My Party or Yours?

I regard David Brooks’ column today as manna from heaven, especially if you are an independent, undecided voter like me who is disgusted with the ideological partisans that dominate both political parties. It’s bad enough when both parties keep pushing preferred candidates that voters reject. It’s worse when these ideologues hijack the meaning of words like ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ and kick people out of the tent when they have the nerve to disagree with one of the party’s platforms. Are you pro-life and like smaller government, but don’t want to completely close the nation’s borders? Then the people who run the Republican Party don’t want you. Same with the Democrats if you are pro-choice and pro-labor, but have the nerve to support the death penalty.

When parties start pushing their choices on the public too hard, the tail will stop wagging the dog. This election is already drawing large voter turnout and huge public interest, and this country can ill afford to have the mediocre, divisive, party-anointed candidates as official nominees if they don’t want them or like them.

With no clear front-runner in either party, you can see both parties starting to get torn asunder from within. On the Democratic side, former President Clinton has been relegated to his wife’s attack dog, which has the potential of undermining his entire legacy among the wine-swillers who once loved him so much. While the public and the media wants Obama, the Clintons and the party elite want Hillary no matter how distasteful she is to the non-partisans who refuse to completely tow the party line, let alone the 500,000 independents in Florida and Ohio who will decide the election.

I’ve neglected the Republican side in all this lately, but it could be worse there than the Democratic side. Again, you can see the public surging behind McCain and Huckabee, while the self-appointed arbiters of conservatism push for Romney and Thompson (whose quixotic campaign came to a merciful end today) because of their self-adherence to the laundry list of what partisans think every GOP candidate must possess.

You’d think both parties would either want the public to determine who the best candidate is, or get behind the candidate that has the most appeal to the general public in November. But that would require people from Ann Coulter and Grover Norquist to Michael Moore and Nancy Pelosi to make room in their tent for anyone who dares to have a differing opinion. Should Hillary or Romney get the nomination, these so-called leaders will be like Nero fiddling while what’s left of their party flees the burning city.