[seanc623]

THANKS FOR YELLING YOUR ANSWER You can vote for anybody you want to. It's still a free country last time I checked. My point was that by voting for a third party, which at the Presidential level doesn't have a chance in Hades to win, you are essentially giving a free vote to the Hillary's of the world. By not voting period you are giving a free vote to the Hillary's of the world. It's a fact. Deal with it. The dems do enough vote manufacturing without us helping them by voting for people like Perot. Unless you get a third party candidate, (like we did here in MN with Jesse), who is fiscally conservative and socially liberal and can capture about 40% of the centrist vote a third party candidate is not going to win. The left here still voted for Skippy Humphrey and the right voted for Norm Coleman. The middle voted for Jesse and voila, we have Jesse the Mind running our state. A third party candidate that is either far left or far right is NEVER going to get enough of the vote to win. Sure, you're still entitled to vote for whoever you want to, but I stand by my statement that a vote for a third party is a vote for the other major party on the left/right scale.

Didn't mean to yell my answer; I stand by my point that if you settle for less, less is all you'll ever get. Jesse won by talking like a Libertarian but has governed like a big spending Democrat/Republican. My party should have run a candidate against him then and I hope we'll run someone this time. I don't like his typical politician act of late and I'd love to see him tumble from the good graces of the media that first ignored him then tripped all over themselves to embrace him as the Next Big Thing.

[terilyn]

You've kind of made my point for me. Jesse ran on the Reform Party ticket and has switched to an Independent. I don't know if you're from MN, but you seem to follow the politics from here. This years race for Governor will be interesting.

Roger Moe has received the D endorsement.

Tim Pawlenty and Brian Sullivan are going to end up in a battle for the R endorsement.

Sullivan is the more conservative candidate but IMHO he's not electable. And, if you listen to the more conservative media around here they agree. Still, the true activists will come out for the caucus and Sullivan will very likely get the endorsement. Pawlenty is more of a Norm Coleman candidate. A R but not a hard R. Here in Minnesota where the libs rule sometimes you have to settle for the lesser evil to keep the dems out of office. In this case Pawlenty is definately preferable to Moe. And, word from a lot of R's is that if Sullivan wins the endorsement, they'll vote for Jesse. If Pawlenty wins, they'll vote for him. Sad, but it's a fact.

That's the exact reason why, in today's world, Keyes, Buchanan, Browne, et all don't stand a chance in a national election. There are too many centrists that don't want either a true conservative or a true liberal with that much power.

If you go back and read a lot of the legislation that Reagan passed it's amazing. He's viewed as a true conservative, but a lot of what he passed is very liberal. Farm bills, amnesty, etc. He was a wise man that knew he had to walk the middle of the road on some items in order to get the support he needed for the truly important ones. The only truly important items are support of our military and getting conservative judges on the bench at the apellate level and to the Supreme Court. Everything else, (CFR for example), can be fought in the courts. If we don't win back the Senate and keep the House, we can all expect that the only judges that will make it to confirmation will be centrist or liberal judges. That will be the beginning of true socialism as we know it.