Ever since the debt ceiling “debate” ended in a sickening thud, with Obama negotiating his way to full blown surrender, and the republican campaign had its semi-official kick-off in the corn maze of the Iowa straw poll, the idea of a third party candidate has been rattling around in my head and recent events seem to point to that as a real possibility. As numerous third party candidates have shown over the years, it’s a nearly impossible road to the White House. But it looks tantalizingly favorable as we wind into the 4th quarter of what has been an unmitigated disaster of a year for democrats and a year that the republican party, for all its heavy handed obstructionism and mad-hatter tea party distractions, has been unable to produce a single candidate who looks electable.
Flavor of the month, Rick ”I jog with a 6-shooter” Perry, given an opening you could invade Mexico through, has energized the biblical and socially retarded wing of the party but the old testament morality that is superficially underpinning his campaign could well be his undoing, especially when it is compared to the double dealing cronyism and borderline fraud being exposed on a daily basis as the source of his success in Texas. I’m thinking that voters – even those completely blinded by the light of their own spiritual incoherence – can smell a rat when the same guy who is praying through crocodile tears in the national limelight one day is stacking bags of cash in the basement like a lone star Mohamar Khadafi and selling out to the highest bidder like a Dallas call girl.
Michele Bachman – the Red Queen to Rick’s Mad Hatter – appeals to the tea party rabble and almost no one else, making her about as electable as Newt Gingrich. All you have to do is picture her as the first woman in American history to be elected president and the dizziness sets in immediately. Running neck & neck with Perry, Mitt “Doesn’t my hair look good from this angle” Romney has a chance but he has to win the nomination first, a conundrum in that, to win the nomination he has to act crazy enough to draw some support from the Joshua, Judges, Ruth voters but not so crazy as the three piece suits on Wall Street get nervous and start looking around for someone else to carry their water. It’s tricky business and after hearing Mitt practically swallow his tongue trying to think fast enough to counter a heckler, ( "Yeah, well...well...corporations are people too you know, buddy..."), I’m not sure he’s up to it.
That assessment leads to the source of my suspicions, Jon Huntsman. Huntsman has seemed to have consciously decided that he was standing a little too close to the hell fire and brimstone and couldn’t keep a straight face when Perry started babbling about how he has doubts about the theory of evolution and giving extraordinary credence to that one scientist who can’t find his way out of his basement lab but nonetheless has plenty of evidence that there is no such thing as climate change. Huntsman has taken the sensible yet dangerous position that those shibboleths of party orthodoxy might be suspect and sounding altogether too rational and sensible to really factor in to the actual republican primaries. But positioned between a severely wounded Obama who’s getting some of the all time worst advice from somebody over there and a nut-case hollow candidate on the right like Perry, he’s starting to look like a reasonable, adult choice to many frustrated democrats, traditional republicans and – most importantly – the majority of voters who call themselves independent.
This is where the current political structure of the country – one that has been badly in need of an overhaul for 30 years – gets in the way. There is no one party currently whose tent is the right configuration to house a Huntsman candidacy. He’s not Libertarian enough nor Green enough nor Peace & Freedom enough to sit well in the existing structure of any of the usual third party suspects. And the way the electoral college is set up, it’s almost impossible for a third party candidate to do anything other act as a spoiler, a la Ross Perot or Ralph Nader. A spoiler third party candidate could tip the election either way, depending on whether or not he could actually win any states and hence garner any electoral votes or just draw popular votes away from one or the other candidate. This is what Perot did in 1992, likely leading to Bill Clinton being elected over the incumbent, G.H.W. Bush, don of the infamous Bush Family criminal cabal, and erstwhile preppy bad ass.
But all that aside, I think I would like to see someone run and run well, because I think it’s high time both parties get a swift kick in the ass from voters who are sick of all the blather and bullshit and a level of political discourse more in keeping with a kindergarten lunch room than a mature nation and ostensible leader of the free world. Let’s call it a profound and timely paradigm shift - Jon, are you up to it?
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