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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PartyTime who wrote (63683)	12/30/2002 5:53:21 PM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

.. can we in America really use our own election process as an above mark benchmark? We now have a president who got fewer votes than his opponent and one who literally got the presidency from a Supreme Court which stopped a legitimate State of Florida recount. The election outcome was so close it was in the noise. What do you prefer, the situation in France where the mainstream socialist candidate (Jospin) gets knocked out of the election by a right wing clown (Le Pen) in the first pass because of the uncontrolled plethora of insignificant candidates, none of which had any chance of really being elected ? No election is perfect, in fact completely equitable "public choice functions" are a mathematical impossibility. As for one party being "nearly the same" as the other, this just shows that the country is not as divided as some people are claiming. Of course, there aren't going to be absolutely radical differences between mainstream presidential candidates in any normally functioning and healthy liberal democracy. European countries that pride themselves on being "models of socialism" have just as much pressure from special interest groups as we do, it's inevitable in any democracy. Only totalitarian command economies manage to "avoid" this problem. The United States doesn't need to take lessons from the rest of the world on the democratic process, despite the obsessional anti-Americanism that's bruited about, and whose followers never miss a chance to cast any event whatsoever in a negative manner for the USA.