Why I can't support Obama - Richard Stallman

http://stallman.org/articles/obama.html

jill stein will never get elected just like ron paul will never get elected. i think one should be pragmatic and not let perfection become the enemy of progress. the world is made up of people with vastly differing sets of value systems. in such a world, the jill steins and ron pauls will never be viable political candidates. and i don't think that's the case only because we are talking about the US.

Lesser of two evils seems to the only choice in the US.

As the Republicans get more right-wing, the Democrats follow them,
staying just one step behind. That will continue as long as
right-wing Democrats can get elected by saying that the Republicans
are worse.

blabberwock wrote:Lesser of two evils seems to the only choice in the US.

Check your verb and preposition. The downfall of Indian English.

The people who voted for Ralph Nader because Al Gore wasn't liberal enough for them gave us Gitmo and Iraq. The country moved to the right because of their vote, not to the left. The least they can do is learn from their mistakes and not repeat them.

"Lesser of two evils" is usually the choice in all democracies, at least for the most committed ideologues of any party. Democratic politics is a game of pragmatism more than ideology, and in this game the winners are not those who appeal to ideological purists.

Democratic party getting more and more right wing is because there are people who do not see too many differences between the two parties and refuse to acknowledge either of them?

I don't know if you read this link I had posted some time back - what's being ignored is how similar the parties are on many key issues. The wall street and corporates rule America. The rest is academic and makes a good soap opera every 4 years.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/04/third-party-us-presidential-debate-deceit

utopia is a state only to be hoped for but never achievable. meanwhile for those of us who live in the real world, there is an ocean of difference between the two parties that calls for real choices. that is those of us who have to go to the doctor every now and then, send children to college, aspire to have a cleaner environment, and if we are women, to not have the government insist on probing us with various cylindrically shaped objects in uncomfortable places because we requested an abortion, and have the very distant and diminishing hope of retiring at some point before we cease to breathe.

The Nation had an editorial on why Obama must be reelected.

http://www.thenation.com/article/170345/re-elect-president#

Here's a rebuttal to that:

http://vastleft.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-nations-deeply-deceptive-obama.html?showComment=1349834985968

blabberwock wrote:Democratic party getting more and more right wing is because there are people who do not see too many differences between the two parties and refuse to acknowledge either of them?

Yes. Gore lost Florida by 537 votes. People like Stallman cast 97,488 votes for Nader, all of which were cast with no hope in hell of electing Nader to office. As a result, we got John Roberts as the Chief Justice, and we got Samuel Alito on the bench. Elections have consequences, and cutting off your nose to spite your face in an election has awful consequences.

Here is a simple illustration. Picture this as the electorate arranged neatly in terms of ideological orientation from extreme left to extreme right:
----------
where each - represents a tenth of the electorate. The middle two -s represent the centrist 20% of the electorate. For simplicity, let's assume any individual votes for the candidate who is closest to them ideologically. Now, if D represents the ideological position taken by the Democrat and R represents the Republican in a two-candidate face-off, you tend to see:
----DR----
because that's the position from where each candidate can hope to garner the most votes. So the election becomes about persuading the centrist 20% or so of the electorate.

Now, if a Green party candidate outflanks the Democrat from the left, and the Democrat does not change her ideological position in response, you end up with:
G---DR----
In this contest, the Republican always wins, because D and G are fighting over the chunks of electorate between them. If D moves to the left, she concedes more territory to R, while fighting for less than 50% of the vote with G. So the "appropriate" response for D in this case would be to go a little to the right, to try and persuade a few more people to her right to vote for her.

Of course, this is a very simplistic model, and there are more things going on that have moved America to the right. But Gore's loss in 2000, caused by liberal wingnuts, definitely moved the country to the right. And when the country moves to the right, the Democratic party couldn't stay where they were and still hope to win elections.

