Three’s A Crowd, People

While this election season has devolved into a palimpsest for revisionist whining, there is one group that somehow failed to qualify for participation in the Race of Disenfranchised Firsts.â„¢

Even the phrase “third-party candidate” regards as an afterthought all those politicians who have resisted the robotic pull to self-assign as R or D.

Since the national mood is one of reparations – of righting wrongs perpetrated on minorities – third-party candidates are the political equivalent of a Samoan Cherokee lesbian with a cleft palate and a limp.

So why, oh why, aren’t third parties being treated with the deference they deserve? Hell, at this point they’d abandon the demand for deference and settle for no longer being treated like a red-headed stepchild.

Maybe if history students learned more about George Washington’s politics than his were-they-or-weren’t-they wooden teeth, voters would know that the two-party system – parties in general, in fact – scared the hell out of the Founding Fathers.

Seriously, it’s just downright un-American to cultivate a political context in which there is no competition, no mechanism by which voters can take their business elsewhere when they’re unsatisfied with the service they’ve received.

And if there’s ever been a time that voters are itching for a change, it’s now….and even though one candidate tells us he’s ready to deliver that change, choices are always a good thing – you know, in case he can’t actually live up to his own hype. Just sayin.’

Anyway, the American electorate is entirely unhappy with the job the government’s been doing, and yet: That same electorate will readily vote in a new iteration of exactly the same thing they claim to despise.

And you know what? They know it. They know that the guy they vote in – R or D – will screw America over just like all the preceding R’s and D’s. They’ll admit this, and they’ll justify it by regurgitating something about “a third-party vote is a wasted vote.” They won’t understand the rationale of that phrase, of course, because they haven’t heard of the Electoral College…but hey, that’s universal suffrage for ya.

And so it is that at Friday’s first debate of the general election season, third-party candidates will be conspicuously absent from the action.

The thing is, they won’t even be missed. The tiny segment of the country that hasn’t failed to recognize their existence will be busy breathlessly justifying their absence as a necessary avoidance of chaos. That’s the media we’re talking about, people, that group that’s set itself up as the accessibility gestapo, guarding the airwaves from third-party politicians like they’re confining a Cholera outbreak.

Seriously, so adamant is its gate-keeping prowess that the media is willing to abandon its relentless commitment to women in politics, ignoring the all-female Green Party ticket.

Speaking of colors and politics, if red is Republican and blue is Democrat, then third parties are chartreuse: They sound good in the abstract, but nobody’s ever actually seen them. Third parties, like chartreuse, are a high-brow trope, but, like chartreuse, nobody would ever dare to seriously consider them.