Setting the Record Straight

Now that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (my condolences to him for the death of his mother) is no longer a presidential candidate and the remaining third-party candidates are little more than annoyances, it looks more likely than not that the results of the 2024 presidential election will not be affected by a minor presidential candidate as a spoiler.

But was any presidential election ever affected by a third-party presidential candidate?   Maybe once in awhile, like all of the young people in 1968 who may have made Richard Nixon President by voting for Peace and Freedom Party nominee (and Black Panthers leader) Eldridge Cleaver instead of Hubert Humphrey, but not so much in other presidential elections.  It's likely that the 1844 election was decided in favor of Democrat James K. Polk over Whig Henry Clay based on Polk's support for annexing Texas and that third-party candidate James Birney of the Liberty Party, which advocated abolishing slavery, brought out voters who would have supported neither Polk nor Clay, both slaveowners, or not voted at all. The 1860 election was such a hot mess that it produced four major candidates - Republican Abraham Lincoln, northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, and Constitutional Union Party nominee John Bell - and the vote was so sectionalized between the candidates that an electoral deadlock was more likely than a spoiler effect.  Had Douglas won New York, Lincoln would have been denied an electoral majority and most likely would have lost the Presidency in the House of Representatives.  The only times third-party candidates played spoiler was when a faction of an existing party supported one of its leaders on another ticket - such as in 1848, when former President Martin Van Buren was nominated by a reformist faction of the New York State Democratic Party was and subsequently endorsed by the anti-slavery Free-Soil Party for his views against extending slavery into the territories.  Van Buren cost Democratic nominee Lewis Cass New York State and the Presidency, electing Whig Zachary Taylor.  And, in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt led progressive Republicans out of the party and ran on the Bull Moose ticket against his one-time friend, President William Howard Taft (they later reconciled), he split the Republican vote and helped elect Democratic presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson. 

I bring all of this up as background to correct two blatant misconceptions about the two most recent presidential elections in which the winners of the popular vote lost the Electoral College - that third-party candidates cost  Democrats Al Gore and Hillary Clinton the Presidency.  That theory may or may not be true in the latter case, but it is definitely false in the former.  And both theories, not coincidentally, involve the Green Party.

In 2000, as Vice President Al Gore (above) was running for the Presidency against Republican George Walker Bush, pundits expressed alarm at the support Green Party presidential nominee Ralph Nader was gaining from liberal-leaning voters dissatisfied with President Bill Clinton and said that Nader could win enough Democratic votes to deprive Gore of a victory that November.  When the presidential election results from Florida, the deciding state, ended up being disputed for five weeks and was ultimately decided in favor of Bush by 537 votes, pundits pointed to the thousands of votes Nader got and concluded that Gore did lose Florida and the Presidency because of Nader . . . and have consistently said so ever since.

In reality, as American University professor Allan Lichtman later proved, Gore actually won Florida, but the election was stolen for George Bush because thousands of Gore votes cast by black Florida residents were thrown out by the state, whose governor was . . . Jeb Bush! And the butterfly-style ballots were so antiquated and difficult to fill out that when noted anti-Semitic third-party candidate Pat Buchanan got a large number of votes in heavily Jewish precincts in Palm Beach County, even Buchanan himself said those votes for him had to have been cast by mistake.     

Also, 2016 Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein is seen as the culprit who peeled off enough votes from Hillary Clinton (above) in that year's presidential election to cost her three states in the Rust Belt that then went to Donald Trump.  Well, I have to concede that, if you look at the numbers, Dr. Stein did win more votes than the margins between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in those three states - Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.  (I once said that if everyone in Pennsylvania who voted for Dr. Stein had voted for Hillary, it wouldn't have made a difference and Trump still would have won the state, but the numbers were revised and I turned out to be wrong.)  But did it ever occur to the pundits and politicos who blamed Dr. Stein for Hillary's loss that maybe Hillary Clinton blew it by not campaigning in those states enough or at all?  Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell begged - nay, implored - Hillary to campaign in her state, but she blew her off, thinking she had Michigan in the bag.  And Florida was a state Hillary was supposed to win, but people in Florida who had never voted before and had never put much faith in politics came out to vote for Trump.  And that phenomenon was repeated in other states.

