Marvel Comics used to do a series called What if…? What if Spider Man joined the Fantastic Four? What if Captain America had agreed to run for president as a third-party candidate? I’m reminded of that series when I think about the options for progressives when they find themselves alienated from or disappointed in the Democratic Party. Whenever this happens, I hear the same thing: ‘screw the Democrats, I’m done with them…we need a third party.’ It’s a like progressive mantra that never changes and never gets anything done.
So, in the tradition of Marvel Comics: What if Ned Lamont had not run for the Democratic nomination but had run as an independent instead?
The first thing that would have been different is that Lamont would have struggled mightily to get any press coverage at all. Even Democratic bloggers would probably have been lukewarm in their support. Very few elected Democrats would have endorsed Lamont. Connecticut newspapers would not have endorsed him. Other Senators would not have paid any attention to him. So, the first casualty of an independent run would have been the resonance of his message.
Because the Republican opponent, Schlesinger, was so anemic, Lieberman would have won re-election quite easily even if Schlesinger doubled (or perhaps tripled) his support. Lamont would have had no chance at winning, his voice would have been muted, and he wouldn’t even have thrown the election to the Republican. He wouldn’t have scared Lieberman or forced him out of the party. Nothing would have been accomplished. The anti-war message would have been stomped and politically invalidated.
Lamont stayed within the system. He suffered through Lieberman endorsements from Sens. Boxer and Obama, who should have been his allies. He ignored concerted attacks from The Establishment. He created a national narrative, divorced Lieberman from the party in both fact and the national consciousness, and gave a road map and courage to other anti-war candidates.
So much more can be done within the party, even in losing, than can be done outside it.
The primary challenge is one of our most potent weapons. We need to use it, not launch quixotic third party spoiler attacks.
How does Obama get a free pass on Ned Lamont? I like to know why he supported independent Joe.
I don’t know that he is getting a free pass, but I don’t think any of the other candidates (excepting Kucinich and Gravel) would use it against him.
“Lieberman became Obama’s mentor when Obama was sworn into the Senate in 2005. “
from this AP article via 5 seconds with google and memory of this fact…
He supported Lieberman in the primary only. In the general, Obama supported Lamont.
Really good point. Like you have mentioned before we need to select a few Bush Dogs to launch primary challenges against this time around. We need to reform the party from the inside.
Uhm, also with Obama and Boxer didn’t they only endorse Lieberman in the general?
that’s better?
Oh fuck I meant the primary, got the primary switch thrown. I don’t agree with either of their decisions, but they do know Lieberman personally and had to work with him.
They should have stayed out, but well both of them have done other things right a lot of the time.
With all due respect, this sure seems like a spurious argument to me. Lamont lost, which would seem to prove that he made the wrong choices.
It’s time for third parties. Period. The age of the Democrats and Republicans is over. We need to eliminate these parties and move into the future.
Lamont won the primary and got 40% of the vote in the general, which would be good enough to win if the Republican hadn’t been held to 10%. It was an unusual election.
But Lamont accomplished a tremendous amount.
None of that would have happened if he ran as an independent.
I don’t think it’s very direct of you to claim that Lieberman was pushed out of the party, he is welcomed back with open arms, he is still thought of as a Dem.
It just showed there were factions against him… weak factions.
The only people that think Lieberman is a Democrat are people that stopped paying attention after election day in 2000.
Our system of government is inherently two-party. For viable third (and fourth, and fifth…) parties to exist, we need to replace our antiquated first-past-the-post voting system, ditch the electoral college, and switch to parliamentary democracy.
None of which is likely to happen anytime soon. Not that I don’t think it would be a good idea, because I do think it would be an excellent idea.
