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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mac Con Ulaidh who wrote (54968)	3/21/2008 4:38:15 PM
From: Dale Baker	Respond to of 542241

Unfortunately our politics usually come down to, "Let me tell you why my opponent is (fill in adjective about character fault or weakness)..." That's one big advantage of parliamentary systems. There is a clear hierarchical system to work one's way up to party leadership, usually with many important tickets to punch along the way. Personality takes second place to party identification, policies and previous performance in power. In the US, every candidate is somehow weak or immoral, untrustworthy, corrupted, stoops to the worst tactics, etc. Each party ends up saying the same about the other. It's all about driving up the negative image of your opponent in the eyes of the voters. Then they are stuck with your policies once you are in power, of course, even if they voted on the visceral, emotional level that negative campaigning seeks to draw out. And sooner or later they will find out that if they didn't support you for policy reasons in the first place, they will stop approving of the job you are doing. It's tiresome crap. I'm already sick of it and the final vote is 7 1/2 months away.