Give some credit to Democratic presidential candidates for at least showing up on Univision the other night to translate to Spanish their market-tested platitudes and canned pander. Republicans just blew off the Spanish-language network.
But nothing bilingual changes the fundamental stupidity of the presidential primary process. That’s easy to understand in any language and nowhere more so than here in Florida, where both major parties plan to disenfranchise primary voters for failing to hold elections according to party dictates. If that doesn’t make you wish for an alternative to Democrats and Republicans, nothing will.
Fortunately, there is an alternative in unity08. We’ve been pimping it here on a regular basis and wish local mainstream media would help inform their still sizeable audience (how did so many media types get to be such insufferable conformists, anyway?).
Unity08 is as much about process as politics, which is to say that it’s perfect for any large state that’s getting kicked to the curb by a bunch of self-serving, big-party power brokers. The idea is to leverage the social-networking power of the Internet to neutralize the disproportionate influence of private money and to diminish the sway of single-issue zealotry over our national political agenda.
A natural, common reaction to anything smacking of third-partyness is a roll of the eyes. They can’t win because they’re too extreme, left or right, and only capable of siphoning votes from one of two genuinely viable candidates. That’s been true in the past. Is it true of unity08?
Check this survey of unity08’s membership and decide for yourself. Roughly a third is Democratic, a third is Republican and a third is independent. Most of them hold the military in high regard and list terrorism, health care and education as their top three issues. They see themselves as slightly left of center on social issues and slightly right of center on economic issues - dead center overall. More than 50 percent of them fly an American flag and 41 percent own a gun. What’s the one thing a huge majority of Unity08 members share in common? A high-speed Internet connection.
The Internet democratizes everything it touches. Why not presidential politics?