Plan? Kind sir, you give them far too much credit.

No. Change for change's sake is the evil sibling of growth for growth's sake, and both are more or less cancerous.

What you're sloppily mocking is the campaign slogan "Change we can believe in." I mock campaign slogans as a complete category, so you're not getting any ground with this unrepentant Obama voter and current Obama critic. I even really enjoyed the first time I saw a bumper sticker ask me "So how's that hope and change worked out for you so far?" or words to that effect. It has bitten the big one, but at least I don't have to confront the even larger travesty that would doubtless have unfolded under that former-maverick McCain, who now seems thoroughly whipped by the polling and focus-group crowd.

I'm guessing you mean this fall or 2012, but no, not exactly. We won't have functional 'third choices' in the US until we fix the greatest flaw in our constitution, which is its attempt to reject parties as essential political institutions. Please forgive a former civics prof for ranting, but we need to get past personality-driven politics and work hard to make sure that everyone, from the humblest citizen to the highest elected and appointed officials, think first about policies and values. Bush 43 dropped the Gs at the end of his gerunds and clearly enjoyed taking a chainsaw to scrub on his ranch. Obama has good hoops skills and apparently no fear of beer despite also being obviously professorial in demeanor. All of which is irrelevant to the current and future health and well-being of the US polity.

On the other hand, I most certainly whish for a '3rd choice' in the long term. All we need is a constitutional amendment that shifts the House from single-member, winner-take-all districts to a party-centered system of some sort. The details would not be quick or pretty to hammer out, but in the end we'd have elections where citizens more reasonably expect that their choice of candidate would have specific policy outcomes. Basically, we need to change from the framers' goal of balancing popular will (House) with the views of 'older and wiser' leaders (Senate) to a balance between clearly ideological differences and the geographical boundaries that can make those differences problematic.

I voted for McStupid, it didn't have to bother me because it was obvious as hell he'd lost.

If the defense spending were the only thing going up, maybe there would be something to mutter about.  Since he's jacking spending through the roof in every category, why bother mentioning specific breaks in his campaign promises regarding fiscal responsibility?  I have first class bridges to sell for anyone that expected him to live up to it.

That's pretty much (if sort of backwards) how many of us felt about swallowing our 2000 desire to vote for Nader and still seeing Bush 43 get into office. Are you maybe bipartisan-curious?

You are confusing the liberal plan with the democratic plan.  Liberalism is an ideology - they have all sorts of plans (feminism, abortion, affirmative-action, immigration, blah blah).  Democrats are a political party - their plans are simply "do what the establishment wants, and fulfill their role as the 'other' etablishment party."

There are never any meaningful changes in policy, no matter who is in office.  You can go down the list of big issues, whether it be wars, free trade/globalism, bailouts of wall street banks while everyone else suffers, spending, deficits, etc.  Either party is identical.  The quicker idiots realize this, and start voting third party/independent, the better, but since idiots don't just magically become smart one day (intelligence is basically fixed), hell will freeze over before that ever happens.  So suffer.

There's a saying - "if you're gonna be dumb, you'd better be tough."  I say "if you're gonna be dumb, you'd better have a big butthole."

Nonsense. Calling a legislature a parliament is hardly an insult, and the Supreme Court is an essential bastion against tyranny of the majority (at least in theory). But you might be onto something about carving off head-of-state duties for the chief exec. Ribbon-cutting and dinner-hosting is hardly as important as managing the executive branch and leading the diplomatic corps. A change like that might even possibly relieve presidential candidates of the burdens of needing to be 'likable' for a mass TV audience.

Beg pardon, but until we have a structural change that breaks the power of the duopoloy, you're an idiot if you vote third party when the lesser of two evils has a chance of winning. I live in Florida, so I've gotten to cast rather a few protest votes like that, but the Supreme Court was the reason I stuffed my values in a sack and voted Gore in 2000.

Yes, I was talking about an amendment, just thought the point was obvious. You're party history is a bit shaky, though. The War of Northern Aggression made the Republicans, but that 'adulterous,' gun-loving, injun-killing, pigs-in-the-White-House-party-throwin' Andrew Jackson made the Democrats. Re the historical role of 3rd parties, it just ain't enough for me to see that kind of sloppy ad hoc corrections. I want a consistent set of policy goals I can vote for, and we won't ever have that without breaking the duopoly.

Re my '08 vote, no I wouldn't change it because Florida was crucial to ensuring that McCain lost. Unless you're asking for a little micro-fiction about what might be happening if we had a real Social Democratic party here and that candidate could have won? I voted Nader in '04 because there was zero hope for Kerry in Florida and Nader was only beginning to piss me off.

Well they have my sympathies. I voted for Bill Clinton in the general, but he was dead last on my list for the '92 primaries on account of being a DLC tool. I'd still love to have a long meal with him at the table; dude can talk. But I think we might have had less than 50% overlap in our policy preferences.

Really, though, the kind of poll numbers you mention piss me off because what they really reflect is that huge numbers of regular voters are just not paying any attention to policy and making their decisions a-la Dubya, with their phone-addled, channel-flipping, overworked guts.

Ah!  A fine Southern Gentleman!  I know that Andy got the democrats rolling, but after Andy they were not a constant fixture until after the war (and their opposition to Lincoln) institutionalized them as the party of the south (how times have changes, eh?).  I did not mean to imply that the war created both parties, only that the war set them on the path to being the only 2 parties.

