What Ralph Nader is Not Telling You!

Ralph Nader just keeps on running for president and as a student of politics I would like to know just what is going to happen if a 'President Nader' was to actually be elected. Nader gathers a lot of support from people who have given up on the Democrats and the Republicans and would like to see a third party integrated in to the political process. Mr. Nader is a very intelligent man and understands how our government functions yet does not see the great danger of having a third party president with a legislature made up of Democrats and Republicans who are not of his party.
As we know, our government has three branches. The executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Because we have a separation of powers the three branches of government provide oversight to the other two branches and all three work together in governing. When the president wants to get legislation passed or stop legislation from getting passed he will go to members of his party in the House and the Senate to gain support for the agenda. We all remember that Bush had to get approval from Congress before he could have our troops invade Iraq in 2003. With a third party president who has no allies from his own party in the House or the Senate how would he get anything done? This is the question Nader is realistically addressing. Most member of both houses of Congress believe that Nader is to the left of the Democratic Party and the only allies he may find in the legislature would be the Kucinich types or Maxine Waters types. Those considered the most liberal. I think these people are great politicians but they don't represent the American people. They represent a small fraction of the American people.
Nader's presidential runs are purely symbolic and are not working towards a clearly stated goal of what will happen when he would take power. Understanding that we are a democracy and not a monarchy should explain the situation very well. He needs allies in the legislature to help get his agenda through or else he becomes a lame duck stuck in 4 miserable years of political gridlock. The Democrats and Republicans would have no partisan allegiance to the president and that would put the president in a horrible position to be able to govern as a chief executive.
What third party organizers need to start thinking about is a bottom-up approach to getting candidates into elected office. They need to put their focus on getting candidates elected to the House and the Senate. If they devised a strategy to riddle both houses of Congress with Green Party candidates over the next 20 to 30 years then they could be in a position to realistically run a candidate for president from a third party. With allies in both houses of Congress a president can govern and push their agenda for the country.
I would like to see Ralph Nader wake up from this black sleep that has caused him to take great sums of campaign funds from Bush/Cheney supporting Republicans, throw an election (2000) that could have saved us from the horrible crisis the U.S. in now on so many fronts, and not learn from the 2000 election and then run in the following one (2004).
I want him to wake up and run for Congress. I believe in the ideals of democracy and I believe that having more than two parties would be more representative of the American people, although I myself am a Democrat. But the strategy Nader employs makes me suspicious of what he may really be up to. I don't know what that could be but his behavior and vision of what the country will be like when he is president causes me to have a moment of pause where I think that he can't really believe what he is saying.
If they begin from the bottom-up, third parties have a good shot at making their way in to elected offices across the country over time. Ralph Nader needs to be humbled and take his eyes off of the prize because he could be hurting this movement much more than he ever help it. So I say this:
Start the movement Ralph, don't end it!

Have Lincoln and Kennedy Set the Standard for Presidential Assassinations?

I'm sure all of you like myself have heard the concern of many of the possibility of Barack Obama getting assassinated as president. I often think about the psychology of this concern and why people point the finger at Obama getting shot that no one questioned when Kerry or Gore ran. Or when Clinton and Bush were President. The first obvious explanation is his skin color. Many are afraid that white supremacists will try to assassinate him because he is black.
Should this be a concern? Yes. Is it a likely scenario? I don't think so. When I think about a white supremacy group going up against the Secret Service and the FBI who will protect the President it doesn't seem likely to me that they will be able to pull off an assassination. To shoot a president would be no easy task, especially in the United States. It would take a high level of sophistication in the strategic planning and execution of the plan. Maybe you do, but I don't give white supremacy groups that much credit. I don't find them to be that bright. Mostly a bunch of uneducated thugs.
But Obama is a trans formative figure with great communication skills and an angle for governing that comes from outside the box. It's starting to smell like Lincoln and Kennedy. Lincoln was the first Republican ever elected to the presidency, Kennedy the first Irish Catholic, and Obama is the first African-American President. All three of these men have been very glamorous political figures with an eloquence in the way they speak that can woo the masses like no other can. The country has also chose to invest all of its hopes for the future in the persona's of these three men. But history taught us with the first two that the dream will always end abruptly with a gunshot forever changing history and stunting the progress that has been made.
More importantly though, all three of these men have/had great agenda's for change in America that can be extremely threatening to the power elite who have a vested interest in opposition of these agenda's. Did the Civil War and ending slavery play a role in why Lincoln was killed? I believe so. Was Kennedy's goal to end the Cold War with Russia and avoid combat operations in Vietnam involved in deciding to kill him? I believe so. Will Obama's agenda and attempts to make America a little better for everyone (like Lincoln and Kennedy) and not just the privileged few make him a candidate for assassination? I don't know and this is the level I can see an assassination attempt happening on.
However, there is a difference. Andrew Johnson was a different kind of politician, a Southerner in fact (although many in the South saw him as sympathetic to slaves). It would have been obvious that he would take the country in a different direction in Lincoln's absence. And he did, oh so miserably. Lyndon Johnson was a very different kind of politician than Kennedy was. Again, it would be obvious to see the country on a different path in Kennedy's absence. And after Kennedy, the country took a different path. But I find extreme safety in this regard in having Joe Biden as Vice President. Biden is a real stand up guy who is much more fit for the presidency than Andrew Johnson or LBJ was in my opinion. Although LBJ had been a star in the Senate he lacked the academic knowledge a president needs. And Andrew Johnson was a nothing Senator from Ga. Biden has been one of America's most respected Senator's for over 20 years and was elected to the Senate at 30 years old (the minimum age requirement for a Senator), And this guy cam from a very blue collar family. He did it all on his own.
But more than that, Biden shares Obama's vision for America. I find a lot of security in this. There is no other path for America waiting a heart beat away from the presidency. Assassination would accomplish very little for those who would want to see America on a different path. Plus, after the Kennedy assassinations Congress legislated standards for protection of the president and presidential candidates that were non-existent in the 1960's. This is in large part why the only assassination attempt we've seen since the 1960's has been on Reagan in 1981. That was almost 28 years ago.
So you can sleep now. When having a practical, objective look at the possibility of another presidential assassination in the coming years we see that the chances are quite low and that this cult of personality around Obama that reminds us of a Lincoln or Kennedy like figure drives our belief that past events will predict the future.

