BDBoop
Platinum Member
- Banned
- #1
US elections: Why does the world's greatest democracy offer just two choices? - Telegraph
BTSOOM.
The gauntlet was thrown down in duelling online videos last week. President Barack Obama's campaign compared presumptive Republican challenger Mitt Romney to a blood-sucking, job-destroying vampire while he headed Bain Capital, a private equity firm. Romney quickly parried with a brutally effective video telling the heart-wrenching stories of just three of the 23 million unemployed Americans in the Obama economy.
The 2012 election campaign season is still young; the battle will grow only more bruising. And voters will become increasingly turned off. But, in America, we get only two choices, and often are left voting for what we believe to be the lesser of two evils.
Friends in Europe and elsewhere often lament their own forms of government which foster countless parties and voices, and create much noise and chaos. Ironically, in America, which we like to argue is the greatest democracy in the world, we are limited to just two choices: a Republican or a Democrat.
And voters are tiring of it. Some 40 per cent of Americans today identify themselves as political Independents – a record. Just 29 per cent say they're Democrats, down seven points from 2008, while the proportion saying they're Republicans has fallen to 27 per cent, according to Gallup.
The middle, which rejects both parties, is growing but the question is, what to do about it?
BTSOOM.