This is one of the reasons I like the fact that Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and Herman Cain are taken seriously by the GOP. I believe this will put Democrats in a more competitive position in elections that they otherwise have no hope of winning (e.g. Missouri and Arizona Senate races of 2012).

Applying your logic, if more and more people voted for the far-left, the Democratic party will be forced to move left, I suppose? Isn't that a better situation? A strong third-party to the left will help the liberal cause!

Unfortunately, there isn't a strong third-party and so you are stuck with Republicans moving further and further right and the Democrats keeping up with them. A third-party isn't even given the right to debate because neither R or D want that to happen and influence the commission that governs it.

http://www.npr.org/2012/10/06/162438686/the-npr-third-party-candidate-debate

Of course, the real driving force is not what people do or want but what the corporates want - both parties get their funding from the same source. The artificial differences created keep the interest going and the public excited.

blabberwock wrote:Applying your logic, if more and more people voted for the far-left, the Democratic party will be forced to move left, I suppose? Isn't that a better situation? A strong third-party to the left will help the liberal cause!

If more Democrats voted for far-left candidates in the primaries in a way that dislodged moderate Democratic incumbents, yes, the party will swing left. But so far the Democratic electorate has had the good sense to not do that -- except in places in California where the party is already significantly to the left of the national Democratic party.

blabberwock wrote:Unfortunately, there isn't a strong third-party and so you are stuck with Republicans moving further and further right and the Democrats keeping up with them.

A strong third party that competes with the Dems for votes is going to be a disaster -- it will ensure that Republicans gain control of all branches of government. Unlike parliamentary democracies where the executive is elected by a hung parliament and third parties have a lot of influence, here a split vote means the end of the road for both contenders on the left.

blabberwock wrote:Of course, the real driving force is not what people do or want but what the corporates want - both parties get their funding from the same source. The artificial differences created keep the interest going and the public excited.

Those differences are nothing but artificial. They may not be as wide as either the far-left or the far-right likes it, but they are real and significant, as Max said.

adding to all that's already been said on the pragmatic left side, some of us genuinely don't like what the far left stands for. i for one don't like a completely unrestrained immigration policy of the come one come all kind, don't care for restricting our energy choices to renewables only regardless of how it affects people's pocketbooks, and unreasonably high taxes like some european countries. i also don't like public sector unions negotiating all kinds of goodies for themselves without also subjecting themselves to some measure of accountability. the public sector teachers' unions are notorious for this.

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:adding to all that's already been said on the pragmatic left side, some of us genuinely don't like what the far left stands for. i for one don't like a completely unrestrained immigration policy of the come one come all kind, don't care for restricting our energy choices to renewables only regardless of how it affects people's pocketbooks, and unreasonably high taxes like some european countries. i also don't like public sector unions negotiating all kinds of goodies for themselves without also subjecting themselves to some measure of accountability. the public sector teachers' unions are notorious for this.

I want to echo this as well. I am left-of-center in my political views, but I don't like far-left programs any more than I like far-right programs. California is a great example of what goes wrong when spending gets out of control.

Here is an example of far-left ideology run amok. The California Teachers Association, a public sector labor union, is the largest spender on political campaigns in the state.

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/state&id=8688876

I know some very committed schoolteachers who are a little to my left on ideology, but hate that union for the blocking tactics it adopts. California, which once used to be near the top for public education, has fallen to the bottom of the pack. But according to my friends who taught at inner city schools, the CTA is not helping fix the problem.

My point wasn't that the far-left ideology is the perfect one but that given the way Democrats have been shifting more and more right, there isn't really a whole lot of choices left for a person. And the solution for that is not "vote for Dem party because else, you get a far worse option".

The argument that people voting for the third-party candidates are the ones 'forcing' the Democratic party veer right is invalid. Funding and Wall Street are the main causes and the few people who protest against that are silenced double quick.

A strong third-party may shake the setup and put some sort of check on the current state of affairs. Until then, both parties will remain corporate stooges.