A Signal For The Death Of The Two Party System?

For my entire life American politics has been dominated by the two party system. It is broken. The only thing that having two political powerhouses has done is create an artificial classification of citizens as either conservatives or liberals. These terms are not representative of beliefs or a view of the future, they are mud-slinging labels that fuel the fire of their respective voting base.

Conservatives are cold hearted, money loving, un-progressive stick in the muds. Liberals are tree hugging hippie peaceniks that don't understand market economics or the military.

In reality, the conservative/liberal labels probably accurately describe 1% of the population.

The reign of George W. Bush has only made the situation in Washington worse. If you were not lock step with the Bush administration you were cast aside and excluded from the election dominance machine that is Karl Rove. If you were not following in the footsteps of Pelosi and Reid, you were acting detrimentally to the overarching goal of defeating Bush. Now that George II is reaching the finale of his second term, those who would not speak out against the administration and their peers, are coming out of the woodwork. It is a good sign that perhaps Washington isn't secretly controlled by a cabal that identifies political candidates via a tap on the shoulder from Skull & Bones, and candidates have the ability to think freely.

Chuck Hagel has publicly stated (he has for a long time now), "I am not happy with the Republican Party today... It's been hijacked by a group of single-minded almost isolationists, insulationists, power-projectors." For most of us, this has been obvious for a long time. If you were actually a traditional "conservative", you must have been shitting a brick watching the Bush administration freely spend, drive the economy into a nosediving level of debt, and grow the government and its special interest attachments to sizes that would have made President Reagan squirm. How could anyone possibly be happy with the modern Republican Party?

The possibility of a Hagel-Bloomberg independent ticket is intriguing, especially with New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, on the ticket. While people herald Rudi Giuliani as the hero of 9/11 and the cleaner-upper of NYC, in post 9/11 times, he can only be seen in my eyes as a political opportunist and one trick pony; I can't think of anyone who has ridden the 9/11 card so hard, not even George W. Bush mentions it with Giuliani's frequency. Given Bloomberg's progressive stance on social issues and his guidance over NYC, I would vote for him in a heart beat.

Historically, people like Ralph Nader have been longshots, emphasis on the "long". Are there other independent Dark Horses, strong ones, electable ones? So far we have the specters of Hagel, Bloomberg, and perhaps even Al Gore. America should monitor Gore's weight, should he lose enough to bring him back to non-fat ass status, consider him a serious candidate for 2008.