Election 2000 - Naive Alliances - Ethan Rand

The other day I sent out an email to a few friends asking for a decent pro-Bush and pro-Gore article -- I wasn't surprised to find that all of the responses I received led me instead to thinly veiled attacks on the opponent rather than reasonable arguments in favor of the candidate.

Well, it's clear that the Presidential election is a Yale vs. Harvard game playing on the artificial turf of the American media. Shit, did I just say that? I'm a journalist.

'Vote your principles, not your wallet.' -E. Rand

Anyway, just about every time someone supposedly "advocates" one of these Ivy League caliber assholes over another they say the phrase "lesser of two evils" or they start knocking the other guy. So one of my pals called me the other night to advise me to "vote my conscience." In the course of the conversation he also said that he wanted to reduce the size of the government and pay less in taxes. My friend also said that if he had his way he'd vote for the Libertarian candidate -- but he felt as though it would be a wasted vote. He said he planned to vote for Bush.

Ah ha, I thought -- so I shouldn't really vote my conscience, I should vote for a more likely winner. Right.

Our conversation lasted about an hour -- with both of us bashing both candidates and troubling over their duplicity and lack of substance -- before he said he would reconsider voting for Bush in favor of voting for the Libertarian candidate. He had called to try to convince me to vote for a major party candidate and ended up unable to support this view.

Both Bush and Gore are so clearly in the pocket of corporate interests that I don't feel like either of them would be representing me.

I've often fantasized about adding a check box to the ballot -- a non-vote. Each non-vote would take away one of the candidates' votes. It would clearly be a battle of negative integers with the winner being the candidate whose total vote count more closely approached zero.

So what am I getting at here? Vote for a third party if you feel like that's the best representation of you personal, financial, political and spiritual principles. I don't think it's a wasted vote at all -- particularly if some third parties get access to public campaign financing funds. Then these assholes, er, politicians will really have to earn our votes.

Oh yeah, I'd also like to see more nudity in public, print ads and on our currency.