BSODmyself

One of my favorite political horserace sites is Electoral-Vote.com. In addition to a daily run down of new polls and current projected candidate electoral counts, there’s usually an interesting commentary from the Votemaster. Today’s commentary mentioned the fight over political party platforms. On this the Votemaster stated:

Nobody ever reads the party platforms anyway, but activists are willing to draw blood to get them their way. It is probably the only aspect of American politics where ideas dominate.

He’s probably right considering that his site generally only recognizes Democratic and Republican candidates. However, when considering alternative political parties, he’s not quite right. As a Libertarian, I know that platforms occassionally are considered sources of ideas for negative attacks. And activists do their darnedest to make the platform represent the philosophy. Usually, alternative political parties and their candidates even express these ideas (often to their electoral deaths). I would say that this is the other place where ideas dominate in politics. But the general reluctance of people to vote for these idea-filled candidates gives us an insight to the American’s regard for the concept of ideas in politics.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Politics, Rants.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.