WANNA HELP ME TAKE BACK THE SENATE?
Posted on 11/01/2002 10:07:17 AM PST by AdamSelene235
The balance of power on Capitol Hill could rest on the shoulders of a politician who has been censured by his own party and arrested three times this year.
It's a long shot, but that's one scenario spinning out of the poll numbers in Colorado's neck-and-neck U.S. Senate race.
Recent polls suggest the race between Republican Sen. Wayne Allard and Democrat Tom Strickland could be decided by as little as 1 percentage point.
Meanwhile, those same polls show Libertarian renegade Rick Stanley siphoning about 3 percent of the vote - and taking slightly more from Allard than Strickland.
If Stanley did end up hurting Allard, it could cost Republicans a chance of taking over a majority in the U.S. Senate.
Then, at least theoretically, as goes Stanley, so goes the Republican agenda on everything from the war in Iraq to judicial nominations.
"It is theoretically possible," said pollster Paul Talmey. "It ultimately could affect whether Democrats have a majority. Maybe the whole universe tilts on Rick Stanley."
Republican Katy Atkinson agreed that the "Stanley factor" could come into play this year in Colorado - as Green Party candidate Ralph Nader did in the down-to-the-wire presidential contest in 2000.
"In this close a race . . . and with all the toss-up races in the Senate, wilder scenarios than that have proven out," Atkinson said.
"Anytime you have a close election, that's really the only time these third-party candidates are significant. A mainstream Libertarian candidate would probably be drawing from Republicans. Stanley is so far out on the fringe, I'm not sure who he is drawing from," she added.
Stanley is a self-described "attack dog," defender of the U.S. Constitution and the right to bear arms.
Three times this year, he has been arrested for flouting gun control laws by carrying a holstered handgun to public campaign events.
Much of his campaign has been waged over the Internet, and he got into hot water with Colorado Libertarian Party officials after forwarding e-mails suggesting that Allard be put on trial for treason and "hung if found guilty."
Stanley thinks most members of Congress are guilty of violating the U.S. Constitution for pushing laws that threaten civil liberties in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Stanley survived his intraparty challenge with only a censure.
He scoffs at critics who have dismissed him as a "renegade, bomb-throwing, anarchist nut case."
And he takes glee in the comparisons to Nader, who took 97,488 votes of disaffected liberals in the 2000 election in Florida, which Democrat Al Gore lost to George W. Bush by an official tally of 537 votes.
"These people in the Democratic and Republican parties who are incumbents need to have a message sent to them," Stanley said. "We're letting them know that the status quo is not acceptable.
"We may not be able to mount a party that has more than a third of the vote, but we can help decide who's going to be in there."
Allard and Strickland have been taking turns on top of the most recent Rocky Mountain News/News4 polls, conducted by Talmey-Drake Research and Strategy Inc.
A poll released Thursday showed Strickland leading Allard 41 to 39 percent, with Stanley taking 3 percent. Another 11 percent were undecided, and 6 percent of respondents would not answer or were voting for other candidates.
Also in the race are American Constitution Party candidate Douglas "Dayhorse" Campbell and John Heckman of the Concerns of the People Party.
Among people who said they had cast early ballots, Stanley had gotten only 2.1 percent of the vote, compared with 43.7 percent for Allard and 41.9 percent for Strickland.
Allard campaign manager Dick Wadhams points out that because the Libertarian Party calls for legalizing marijuana, its candidates sometimes take votes from Democrats in liberal enclaves.
If Stanley ends up taking more votes from Allard, however, "The reality is there's nothing we can really do about it," Wadhams said. "I don't lose a lot of sleep about it."
Still, as Election Day approaches, Stanley said he has been besieged with e-mails from worried and angry Republicans.
As one missive reads: "If Strickland wins, the blame rests on the rump-sitters, (expletive deleted) moaners and the Bush-bashing, whining, fifth-column Libertarians and third parties promoting divisiveness, dividing and conquering the electorate so the one world, secular global socialists can win."
Stanley fired back: "I am personally taking great satisfaction in bringing you lying, treasonous, sorry excuse for Republicans masquerading as conservatives to your knees. You all deserve it."
Speculation about the Stanley factor fits into the traditional eleventh-hour fire sale in American politics. At the end of hard-fought campaigns, theories by pundits and journalists are a dime a dozen.
Still, it's no secret why the latest scenario is getting attention, Atkinson said. "When it's that close, every little thing can make a huge difference."
Even little ol' Rick Stanley.
Its odd that Allard has started pushing windmills. Why is he more interested in wooing the Greens than the Libs?
Allard looked me in the eye and tried to BS me on the viability of wind farms. Naturally, he has no problem picking my pocket to pay for such nonsense.
To me it seems more than theoretically possible. It seems pretty likely. Maybe Wayne Allard can hurry up in the next five days and find a nice, appealing middle ground between Conservative and Libertarian.
The truth is when the fringe left and the fringe right have candidates their followers vote for their candidates. When they don't have candidates, they either don't vote or split down the middle.
Both the Libertarians and the Greenies will tell you there is not a dimes worth of difference between the major parties. When they don't have their own candidates they either don't vote or split their votes 50 50 between the parties.
Only one of them seems to believe my earnings do not belong to me. Only one of them had the gall to lie to me about my own field (engineering/physics). And only one of them is going to spend my confiscated income on windmills even after I explicited spelled out why it was a waste of my money.
If Allard would get serious about reducing taxes,government waste, or protecting the Bill of Rights, I might vote for him. When I met him he was helping a company exclude itself from burdensome regulation in exchange for a fund raiser. I would prefer to see him attack the crippling regulation, but somehow I don't think he will do that. After all, that is the source of these people's power. First you rob and cripple people with regulation and taxes and then you secure political power by allowing certain organizations to exclude themselves from the rules or share in the loot.
This sort of behavior is killing this country.
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