In the meantime, I agree fully with Booman and then some — the primary challenge is not just one of our most potent weapons, it is our most potent weapon bar none. You want your vote to count for something? Then definitely show up for the primaries, where vastly fewer people are voting than in the general election. In fact, it baffles me that political activists in various minority communities, racial and otherwise, don’t pour huge amounts of energy into GOTV efforts in the primaries. If every gay, feminist, African-American, union worker, and garden-variety liberal showed up for the primaries, we would control the party overnight.
I like the idea of a parliamentary democracy in many ways, but it would require an overhaul of the Constitution. (It would also require honest men to do the making over to truly make it a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.) A “no confidence” vote to send Bush back to Texas would be lovely, simply lovely.
That was my point with this comment yesterday.
It may have taken over 200 years, but apparently the current gang of legislators and lobbyists has gotten a handle on how to toally confound everything the founders tried to do.
The founding fathers assumed, if not good faith, then at least sanity and some sense of the existence and value of the commonweal.
These guys we’re dealing with now are SO far beyond that ….
Or instant runoff voting.
No more primaries, and you don’t throw your vote away on a long shot.
One. Britain has first past the post. Canada has first past the post. Both have three national parties and at least one regional party strong enough to have a national impact. So the two-party system has nothing to do with “first past the post.” (Actually the duopoly has much more to do with the rigging of the rules at all levels to create “barriers to entry” to other parties and independent candidates.)
Two. Since we are in fact locked into a two-party system by their own manipulations, it damn well needs to be an adversarial system, like our court system. If it’s going to be a two-party system, the system completely fails if you have one party fighting tooth and nail for whatever its membership wants, while the other party only fights tooth and nail to shut up its own base and routinely rolls over on command for the demands of the other party. Just as we have a plaintiff’s attorney and a defendant’s attorney, not a plaintiff’s attorney and a “hey let’s be reasonable and split the difference” attorney. That’s a highly disfunctional system, and disfunctional democracy will in the end lead, out of desperation of those unrepresented or represented by the perpetually submissive party, to revolution.
Both Britain and Canada have parliamentary democracies, which keeps the executive, the prime minister, subordinate to the legislature. It doesn’t take an extraordinary activation of special powers, i.e. impeachment, to dispose of an unpopular or uncooperative prime minister. (The problem with the UK variation on this theme is the lack of clear limitations on the powers of the prime minister, which stems in part from the lack of a modern, explicitly written constitution.) The elimination of the executive branch as an independent organ of the government is the key feature.
First past the post is a secondary consideration, neither necessary nor sufficient for a multiparty system, but it helps. Between first past the post and rules designed to ensure the overrepresentation of the majority party, Britain is has nowhere near the diversity of parties that some other parliamentary democracies have.
The goal to which we ought to strive is a system in which no single party commands a majority. The main advantage to a multiparty system, in my opinion, is that the need to form a ruling coalition makes it very difficult for the radical fringe to dictate terms to the rest of the government, as has happened here with the GOP. It also ensures that smaller parties, including the “single issue” groups that Kos deplores so loudly, can demand concessions in exchange for their participation in a coalition government.
The problem with the US, aside from its structural weakness, is a highly consolidated mass media with a vested interest in the status quo, a moribund educational system, and a campaign fundraising system that amounts to institutionalized bribery. I don’t mean to suggest that adopting a modern democratic model would solve our problems by itself — one need look no farther than Italy to watch a modern parliamentary democracy rendered dysfunctional by corruption — but to do so would be to win half the battle. The other half would still require a fierce fight and undoubtedly involve substantial changes to the First Amendment where political campaigns are concerned.
We are supposed to be a reality-based community, and the reality of the situation is that the system is hopelessly rigged against any third party. Even the two “third parties” that seem to get any attention at all — the Libertarians and the Greens — can’t seem to get much of the vote. Some of that is their own fault, but much of it is the inertia of the two-party system.
