You said:
“That’s not how it works in a democratic society, folks. People who want to live in freedom and peace learn to get along, to compromise, to listen to the other guy even when he’s dead wrong. Sometimes your guy or your ideas just don’t resonate with all your countrymen. And when that happens, you need to play nice and work for the next-best. This is not a perfect world.”
When Ronald Reagan bolted the Democrat Party it was due to the shift away from the values traditionally espoused by his party. Compromise, learning to get along, listening to the other guy even when you know he’s wrong were no longer tenable positions for him. His ideas did not resonate with the ever-shifting beliefs of his fellow democrats. The next best thing for him was to defect from the party.
No doubt some democrats thought it the height of vanity on his part for him to think that his opinions were too sacred for him to be so dogmatic as to not stick around and play nice.
No, he didn’t run on a third party “vanity ticket”. What he did was run (away from one party and toward another) on principle.
Lots of politicians switch parties. That has nothing to do with this discussion or the points I made.
If Keyes tries a third-party run, it will be an exercise in futility. Surely you aren’t comparing Reagan to that?
We have enough problems this year without Keyes making things worse with a vanity run. We certainly don’t need more blowhards spitting in the wind.