The Left's Hue and Cry Against Third Parties

2012

• The ridiculous third party rallying cry - Bloomberg and Friedman pretend partisan fighting is ruining our country. The real problem is too much consensus (By David Sirota, Salon) As both Dartmouth professor Brendan Nyhan and the Columbia Journalism Review show, this act is so unerringly consistent that it has become cliche #233. And yet despite its maddening monotony, it remains a popular cottage industry. Indeed, from the pornstachioed Thomas Friedman to the Gordon Gekko-haired Jon Avlon to the monocle-and-top-hat-worthy Michael Bloomberg, the Third Party Fetishists provide a glorious career for its most slavishly devoted and dishonest cast members -- and, hey, as grifter jobs go, it's a damn good living.
• Crashing the Party System - Why does Thomas Friedman want to help a Republican win the White House? (Ben Adler, The American Prospect) Of all the rites of American politics that attend the presidential election, none is more irritating than the inevitable third-party bubble. Around this time four years ago, a coalition of irrelevant old politicos—former Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford officials and a former governor of Maine—formed a group called Unity ’08 to create a bipartisan presidential ticket. They had big dreams of holding online primaries and recruiting candidates like New York City’s independent mayor, Michael Bloomberg. The effort sputtered, then pooped out.
• Morning Jay: The Fundamentals Do Not Currently Favor Obama's Reelection (By JAY COST, The Weekly Standard) It is worth pointing out that, in the last forty years, no president has ever been elected in a predominantly two-way race with less than 48 percent of the independent vote. (That was George W. Bush in 2004.) with CHARTS