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Can anyone recall an election where Colorado received
more attention from the major-party candidates? George Bush
has family in Denver and even attends a Bronco game.
Michael Dukakis goes on Nightline
live from Denver,
then stumps at a good old-fashioned Democratic rally in
Pueblo, a good old-fashioned Democratic city, and he may
visit again this weekend.
But the more I see of them, especially their television advertising, the more inclined I am to vote for Dr. Ron Paul, the Libertarian candidate.
Certainly there are arguments against voting for a third-party candidate. One is that only crackpots and weirdos are anything other than Democrats or Republicans.
Sure. Normal, well-adjusted people deliberately make spectacles of themselves as they drive tanks or chomp pork rinds, and all thoughtful citizens truly believe that the classroom recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance is an issue of vital national concern.
The other argument against voting for a third-party candidate is more serious. They say that you waste your vote if you do not cast it for a major-party candidate.
For one thing, how can you call a vote wasted if it is against both Dukakis and Bush?
For another, if history is any guide, a third-party vote
means something. The Republican Party began as a third
party whose first presidential candidate, John C.
Frémont, got royally trounced in 1856. But could
Abraham Lincoln have been elected in 1860 if no one had
bothered to vote for Frémont in 1856, just because
it would be a wasted vote
?
That's the only time a third party became a major party. Most often, third parties put issues on the national agenda. In time, those issues get adopted by the major parties and national policies change.
The Populists garnered just 8.7 percent of the vote in
1892 with their platform: a graduated income tax,
abandoning the gold standard and direct election of U.S.
senators. The Populists faded, but most of what the
Populists wanted became law. Nothing that the Republicans
or Democrats said or did in 1892 had as much lasting effect
as those wasted
votes for Gen. James Weaver.
Consider George Wallace and his American Independent Party in 1968. With only 13.6 percent of the vote, Wallace never got any closer to the White House than most tourists do.
But was a vote for Wallace wasted? Not if you were one of Wallace's adherents who felt ignored and wanted somebody to listen. Every major-party candidate since then has had to court Wallace's red-white-and-blue constituency: red neck, white trash, blue collar.
American politics lunged to the right then, and have
stayed conservative ever since. Patrician candidates work
hard to prove that they're regular guys you might meet at
the bowling alley. Bush and Dukakis are both striving for
the Reagan Democrat
vote -- that is, the people who
would have supported Wallace 20 years ago.
As an effort to elect a president, the Wallace campaign was a monumental failure. But as a way to give a voice to a constituency, George Wallace succeeded famously.
I entertain no delusions that my vote for Ron Paul will put him in the White House. But I do believe in what the Libertarians promote -- more individual freedom, reductionsin military spending and obligations, fiscal sanity, an end to this moronic war on drugs where the cure daily becomes worse than the problem. The more votes a Libertarian gets, the sooner the other two parties will run sensible campaigns.
There is one more good reason to vote for a candidate
who can't possibly win. Remember the bumper stickers of
1974: Don't blame me, I voted for McGovern
? Whatever
happens in the next four years, it won't be my fault. Yet I
can feel like a good citizen because I did cast a
ballot.
Voting for a third-party candidate is the only way to guarantee that you'll feel good about your vote.
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