Tag: 2 party system

Forget Russia, The Democrats and Republicans Have Openly Rigged the Election for Decades

The lesser of two evils is still evil.

The last time the American people were allowed to see more than two candidates for president on television was in 1992 when Ross Perot was allowed on stage with Democrat Bill Clinton and incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush. Perot ran as an independent, financing his own campaign and shook up American politics. He received more than 19 million votes as a result of being allowed on that stage with Bush and Clinton.

Perot wound up with about 19% of the vote in an election that Clinton won by 6 points over Bush. The fact that Perot was able to garner so much support was a direct result of his presence in the national televised debates. Naturally, the idea of a third party stealing votes from one of the major parties is a threat to the establishment.

In 1987, Democrats and Republicans unanimously agreed to form the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) which is a nonprofit corporation established with bipartisan support. The CPD’s formation was directly recommended by the bipartisan National Commission on Elections to turn “over the sponsorship of presidential debates to the two major parties.”

The CPD was chaired by heads of the Democratic and Republican parties, Paul G. Kirk and Frank Fahrenkopf and at a press conference in 1987, they both had no problem admitting that this commission was formed to essentially exclude third party candidates.

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The Biden/Harris campaign and the dead-end of “lesser evil” politics

This is hardly the first election in which such “lesser evil” arguments were advanced. In 1988, it was a matter of voting for Dukakis, the right-wing governor from Massachusetts, to finally put an end to the Reagan years. After Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush, the following election in 1992 became a matter of putting an end to the Bush years by electing Bill Clinton, whose right-wing policies cleared the path for Bush II in 2000. In 2008, the argument became the need to elect Obama, the “candidate of hope and change,” in order to end the disaster produced by Bush II, above all, the war in Iraq.

Obama continued the most right-wing policies of George W. Bush (with whom, by the way, he has established a close personal friendship), including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the overseeing of the Wall Street bailout following the 2008 financial collapse. It was the right-wing policies of Obama and the nomination of Hillary Clinton on the basis of a prowar program, glossed over with identity politics, that created the conditions for the election of Trump in 2016.

This act, in other words, has been played out before, and each time the result is a further shift to the right of the entire political establishment.

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