To have any kind of viable third party you would have to be able to split something like 40 million voters nationwide away from the two major parties, on a permanent basis, and find a way to fund the new party. You would need to create a “farm system” of party members running for everything from Senator down to school board. You would need to find a way to differentiate this new party from the two current parties. That alone is going to make a new party difficult. If this new party is based on principles of fiscal conservatism, what differentiates them from Republicans? If they are a party of working men and women, why aren’t they in with the Democrats? And so forth.
Being a storyteller, I like to use stories as analogies. The Trojan War is a good example here. Remember that the Greeks fought the Trojans for ten years and made no progress going up against the gates of Troy. It wasn’t until they actually got inside the gates that they managed to do some damage. Any military instructor will tell you it’s easy to attack a fortification from the inside than from the outside. The Democratic Party has a “machine,” if you will. It has money and the means to get more. It has people who identify with it. It has people willing to work for it to get things done. These are things no third party will have for a very, very, very long time. I would rather put those things to work for me than try to fight them. If that means taking over the Democratic Party from the inside out, that’s fine with me. It also has the advantage that we can look to recent history to know that a party can be taken over by a relatively small group — but they have to have the message and discipline to do it. We would also have the advantage in doing this with the Democrats that we wouldn’t be taking them over to serve evil ends, but to do what it is supposed to do — be a party of working class, everyday people, responsive to their needs rather than those of some corporate or beltway elite.
What you describe is exactly how the fascists got control of the Republican Party. They went inside. A lot of decent Republicans kept voting for their party because it was their party, even though it wasn’t any more.
I’m not comparing us with the Reactionaries. Just pointing out that this model has been tried once before, and it worked spectacularly.
That’s exactly what I was pointing at. All you need are groups of people dedicated to the ideal of creating a progressive Democratic party to start going to the meetings, getting themselves invited to the caucauses and the conventions, and pretty soon, you have a progressive Democratic party. With a little luck it wouldn’t take take 20 years, either.
what if the pilgrims had to fight dinosaurs but the man from u.n.c.l.e. went back in time to help them?
and you have just given someone in that somewhere a nice big helping of breakfast surreal.
I just wanted to say I had to fight the urge to vote for the Green candidate for Congress today. Laura Richardson is such a creep. She put big hurdles up when we tried to organize a peace march in her district. She
injected race into the campaign after promising not to. And the Green is an alright guy–I’ve met him at some Long Beach Area Peace Network events. But I didn’t want to take any chance that the Republican would win.
sorry to hear you think she’s a creep. I think you could have safely voted for the green in that race if you wanted to. Richardson should be a fairly progressive voice in the congress. I will interested to see what committee assignments she gets. She has big shoes to fill.
Well, everyone says the Democrat will be a shoo-in, but it looked like I was the only one voting by late morning (at our local Cambodian Methodist Church), so I was afraid some big turn-out push by the Republicans could turn things around.
except that Lieberman got stronger.
Lieberman RAN AS THIRD PARTY!
And also, how can you write that and not see that the problem would have been the “probably lukewarm” support which by the way would, I think, have been not “lukewarm” but total condemnation.
The problem is all these bloggers et al that react to the idea of an option as if options are bad… “nothing can get done that way”… I say take note that “nothing” is getting done this way, if you consider the failure of civilization “nothing”.
in other words, you write that and don’t seem to realize the hypocrisy in that.
Lamont would have been the same exact person! Same exact policies! And we could be sure his less than actually liberal past would have been so important rather than so unimportant.
Changes like that in a what if with only one difference are supposed to be telling!
Lieberman did not get stronger. He was virtually destroyed and his ability to be of use to the neo-cons was curtailed. Luckily for him, the Senate wound up 50-50 or he would have been stripped of his seniority, which is a major possibility after ’08 because of his endorsement of Susan Collins and probably whomever wins the GOP nomination. His little power is blackmail, and it is temporary. His defeat in the primary resonated all across the political landscape and effectively neutered The New Republic and helped make the DLC radioactive. It was an enormous accomplishment. It also taught a lesson to others, like Jane Harman, who are now running scared and voting better.