'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
Despite the vast ideological landscapes and political freedoms that set the United States apart from much of world, the 2012 presidential election has been, like so many American elections of the past 150 years, ultimately a two-party contest.
"Regardless of the final results of the election, Wednesday, Nov. 7 continues a gigantic battle between small-government, constitutional conservatives and the big-government Republicans for the heart and soul of the GOP," longtime conservative maven Richard Viguerie tells Inside the Beltway.
As President Obama is in the middle of a two-day "Betting on America" bus tour across Ohio and Pennsylvania, political analysts said he will have to reassemble the "hope and change" demographic coalition of 2008 that relied on a high turnout of youths and blacks, and winning a larger-than-usual percentage of Hispanics and whites. By most accounts, that will be easier said than done.
Henry Olsen writes in his Washington Times Op-Ed "Dangers of academia's 'indoctrination mills' " (Monday), "Despite decades of calling out the problem, conservatives have yet to make a serious dent in the left's dominance of academia."
Mr. Nader was "inconsequential nationally, but because of our electoral system, he cost [Al] Gore Florida, and hence cost him the election," Mr. Olsen said.
ELECTION 2012: Third-party candidacies: Rarely successful, often influential →
"They can be decisive in a lot of ways, often in ways that don't necessarily show up in how well the candidates do, but rather where they do," said Mr. Olsen, who suggested George W. Bush may not have become president in 2000 were it not for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.
ELECTION 2012: Third-party candidacies: Rarely successful, often influential →
