Hagel … Independent?
Imagine what would have happened in 1992 if instead of Ross Perot running for president as a third party candidate, somebody sane would have taken up the mantle.
Why, perhaps a third party candidate might have won the thing! Or maybe the whole Perot phenomenom rested a bit strongly on the eccentric’s ability to garner news coverage.
At any rate, 1992 looks a bit like what 2005 looks like: complete dissatisfaction with both parties. (Though, to be honest, that appears to be the norm in American history whether than the exception. Political partisanship amongst the electorate is DEAD — but it has always been dead, or is your reading of post-Reconstruction Party Machine Politics different from my reading of the subject?) Granted the Republican Party is falling apart at the seams, but the Democratic Party has already fallen apart at the seams.
It’s a curious consideration. John Anderson wound up with a fairly meager 6.6% of the vote, compared to Perot’s 19%. Both of them, at one time in the campaign, had poll numbers that suggested they could win the damned thing… before the inevitable “can’t waste the vote” thing came into play and people gravitated to the two parties.
I mention this because Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel is rumoured to be mulling an Independent bid at the White House. Liberal conspiracy theorists maintain that he won his first Senate election via Diebold-type vote manipulation, but… he is as good and decent a Republican as there is in Congress. He is conservative, despite the neo-conservative’s gnashing at him for feignt criticisms of Bush’s Iraq policy (witness the American Spectator piece on Hagel.) I would vote for him over Hillary Clinton, and certainly any of the Republican-oids that the Republican Party seems to be pushing right about now.
The basic problem, for me, is he is a Republican, and I want him noted as being one for the good of Republicanism… not “in the middle between the two”.
We’ll see.