I have to ask the question because I’m finding myself agreeing with Dennis Kucinich on an issue. Actually, that’s kind of an exaggeration. While I disagree with most of Kucinich’s platform, he is right on abortion and mostly right when it comes to the drug war. His positions on civil liberties are also mostly right. Where I disagree with him is his economic and foreign policies. I find them to be unworkable and extremely unrealistic. Not sure we need a “Department of Peace” either, when we already have the State department with the capacity for peaceful diplomacy.

But I digress.

What I agree with Kucinich this time, is his outrage at John Edwards and Hillary Clinton for their comments after an appearance at the NAACP. Kucinich has all the details here. (By the way, more props to Kucinich for using Drupal to power his campaign website.).

If Kucinich is being marginalized within his own party, and a major one at that, imagine how hard it is for third party candidates to get national recognition. In 2004, the Libertarian Party had their candidate on 48 of the 50 state ballots for the Presidential election, but were left out of any national debates. The Green Party was also left out, and was actively attacked by the Democrat Party and removed off of some state ballots. The two parties have locked up the system making it very hard for third parties to get any national exposure.

Do I think the Libertarian or Green party candidates had a shot at actually winning? No, I don’t. However, they did have the power to influence the other parties, and they clearly have wide ranging appeal. They should have been allowed in the presidential debates in 2004.

Now, I realize that we can’t let every presidential candidate in on the debates. There must be some objective criteria, like being on the ballot in a certain number of states or receiving a certain percentage of the vote in the last election. Otherwise, we would have Gary Coleman and Gallagher in the debates. I’m not sure yet what the criteria should be, but what we have now is ridiculous.

This might be the first and last post where I write how I agree with Dennis Kucinich, but on an issue like this, it’s easy.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 8:19 am and is filed under Current Events, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.