Okay, but how do they prevent him from forming a Cabinet? He chooses the Cabinet ministers, yes? Which officially are appointed by the sovereign, if I remember my earlier reading correctly, but I don't know where the Commons comes into the process.
I won't argue the failings of a two-party system, but I don't think my point would be much different if we had three or four parties. To get a president into office requires the influence of a national party, or at least one that commands enough support across the nation to beat the others to the finish line. You can't win from D.C. alone. I suppose if we had (say) four political parties, New England or the Deep South or whoever might be able to scrape together 30% of the vote and beat out the other three splitting the remaining 70%, but that doesn't look like much of an improvement to me, since coalition government (at least of the sort formed after the elections) doesn't exist here. So we have national parties, and the presidential primaries give people a say in who gets put up for that office.
Do your parties have nominations? It occurs to me the primary argument could be tossed out if five Republican candidates could all run for the same office in the general election, instead of the party putting its backing behind a single candidate. But man, that sounds like it would be chaos.
It boggles me, though, that people say our two major parties don't look too different. On the level of individual candidates, I may agree, and admittedly the political winds have led to a certain amount of rhetorical see-sawing on particular points, especially wrt economics. But when you get past the rhetoric (we need to educate our children! and protect American workers! and end corruption in government!) and start looking at the intended policies, I find it hard to see much similarity between the two. It might be better to say there isn't a single dominant philosophy in either party, that shapes all their positions on the various issues; that, I could agree with.
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yati
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Date: 2008-10-29 11:34 am (UTC)I won't argue the failings of a two-party system, but I don't think my point would be much different if we had three or four parties. To get a president into office requires the influence of a national party, or at least one that commands enough support across the nation to beat the others to the finish line. You can't win from D.C. alone. I suppose if we had (say) four political parties, New England or the Deep South or whoever might be able to scrape together 30% of the vote and beat out the other three splitting the remaining 70%, but that doesn't look like much of an improvement to me, since coalition government (at least of the sort formed after the elections) doesn't exist here. So we have national parties, and the presidential primaries give people a say in who gets put up for that office.
Do your parties have nominations? It occurs to me the primary argument could be tossed out if five Republican candidates could all run for the same office in the general election, instead of the party putting its backing behind a single candidate. But man, that sounds like it would be chaos.
It boggles me, though, that people say our two major parties don't look too different. On the level of individual candidates, I may agree, and admittedly the political winds have led to a certain amount of rhetorical see-sawing on particular points, especially wrt economics. But when you get past the rhetoric (we need to educate our children! and protect American workers! and end corruption in government!) and start looking at the intended policies, I find it hard to see much similarity between the two. It might be better to say there isn't a single dominant philosophy in either party, that shapes all their positions on the various issues; that, I could agree with.