The concept needs fleshing out. There was also a hue and cry asserting that McCain and Sarah Palin will “shake up Washington” and “make America rich, not the special interests.” A paradoxical quest, though, when you consider that ABC’s Brian Ross had the same difficulty covering the “wild whirl of corporate and lobbyist-paid parties” at the Republican convention that he had at the Democratic. Which special interests are in for a shaking? Perhaps not the National Rifle Association, Lockheed Martin and the American Trucking Association, which, per Ross, treated Republican delegates to a “raucous six-hour party at a downtown bar featuring music by the band Hookers and Blow.”

One should add that both parties are bending over backwards to be first in breaching gender and race barriers and to claim the cachet of “Defender of Civil Rights.” For reasons detailed above I’m not rejoicing at Obama, and when you take a good look at Palin you suddenly forget how excited you were that she’s a woman. From her facile threat to go to war with Russia over Georgia to indications of a highly vindictive nature, she is unsettling. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that minority and female candidates who are tricky and unreliable do not count as civil rights breakthroughs.

With the Republicans and Democrats straying so much from their stated missions, it’s inevitable that many people will wonder why we don’t have a third (or should I say, second?) viable party. We’ve certainly got cause and a mission: to represent truth in labeling against false advertising. It’s clearly too late for ’08. Not too late, maybe, for ’12.

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Doug Lasken teaches English at Taft High School in LA Unified. Reach him at Dlasken514@aol.com.