McCotter's Real Mistake

When Michigan Representative Thaddeus McCotter made his famous E5 (that's an error by the third baseman, for those of you who don't know how to score baseball) he did something more than simply putting a solid Republican House seat in play. He opened the door wide for all sorts of trouble, and not the least of which was making the seat plausibly winible for a Democrat. He opened it up for the likes of Kerry Bentivolio, a Republican in name only, to have the convenience of becoming the only Republican on that actual ballot.

To be sure, the local GOP is attempting a write in campaign to see whether the party can keep Bentivolio off the November ballot. That's because he is in fact a libertarian, and stands against what the mainstream GOP supports.

This why we need to return to the smoke filled rooms of the past. Republicans as a political organization would not give him the time of day. But the parties aren't actually private entities anymore. Anyone who can collect the required number of signatures can have their name put on the primary ballot of either of the big two political parties. That's unfair to both of them. It can lead to situations such as this, where someone who doesn't truly stand for the party ends up a standard bearer. It's a large part of the reason that we have, according to the words of the pundits, demopublicans and republicrats rather than philosophically distinct parties.

To be sure, Bentivolio, being libertarian, plays against this type. Yet generally, the system as we have it has caused a movement towards the mushy center rather than the extremes of either party. Instead of building political organizations with a core of distinct beliefs which anyone can understand, we have entities which appear to merely coalesce around the most common denominator. We end up with no real choice come November.

Or we end up with a Bentivolio, which forces Republicans to vote against their grain or, worse, to vote for the Democrat as the lesser of two evils. Either way, opening up the two major parties to the whim of the public in the end offers less rather than greater choice. It gives the voter not distinct options, but pale gray choices.

This is not pick on Bentivolio, who we are sure is sincere and well meaning. We certainly would vote for a libertarian ahead of a liberal, even though we are not sure the distinction is particularly substantial. And we recognize that the ultimate fault here is with McCotter's stupidity. Yet even that is merely an under the circumstances error. Had the GOP been left to itself, McCotter as an established Republican would have surely gotten the nod without all the hullabaloo about petition signatures.

Close the parties. Allow them to pick their candidates based on their standards, selected by true and active party members. The voting public would still have their free will choice to make in the general elections. Indeed, they would likely have a clearer choice than they do as it is.