Florida, the forgotten

[patrickds]

I decided to write an opinion piece on what is happening in Florida and how I feel about it. The mainstream media and most of the leading candidates are ignoring the situation, and I feel that as a Floridian I have a responsibility to tell things from the point of view of a person directly impacted by the debacle. It jumps around a bit, is somewhat

Comments

[gundevako]

I guess the first thing I should say in response is, be happy you don't have political parties like here in Europe, here they have even less say. There was no referendum when they here for signing the EU constitution or for exchanging the mark for the euro, and these decisions have a direct effect on the people of the country.

I have always admitted that the the one major flaw of the US political system is that it isn't meant to have political parties. We have a system rooted in the ideals of the enlightenment, and in our constitution nothing is said about political parties. We have, possibly, one of the shortest constitutions in the world but it allows interpretation while giving us a system to govern with. The problem is, because political parties are not mentioned in the constitution, they pretty much have to adapt to our system and create there own internal rules and that creates conflicts like this one. The whole thing seems to be a little tacked on, and I start to wonder if we should maybe reconsider how we deal with the party system in the US, especially considering it is the only party system like that in the world. More than any other country in the world can two people in the same party have such differing opinions about something, at least in public.

Well I think I ranted just a little too much in my response there, but I hope you understand what I am saying.

[patrickds]

Hmm... I don't know about Germany, but in Sweden they had a vote on whether to adopt the Euro or not, and they decided not to. I don't think the vote was binding, though; it was more like a large poll (in the guise of an election) to help the government make a decision. Not sure, though, but I know my Swedish friend voted to keep the Kroner. But, yeah, that would stink to not have much say in how your country is run.

And I agree that the political party system in America is fubar. But it's not so bad. ...There's a lot of positives and negatives over all and I'm not sure what would be better. By not having so many differing parties, people of similar (albeit differing) goals can come together and push for chage in a more unified way. And in some other countries that have many viable political parties, most of the time many of the similar parties come together to form a majority coalition, and you end up with only two or three big parties (composed of smaller parties) anyway. Maybe it'd be best to just not have political parties at all, but I'm not sure how well that would work either... I guess I don't have any answers really. Just more conjecture and guesses. Ah, well.

[gundevako]

I think your right, that is the way it is in a lot of countries. Although in German the coalition thing is pretty new. The main liberal party here in Germany, the SPD, is having problems because some of it's members want to start a coalition with the far left. You are also right about how similar the people in the parties are over here. It is kind of creepy how they almost don't seem to be individuals sometimes, just members of a party. In that way I do like the US system better, because we acknowledge that there is a connection with the individual and the type of politics he does.

It is probably worth mentioning that the LDP is a phenomenon in world politics. I believe that no other modern parliamentary system have that type of constellation. Also on a related note, I find Fukuda vastly more boring than Abe or Koizumi! Seriously, Japanese politics, get interesting again!