Here's another thing.  Dr. Stein was on the ballot in 44 states.  Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson was on the ballot in all fifty of them.  As I noted on this blog once before, MSNBC host Chris Matthews, after the 2016 election, explained that moderate Republicans turned off by Trump who could have voted for Hillary voted for Johnson instead, and that the vote Johnson won in key states was greater than Trump's margin of victory.   At least that was Matthews' reasoning.  So, if third-party candidates are spoilers, how is it that Gary Johnson - who came in third and got double the number of votes Dr. Stein got nationally - had no effect on the 2016 election but Dr. Stein did?

And why isn't then-FBI director James Comey more to blame for reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton's laptop just before the election than Dr. Stein is?

Come to think of it, why is Hillary Clinton, who was a lousy candidate, totally blameless? 

So again, the only way a third-party candidate can be a spoiler is if the candidate in question is from one of the two major parties and leaves to run on a separate presidential ticket and brings enough fellow members of said party with him or her - as liberal Democrat Henry Wallace did with his Progressive movement and as conservative Democrat Strom Thurmond did with the "Dixiecrats" in 1948 when they both ran for President against incumbent Democratic President Harry S. Truman, when the polls favored Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey.

Oh yeah, Truman won.  

Spoilers?                

A Hot, Wet Disaster

The United Nations' Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change released a report this past week saying that unless the world acts in the next decade, there is no way we can escape the worst effects of climate change - longer heat waves, rising sea levels, persistent droughts, stronger hurricanes and nor'easters, and Florida falling into the sea.  Unless we do anything, the worst, most irreversible  effects would be felt as soon as 2040, a date no farther in the future than 1996 - the year of Bill Clinton's re-election to the Presidency, the Macarena, and Muhammad Ali lighting the torch at the Atlanta Olympics - is in the past.

See goodbye to Miami.  We ain't gonna do nothin' to stop climate change.

We Americans - a rather amoral, selfish confederacy of imbeciles, idiots, morons and circus pinheads - have made it clear that we have no interest in combating, or even believing in the existence of, climate change.  Well, okay, not all of us, but a majority of us.  And one of those climate-change deniers, a guy so stupid that he flunked recess in grade school, is President of the United States.

A sizable number of voters continue to reject presidential candidates who put climate change front and center among the policies they espouse.  Nowhere was that more obvious than when Al Gore was ridiculed for his climate crusade during the 2000 presidential campaign despite his strong credentials on the issue as a U.S. Senator and as Vice President. More recently, Martin O'Malley (if you're sick and tired of hearing about him, well, kiss my posterior!) made climate change a centerpiece of his 2016 presidential campaign, proposing initiatives such as having the Environmental Protection Agency adopt a zero-tolerance policy for methane leaks from fossil-fuel production, canceling Keystone XL pipeline, prohibiting further offshore drilling and drill leases in Alaska, ending fossil-fuel subsidies (which would make gasoline more expensive and force people to drive smaller cars), and setting the United States on course to be powered by 100% clean energy by 2050.

We all know what happened.  Just look at all of those SUVs with "Ready For Hillary" bumper stickers still on them.  

Right now the White House is controlled by greedy polluters who were all too happy to put the American pledge to honor the Paris Agreement through the shredder, and we have an entire political party that is so convinced that climate change isn't real that it disbanded a climate-change subcommittee in the House of Representatives when they regained their House majority.  If they acknowledge climate change at all, they think of it as what happens every three months with the equinoxes and solstices.  So, no, I see no future for getting serious about climate change . . . or the planet.      

Strange Politics

For Donald Trump's Cabinet . . . Dr. Who?

Not the TV character - a question.

Dr. Carson - Ben Carson - for Housing and Urban Development Secretary?

Because he grew up in Detroit?

Then why don't we just make him Transportation Secretary because he grew up in a town where they make Chevrolets?

Maybe I'm the wrong person to criticize this choice, because I voted for an M.D. for President, but what does a neurosurgeon know about housing and urban development?  And, apart from neurosurgery, what does Ben Carson know about anything?

