Letter:A vote for Zeese is a vote for Republican control of Congress
We don’t know who will be elected to replace Paul Sarbanes in the US Senate. But we do know who it might be and who it won’t be: It will be either Democrat Ben Cardin or Republican Michael Steele.
It will not be third-party candidate Kevin Zeese, whose poll numbers indicate that he will score in the low single digits.
Miniscule numbers, but they might nonetheless be decisive: A late October SurveyUSA poll conducted for WUSA-TV and WMAR-TV has the Steele-Cardin race a dead heat. If accurate, were even one percent of voters to choose Zeese who otherwise would vote for Cardin, Steele will win. And a Steele victory would doom any prospect, however thin, that Democrats might recapture the Senate on November 7.
There is much to admire about Kevin Zeese. He is a bright, articulate activist who has championed peace and, even more courageously, challenged the Reagan-Bush, Sr. “War on Drugs” that aimed to remedy a public health problem with the mass incarceration of citizens for getting high on something other than alcohol. Yet while I agree with Kevin on most issues, I will not be voting for him.
The election of Bush, Jr. over Al Gore should have put to rest the notion that there is no significant difference between the Democrats and Republicans. Had Gore and a Democratic Congress been elected in 2000, it’s fair to assume that there would have been no Iraq war, no budget busting tax cuts for super-rich, and we’d be much further down the road toward addressing the perils of climate change.
During his state senate campaign, Jamie Raskin has been fond of saying that we don’t need a third party, we need a second party that really stands up to Bush and the Republicans. Indeed, history teaches that the American political system is unkind to third parties. Unlike parliamentary systems in which parties are awarded seats based upon their proportion of the vote, ours is a winner-take-all system. That’s why there are no Greens or Libertarians in Congress but there are Democrats who are green and Republicans who are libertarian. And that’s why if Michael Steele gets one more vote than Ben Cardin, Steele wins and Cardin loses. And the Kevin Zeese campaign will have earned an asterisk.
There is plenty about Ben Cardin and the Democratic Party that is uninspiring and downright disconcerting. But I for one am looking forward to the day when the Democrats are in control of Congress (and the White House) and I can again grouse—and protest—about how they are letting us down.
— Mark Cohen
Silver Spring
Comments
I completely agree with Mark. The race is really close. Even one percent could mean "Senator Steele from Maryland". The stakes are too high to protest our "winner take all" system this way. This means the extreme minority holds the majority hostage.
I keep remembering the 90,000 Nader votes in Florida. Even if 2% of those votes had gone for Gore we wouldn't have been in the mess we are in now.
Posted by: Jean Capps | October 27, 2006 05:44 PM