Age of the Geek

By: 
Travis Fischer

Conventional Wisdom
  
     So let's recap the last couple weeks.
     Michelle Obama gave a critically acclaimed speech at the Republican National Convention. Ted Cruz became a hero to Democrats. And Hillary Clinton proved to women everywhere that if you marry into politics and spend decades building an extensive career, you can one day be considered a worthy opponent for a billionaire reality TV star who stumbled his way into a national election and can't seem to figure out how to get out of it.
     How long was I on vacation?
     To nobody's surprise, Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee for President at their national convention.
     Clinton is by no means the first woman to win a nomination for president. In fact, she's won't even be the only woman to win a nomination for this particular election. That said, yes, Hillary Clinton is the first female nominee that has a realistic shot of winning the presidency. In spite of her own best efforts to the contrary.
     Which is not to say that Clinton isn't trying very hard to win the White House. That's kind of her problem. Her decades of preparation to be president has stripped her of any likability she might have had. She is a ruthless power player and, like Darth Vader, the more she squeezes, the more supporters slip through her fingers.
     From the start of the primary, Bernie Sanders supporters operated under the assumption that the deck was stacked against them. That the power brokers within the Democratic Party had already decided who the nominee was going to be and the popular vote wouldn't really matter. It turns out they might have been right.
     Once again, Clinton has an e-mail problem. And this time the e-mails aren't even hers.
     Shortly before the Democratic National Convention leaked e-mails revealed that the DNC had been less than neutral when it came to the primary race between Clinton and Sanders. With Sanders running so closely behind Clinton in the hotly contested primary, it really makes one wonder if he might have eked out a win under different circumstances.
     There doesn't appear to be any evidence that Clinton and the DNC actively conspired against Sanders, or even that the DNC's snarky e-mails actually led to anything of consequence, but the whole kerfuffle has done little to endear her to the "Bernie or Bust" supporters she now has to court.
     To add insult to injury, disgraced former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz now has an honorary position on the Clinton campaign, which looks all manner of suspicious.
     To be fair, it's not like Sanders was completely shut out. He knew his campaign was a long shot. His persistence was never about winning the nomination, but about leveraging his popularity to influence the party platform, which he did.
     That said, it's clear that the DNC wasn't running the primary the way it should have been and they've put a dampener on one of the most energetic political movements in living memory.
     But while the Democratic Party needs some serious house cleaning, the Republican Party has all but collapsed on itself.
     In stark contrast to the DNC bending over backwards to secure Clinton's nomination, the party behind Donald Trump now spends the bulk of their time trying to figure out how to support him while distancing themselves from everything he does.
     The mental gymnastics that Paul Ryan has to perform to reject Trump's statements while holding him up as the standard bearer for his party should earn him a gold medal in Rio.
     Ted Cruz famously said voters should "vote their conscience," but what is a conscientious voter to do when the choice is between a corrupt political insider and an unhinged demagogue?
     Well, there's always a third party. Libertarian Gary Johnson is on the verge of making it into the debates. The Libertarian Platform may not be entirely appealing to Republicans, but with Trump and Clinton in front of them, Johnson may start to look a lot better.
     Meanwhile, Jill Stein of the Green Party is the natural home for "Bernie or Bust" supporters mad about Sanders losing the primary, but not willing to vote for Trump out of spite. The Green Party's platform is essentially the Democratic platform, except they say they'll actually do the things that Democrats promise to do. And with Stein polling at four percent, it's likely they'll never get the chance to be proven wrong.
     A third party would be nice, but until we get ranked voting, third parties are a luxury for people that don't live in swing states. Here in Iowa, where votes actually matter, pragmatism should probably win over principle. Too much is at stake for anything else.
 
     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and hopes the instant-runoff voting proposed in Maine catches on nationwide.

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