Apparently, Trump thinks Carson is qualified in urban affairs because Carson is black. You can't blame Trump, really. The United States is pretty much the only English-speaking country where "urban" is a synonym for "black."  A black circus bills itself as "urban family entertainment."  Black radio stations are called "urban" radio stations.  We have a black-oriented public-affairs organization called the National Urban League, once known as the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes; maybe a name like the National League on Black Urban Issues would have been a better name.  We've become acclimated to thinking of black America as urban America, and white America as rural and suburban America, thanks to transportation policies and housing policies that encouraged the white middle class to leave the cities - and blacks - behind.  But not all blacks live in cities, and not all whites live in the country or the suburbs.  Dr. Carson himself lived in semi-rural Maryland while at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore - where a white guy (Martin O'Malley) served as mayor in the two thousand zeroes.    

Meanwhile, the ordeal in North Carolina is finally over.  Pat McCrory, the Republican governor who made defending the civil rights of people afraid of transgendered individuals by preserving the sanctity of bathrooms and making girls who were born guys use the men's room and guys who were born girls use the women's room (I don't get it either), formally conceded to Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper in the general election.  Cooper is a light in an otherwise dark tunnel for the Democrats, the second Democrat elected governor in a state south of the 36' 30" parallel line since 2008.  Maybe Democrat Foster Campbell will win the Louisiana U.S. Senate general election this Saturday.  

And while all this has been going on, Al Gore stopped by Trump Tower to talk to the presumptive President-elect about climate change at Ivanka Trump's invitation.  This is getting really weird . . ..

Gore Gored

With Washington, D.C. having been hit by two blizzards in a week, Republican lawmakers have been needling Albert Gore for his insistence that global warming is a real threat, with one Republican hoping that it snows until "Al Gore cries 'uncle.'" The daughter and son-in-law of noted global warming denier James Inhofe even ridiculed Gore by building an igloo in the middle of downtown Washington and calling it Gore's "new house."

Again - severe snowstorms, not even blizzards in areas that normally don't see such weather, aren't indicators that global warming doesn't exist. In fact, they may be an indicator that what should be called "climate change" does exist. Warming in some parts of the world may have an adverse effect of causing more precipitation and even colder temperatures elsewhere. In Britain - which saw tremendous amounts of snow last month - people could see a new ice age as melting ice caps in the polar regions disrupts the Gulf Stream, which keeps the British Isles temperate and mild enough for human settlement. And by the way, the United Kingdom and Ireland are as far north as Labrador in Canada is.

Environmentalists shouldn't get upset over Republican ridiculing of Al Gore. If so many Republicans are making fun of him, that only shows how popular he is. When the only Republican making fun of Al Gore is a county clerk in Wyoming, then he'll have a problem.

Rescue Mission

Former President Bill Clinton's success in getting Asian-American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee released from prison in North Korea with a full pardon from North Korean leader Kim Jong Il proved two important things to the world:

1) There's nothing Clinton can't do.

2) Kim Jong Il is still alive.

The Obama administration had been negotiating the release of Ling and Lee for weeks with the North Koreans, and Clinton intervened to close the sale. The White House sought to stay out of the final meetings between Clinton and the Communist government to avoid unnecessary interference on a sensitive matter. Dealing with Kim Jong Il under any circumstances is a tricky affair, so Obama, who makes the dough as President, is happy to let his Secretary of State's husband get the glory.

North Korea hopes to get good publicity with its act of good faith, but last time I checked, they still have a lot of nukes.

There's a bit of ironic symmetry to this story. It ended with Clinton's private diplomacy, but it began when Ling and Lee went to China on assignment for the cable channel run by Clinton's onetime second-in-command, Al Gore - before crossing into North Korea inadvertently. Crossing into unfriendly countries is a common habit of Americans these days.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, late word is that the cash-for-clunkers car program extension should make it through the Senate.

A Political Riddle

Here's a riddle for you all.

What's the difference between Al Gore and Norm Coleman?

Al Gore knew when to give up, and he actually won his election!

Even today, Al Gore has a better chance of becoming President than Norm Coleman has of returning to the Senate. :-p