Agreed.

The latter.  I dont mean voting for anyone necessarily on the ballot, but voting for anyone you really wanted (like perhaps Edwards or Clinton).

I think there are many as you describe, but there are also ones like me as well.  I voted for him twice.  The first time out of hope (quickly dashed with his actual policies), and grudgingly in 04 (as Kerry was just totally unacceptable).  I did not approve of what he was doing in many areas, but did in some, so I disapproved of him overall (or one could say I was undecided since I did support some of his policies).  Bush Ran on the right, and governed in the center.  Clinton ran on the center, moved to the left and was dragged back to the center.  Obama just ran left and has governed left (it remains to be seen if he will be dragged back to the center). perhaps that is the beauty of the system.  Regardless of who runs and what they do, eventually they are all temporized by the "silent majority" of the lugs you describe.  I do know most foreigners laugh at us Americans for thinking there is a tinkers damn worth of difference in the parties.  And party rhetoric aside, they are pretty much on target with actual governance.

I'm a structuralist on this point. The particulars of party history are secondary to the fact that we have a House with single-member, winner-take-all districts and a Senate with essentially the same structure because no state has two senators on the ballot in one cycle. No doubt that the national Democrats owed a lot to Lincoln, and perhaps more to the Radical Republicans of the Reconstruction era, for their late-19th and early 20th century strength. But that's historical detail about how change happens under our structure.

Re your run-direction-X, govern-direction-Y thing, from my lapsed scholar's point of view it is better described in ways that reflect the full election cycle. In the primaries, duopoly presidential candidates tend pick what they think is the most valuable chunk of the party base and try to win them over. Because there are policy and ideological differences even in our duopoly, this means more less that 'fringe' elements get lots of attention during the excruciatingly long primary process. After the conventions, both duopoly presidential candidates begin moving to the center, at least rhetorically. For someone like me, that means figuring out just how right-wing to be because we have no meaningful left in this country. Bill Clinton started out a 'DINO' and only got worse by colluding in the creation of NAFTA and the repeal of Glass-Steagall, among other sins (I wanted to fast-track my boot up his ass the day I learned about fast-track trade agreements...). The national health care thing cut him some slack with me, except I sometimes wondered if he and some DLC cronies didn't bungle it on purpose.

Sounds like you might be another vote for an amendment to change Congress to proportional representation by party. Maybe we can trick Congress into calling a convention to ratify an amendment banning gay marriage so we can, in the tradition of our framers, ignore the initial assignment and seize the opportunity to go about doing some real good for the country. A ratifying convention would certainly be more TV-friendly than the old send-it-round-the-state-house route.

Yes, I think so. But then again, maybe not...

Congress definitely takes ideas from state legislatures--the 50 'labs' thing is one of the best things about federalism. Just seems much easier to work on one legislature instead of 50, at least in my wildly implausible scenario.

Frankly, I can't think of anything that would scare any legislator, state or federal, more than the idea of a convention to draft a constitutional amendment. The last time that happened, we went from the Articles of Confederation to the current Constitution, and that change pissed off no small number of folks who were doing well with 13 currencies and other elements of the 'economic chaos' that followed our Revolution.

As a Southron boy with kin way back on both sides, I'm not as fond of states' rights as some might think. Plus, just thinking in sloppy system-theoretical terms, all of us owe a great deal of our safety and prosperity to the steady rise of national standards since the end of the War of Northern Aggression. On the rhetorical side, the states's rights talk also often rings hollow for me because everyone loves to bitch about unfunded mandates, but almost no one ever says no when DC wants to send more money to their state than came into the Treasury from that state.

p.s. Hopefully your knowledge of the basic amendment mechanics has made a few folks get the doc out and read it. I begged, pleaded, and even suggested keeping the textbook in the bathroom in hopes of getting my students to read the Constitution itself. (Constitutions are another area where the fed is superior to (most?) states in my view. Here in Florida, it would take real time to read the damned thing, and there's a new chunk of entirely legislative-level language being added nearly every election cycle because we lack a proper voter referendum process. Our local constitution actually covers pig breeding practices now!)

I've taught a handful of courses on state & local and the main thing they taught me was just what unsung heroes specialists in this area are. Even getting a decent sketch of all 50 states at the top level would need a lot of study time, and learning 3-5 good local level stories for each state would be another, probably taller order.

For us lazy folk, there's that wicked Wikipedia. At the moment, it makes us Floridians look more scholarly than Illinois folks. Our constitutions have a TOC, but Illinois' is buried in a prose lump. That prose lump does show that the margin rejecting the option of a convention dropped significantly between 2008 and the preceding vote in 1998, going from roughly 2.5:1 against to roughly 2:1 against. Also looks like the last time Illinois voters excercised that option was during the opening of the War of Northern Aggression.

p.s. I should confess to having too much fun referring to the textbook Civil War as the WoNA. For the longest time, it was a term that tagged someone as an unrepentant supporter of the Confederacy. But we live in an age where we've had one Illinois native turn pseudo-carpetbagger by moving from Arkansas to the White House as a presidential spouse, then to a New York senate seat, and back to the executive branch as a cabinet official. Maybe we're ready to ditch the initial victor-written stories from back then and start dealing with the fact that there were no saints in that conflict (with the possible exception of devoutly peaceful abolitionists like the Quakers).