After watching Republican leaders endorse Donald Trump for president, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called on \u201cthoughtful conservatives\u201d to start a \u201cNew Republican Party \u2014 a center-right party liberated\u201d from narrow-minded politicians, talk show hosts and special interest groups. \u201cIf you build it,\u201d he promises, \u201cthey will come.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ray Metcalfe will probably disagree. In 1986, he tried to do that in Alaska. But over the course of two decades almost no one came. And voices like Friedman, and the news media in general, are partly to blame because they treat third parties as an irrelevant sideshow.<\/p>\n
When Metcalfe started the Republican Moderate Party here, he sought to remove the special interest influence of the religious right. Even if he hoped to rebuild Alaska\u2019s GOP, he recognized there would be a transition period where his third party would have to win \u201cenough seats to deny each of the other parties a majority.\u201d That would let them help \u201cform a coalition absent radicals from the Left or the Right.\u201d<\/p>\n
The quotes come from Metcalfe\u2019s 1998 run for governor on a platform he described as \u201cmoderately conservative on fiscal issues and moderately liberal on social issues, with a twist of Libertarianism.\u201d He finished fourth with six percent of the vote.<\/p>\n
But four years later the Republican Moderate Party\u2019s nominee for governor couldn\u2019t even muster one percent. And throughout its history they managed to elect only one representative to the Legislature. When Metcalfe realized his dream was over he became a Democrat. And now he\u2019s running for the U.S. Senate as one.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s Metcalfe\u2019s third bid for Congress, though he\u2019s never won a primary. If he succeeds this time he\u2019s hoping conservatives will help him win the general election by splitting their vote between Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Margaret Stock, a lifelong Republican running as an independent.<\/p>\n
Like Metcalfe in 1986, Stock feels the GOP has moved too far to the right. For instance, the party\u2019s position on immigration isn\u2019t aligned with \u201cchallenging our complex immigration laws in order to provide more humane and rational policies,\u201d work which earned her a \u201cgenius grant\u201d from the MacArthur Foundation.<\/p>\n
But unlike Metcalfe, Stock won\u2019t run as a Democrat because she blames both parties for the hyper-partisan gridlock in Congress. And for similar reasons, 16 other individuals are making independent bids for the state Legislature.<\/p>\n
But Alaska\u2019s GOP chairman Tuckerman Babcock isn\u2019t buying it. He calls them all Democrats \u201ctrying to pull one over on the voters and make it appear that they\u2019re somehow neutral.\u201d Of course, that\u2019s a convenient campaign soundbite intended to sow mistrust for any candidate opposing his party\u2019s members.<\/p>\n
According to Babcock, \u201cthere are only two teams\u201d in American politics. He\u2019d like it to stay that way. And Freidman would, too. \u201cAmerica needs a healthy two-party system,\u201d he wrote, \u201ca healthy center-right party to ensure that the Democrats remain a healthy center-left party.\u201d But unlike Babcock, he says we\u2019ve only got one because the GOP is morally bankrupt.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a problem though with Freidman\u2019s implication that the Democrats are and should remain a center-left party. It excludes candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders. And that would silence the voices of the 12 million people who voted him.<\/p>\n
One can easily argue that Sanders isn\u2019t a real Democrat. Until he declared his candidacy for the presidency, he was an Independent who called himself a democratic socialist.<\/p>\n
Why didn\u2019t he run as an Independent? Probably because he recognized the futility of such a campaign. Not in terms of money but exposure. As Sanders, and Trump for that matter, argued throughout the primary season, the two-team game is rigged because the media ignores Independents and candidates put forth by the Green and Libertarian parties.<\/p>\n
Instead, the two outsiders played by the party rules and earned almost 45 percent of total votes cast. Had they run as Independents in the general election, and the media treated them as viable candidates during the entire campaign, it\u2019s conceivable they could have won those and much more.<\/p>\n
Let me argue this from another perspective. For more than a decade the majority of people in this country haven\u2019t approved of how Congress or either party has run the country. By extension, that\u2019s an indictment against our two-party system. That\u2019s why more than just the candidates of the two major parties should be heard.<\/p>\n
And if those rules are changed, just maybe we\u2019ll elect more people like Gov. Bill Walker, who is trying to govern with his \u201cAlaska First Unity\u201d pledge to put interests of the people and state ahead of the parties.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After watching Republican leaders endorse Donald Trump for president, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called on \u201cthoughtful conservatives\u201d to start a \u201cNew Republican Party \u2014 a center-right party liberated\u201d from narrow-minded politicians, talk show hosts and special interest groups. \u201cIf you build it,\u201d he promises, \u201cthey will come.\u201d Ray Metcalfe will probably disagree. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":8,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-28098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28098\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28098"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=28098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}