Gern:I thoroughly agree with what you say up until the last sentence. But looking at American politics through European eyes, I could never describe the Republican and Democratic parties as "center of the road." As one illustration of dozens, any party leadership that allows 45 million of its citizens - from young kids to poor sick folks in their 60s - to suffer the anxieties and misery of no health insurance, is an extremist and dangerously heartless organization.
I say "party leadership" because the majority of rank and file Democrats and Republicans, in their personal lives, are usually caring people on a local level. But while they have may have remained true to their parties, their parties have abandoned many of them - not just at national, but at state level, by trekking, sometimes stealthly, always steadily to the right.
Corporate monothiths like Westinghouse, General Electric, Disney and Time Warner (apart from being large political donors)largely control the nation's views and access to information through their holdings in the country's major radio and TV networks. They are continuing to buy up local stations, just as the newspaper sector is being concentrated in alarmingly few hands. How long will the Internet window of freedom last?
The Mudcat forum is extremely healthy, in that people loosely bonded by a common love of international folk music, have freely exchanged a range of viewpoints, mostly absent of rancor. And I would judge that many Mudcat/Gore folks have more empathy with the Greens and their positions than with the Democratic Party. One reason perhaps is that the Greens are still grassroots in their structure, while the National Democratic Committee's body is now inhabited by a monstrous form of corporate Stalinism.
I cannot claim to have voted Nader (merely being a taxpaying non-American)but my wife did, and felt "clean" afterwards. We were two of 52 campaign workers for Nader in NH and our only regrets are that Ralph got just 4 percent in the state rather than the target of 5 percent. But in the words of Joe Hill, "Don't mourn - organize!" And do I care that Gore lost New Hampshire by 1 percent? Not a bit! A smiling snake is still a snake.
Anyway, to those Mudcatters heading for Barry Finn's party on Nov. 18, and ready to take me to task, I am an aging, shortish, tubby guy with glasses and a Scottish accent, sometimes playing 12-string guitar.