Are We Seeing the Beginning of a New Realignment?

In America, there there has been three major realignments of our political system since the founding of our country. The first alignment was in the 1770's-1780's when this country was first established, the British were defeated in the Revolutionary War at this country was born. About 70 to 80 years later there was a realignment of American government when the Civil War was fought and slavery was abolished. The country took another hard turn politically about 70 to 80 years after that when the great depression hit and WWII was fought causing another realignment where government was introduced as a friend of its public through the New Deal policies and the world was divided up between democracy and communism after the war.
Well, here we are 70 to 80 years after our last realignment and it hasn't happened again yet. Experts have been saying we are due for a realignment for the past decade. Are we starting to see the next realignment? Barack Obama is changing the political landscape in America. The election of the first African-American president is a huge milestone for American politics and has sent a message that has changed the status of minorities in politics. And with a huge victory for Democrats in the Executive and Legislative branches of government could we be heading in to another progressive era? The last one was in the 1960's under JFK and LBJ when the Democrats controlled both the presidency and both houses of Congress. That was over 40 years ago. Progressive era's like those of the 1930's and 1960's show us a kind of politics where the government extends a helping hand to the less fortunate in society by using government to create more opportunity so that every American has a fair shot at achieving the American dream that we all seek to live.
The Reagan revolution that was born in the election of 1980 put a halt to progressive politics and took the Democratic Party down a road that painted them as weak on defense and void of moral values. With Reagan's soaring popularity the Democrats were in a real fix to get anything done the way they wanted to. By electing Bill Clinton in 1992 the Democrats saw the hope of recovery for the party until the Clinton sex scandal took the party right back to where Reagan had put it in the 1980's. By the election of 2000, the Republicans were in control of all three branches of government for the first time in several decades. They held that power until 2006 when the politics of trickle down economics, expanding the power of corporate America, and cultural division saw its chickens coming home to roost. The long held argument by liberals that these kinds of politics do not work and could be detrimental to our political system came to fruition in the election of 2006 when the American people gave control of the House and the Senate back to the Democrats. Did our Republican President George W. Bush get the message and make changes? No. So things got even worse and here we are.
Obama is a trans formative figure. He has communication skills that give JFK and Ronald Reagan a run for their money. As history has taught us, great communicators make great changes in the way we think about politics and the way we practice politics. People are questioning whether Obama will be able to carry this country the way FDR, JFK, or Reagan did. If he cannot make great changes it would be the first time in history that a president with great communication skills has not been able to do so.
So what will Obama do with the presidency and a Democratically control legislature? Our country is in crisis economically, militarily, and morally. There is much work to be done and it is up to the new president and the new congress to steer us in a direction that will make us that shining city on a hill that we once were. This is still a wonderful country in which I am so proud to be a citizen of, but I remember better days and I want to move forward so we can have them once again.
If there is going to be another realignment now is the time! Hold on to your seats America because we're about to ride in to the future with a great leader at the helm and change is coming to America. Say your prayers and cross your fingers that this great leader of great moral character will be assisted by those who oppose him to do the right thing and put the welfare of our fellow countrymen before our own personal interests.