What are McCain and Obama Afraid Of?

PRLog (Press Release) – Sep 23, 2008 – There are many people whom I have encountered that have expressed their disgust of the two-party system, especially how the leaders of the two parties place party before nation, and the perception that they are beholden only to large donors, rather than the citizens they ostensibly serve.  Those of us who support third-party candidates have been pushed out to the fringes by these two incumbent parties, who have used their money, power and virtually unlimited access to the major media to perpetuate the two-party system. The Republicans and the Democrats, however, can only marginalize us up to a point. When there are enough of us, they will have no choice but to listen. We need more people to have the courage to say that the emperor has no clothes.

Take as an example what has happened to the presidential debates. Ever since Perot's appearance against Clinton and the first President Bush in the 1992 debates, no other candidate outside the Republican and Democratic parties has been allowed to take part in a national debate alongside the Democratic and Republican candidates. Conveniently, the allegedly non-partisan Commission for Presidential Debates (CPD) is co-chaired by the former heads of the RNC and DNC. I will leave it to you to guess which masters they serve.

In fact, outside the second debate four years ago, two legitimate candidates (Michael Badnarik of the Libertarians and David Cobb of the Greens) were arrested while attempting to serve a show cause order on the CPD as to why a debate at a public facility, paid for at least in part by taxpayer dollars, excludes legitimate candidates. The CPD was created by the Republicans and Democrats specifically to wrest the debates away from the League of Women Voters because the LWV had the nerve to say that there were more than two parties who should be heard in the debates.

If candidates were thrown in jail during the campaign in any other country, we would be (rightfully) screaming about this attack upon the democratic process. This story did not make it to ANY mainstream news source, to the best of my knowledge. I would wager that a large percentage of people who knew about these arrests (and I would be willing to surmise that this was a tiny percentage of the overall population) learned about it on a popular blog known as fark.com, better known for its irreverent takes on current events.

Here's a perfect example of the collusion between the Republicans and Democrats. This is taken verbatim from the 32-page "Memorandum of Understanding" agreed to by the Bush and Kerry camps in 2004:
(Source: www.c-span.org/pdf/memounderstanding.pdf)
(d) The parties agree that they will not
(1) issue any challenges for additional debates,
(2) appear at any other debate or adversarial forum with any other presidential or vice presidential candidate, or
(3) accept any television or radio air time offers that involve a debate format or otherwise involve the simultaneous appearance of more than one candidate.

Unsurprisingly, there has been no release of the terms and conditions of this year's debates (as of the time this piece is being written).

Since many in the media are intricately connected to the same people who control the Republicans and Democrats, all of this gets buried. Of course, while the populace is polarized along left/right lines, I believe that the parties are using this divide and conquer strategy to serve their own interests, harming our nation even further. If one believes that the Democrats or Republicans have our interests at heart, I have some swampland in Nebraska for sale.

In 2000, I actually had one person threaten to bring me up on treason charges for voting third-party. There are actually people that believe that third parties are (or should be) against the law, and there are many others who may not even know that other parties exist. Another contributing problem is the ongoing combined effort of the Big Two to deny ballot access to other parties.

Those of us who support candidates other than those of the Republican and Democratic parties (and in the interest of full disclosure, I am not a member of any party and voted for the aforementioned Mr. Badnarik in 2004) believe we have a right to be heard on an equal footing with the "big two". Elections, especially federal elections, are too important not to have our citizens be informed of ALL possible choices. We do not ask for special treatment; rather, we ask for equal treatment. We ask only that other legitimate candidates have the opportunity to state their case to ALL of the American people. Let the American people -- not the Democratic/Republican cartel and their fellow travelers -- decide which candidates and views they wish to accept or reject as they see fit.

I am aware that there are some people who have been on the ballot in one state or another, who can at best be called crackpots. The tragedy of this is that legitimate, serious candidates become lumped into this group by many people. My proposal is as follows: If a candidate is on the ballot in enough states holding enough electoral votes to mathematically win the Presidency, that candidate should be a part of the national debates. In this election, there are six candidates meeting this requirement: Sens. Obama (Democrat) and McCain (Republican), former Reps. Bob Barr (Libertarian) and Cynthia McKinney (Green), Ralph Nader (independent), and Chuck Baldwin (Constitution).
I believe that this is a rather manageable number of candidates for debates that are viewed by tens of millions of people; debates that have the potential of influencing the most important choice that an American citizen has: to choose the person to lead this nation for the next four years.