Stop Picking Your Political Poison
Connor Strange
Co-Editor-In-Chief
The land of the free, the home of the brave.
The fattest nation on Earth, second only to Mexico.
A country $17 trillion in debt.
America is described as many things, positive and negative. Because of its ever-present nature, its politics often become the business of citizens and foreigners alike, whether they like it or not.
And at the very core of American politics is the bipartisan system.
Unfortunately, it’s rather broken.
Because of heavy bipartisanship, American voters and politicians are shoved into two categories, and everything else is heavily marginalized. Democrats and Republicans are our two candidates for president every year, the titles to which most every American subscribes.
This system is the ruination of a proper election.
In recent presidential races, some have described the situation as “pick-your-poison”. Plenty of people saw Republican forerunner Mitt Romney as an unlikable candidate and far too conservative for their tastes. At the same time, they found incumbent Barack Obama fairly lackluster in his first four years of presidency. But an overwhelming majority of those people did just that. They picked their poison rather than vote for an independent candidate.
The rivalry between Elephant and Donkey has stalled decision-making to a infuriating battle over nearly every bill. The government shutdown last year was wholly due to the two sides of Congress being unable to agree with each other, and so irresponsibly stubborn that progress was no longer possible for months.
They squabbled over the Affordable Care Act (colloquially ObamaCare) for longer than ever necessary. And by the end of it all, after countless government employees went without work for months on end, the bill was hardly changed.
This recent shutdown wasn’t due to some glaring fault with the Affordable Care Act, it was instead an argument about Republican and Democratic values that was apparently so heated that it ground the world’s largest superpower to a standstill.
If the general population considered independent parties seriously, this probably wouldn’t have happened, or if it had, it certainly wouldn’t last so long.
The excuse “you’re throwing your vote away” is bandied around, and seen as a legitimate reason for choosing a less worthy candidate or one that doesn’t necessarily represent the right viewpoints for the voter.
If next year’s Barack and Mitt don’t seem like very good prospective presidents, then there’s no reason that they should be the only options.
The best candidate shouldn’t be the less bad one.
Last year, there were fourteen separate independents in the running, all with different views and ideas about this country’s future. A lot of people are hard-pressed to name one of them, let alone vote for them.
For as often as people complain about America, they sure don’t offer up many solutions to make it better. Doing away with bipartisanship could very well be one of them, however. No system that comes down to choosing which foot to shoot should be the basis of an entire nation, let alone the most influential.
