Heartily seconded. Two parties alone simply can't adequately represent the diversity of this nation.
Heartily waffling. While, on the one hand, I'm almost as frustrated with my own party as I am with the other bunch, I would hate to see the US fall into the kind of mess they have in Italy and Israel, where there are numerous parties, so numerous that none can gain a majority on its own. Every election, they have to form multi-party co-alitions just to come up with a government. The coalition members all demand concessions and compromises. Whether they get them or not, the coalitions are always falling apart or threatening to fall apart. It's not very stable or efficient.
On the other hand, we've seen ourselves how dramatically both parties can change. Clinton dragged the Democrats to the center. Bush II adopted the neo-con agenda. Neither party is what it was twenty years ago.
The problem for us is to take control of our parties back to the grass roots and make them what we want them to be, not what they think they have to be to get elected. We have to stop them focusing on divisive fake problems and force them to address the elephants and donkeys in the living room: abiding by the Constitution, making our healthcare #1 instead of #37, eliminating the national debt, educating our children, recovering our productivity, preserving and improving our environment, and doing government business in real time and the light of day. I refuse to accept that we cannot; I'm tired of accepting that our parties will not.
