Political Parties

Paris.--Nineteen ninety-four saw the end of the American political parties as we have known them since the 1930s, and in the case of the Democratic Party, since the election of 1800, when an alliance of Southern agrarians and Northern city-dwellers made Thomas Jefferson President. That coalition of interests survived to elect John Kennedy in 1960, but it is now dead.The uneasy alliance in the Republican Party between Eastern internationalist banking and trading interests and the suburban and small-town middle class is also finished.

As a post-World War II political activist, candidate, office holder and Republican supporter for the past 67 years, I have always believed in the two-party system of Republicans and Democrats. I believe in a political system consisting of "big tent" Republican and Democratic parties that, among other things, consist of liberals, conservatives and independent voters. However, for the past 40 years, the zealots in each party have rejected the emphasis on united parties in favor of fragmented "leftist" and "rightist" principles.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court, usually more an arbiter of law than of politics, turned its attention yesterday to whether political parties' spending has a bad -- or good -- influence on election campaigns.With a lawyer for the federal government arguing that money tends to corrupt politics, the justices probed the possibility that campaign spending by parties may be part of the problem -- especially in sponsoring negative advertising.At issue, in a case from Colorado, is the constitutionality of a federal law that limits how much money a political party can spend on political messages during congressional election campaigns.

Sen. Ben Cardin warns of devastation for millions of Americans if the automatic spending cuts called sequestration occur March 1 as scheduled ("No to sequestration," Feb. 20). If that's really true, however, why are members of Congress taking a week's vacation, and why is the president in Florida playing golf with celebrities? If sequestration is so terrible for Maryland, why aren't Senators Cardin and Barbara Mikulski in Washington working on a solution? The answer must be that members of both political parties no longer care about the American people enough to even show up for work.

THAT MORNING of Jan. 18, 1976, I sat in a dusty city-room corner of the now-departed News American and hit the keyboard of an old Royal typewriter. Marvin Mandel, governor of Maryland back then, was on his way to federal court. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., governor now, was on his way to freshman classes at Princeton. And I was beginning what has become nearly 29 years of writing newspaper columns. A columnist's job is different from a reporter's. A reporter says: Here are the facts. A columnist says: Here are the facts - and here's what I think about them.

"WHAT IS TO BE DONE?" is the Russian equivalent of Hamlet's "To be or not to be." That question was the title of a novel by 19th century author and literary critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a book which had such an influence on Vladimir Lenin that the Bolshevik leader used it in one of his most influential theoretical tracts. Today the question is again asked -- this time in regard to Russia's political situation after President Boris N. Yeltsin's re-election.As important as is the symbolism of free elections that now have been institutionalized as part of Russia's democratic reforms, that country's political system is woefully underdeveloped by Western standards.

In the weeks before the 1994 election, the House Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee decided not to show committee members videotapes of focus groups of angry voters in key districts from Idaho to Maine."

WASHINGTON - As the House heads toward a key vote on campaign finance legislation, Republicans and Democrats have been raising money so aggressively that they are breaking records, despite an informal fund-raising moratorium after the attacks of Sept. 11. Officials of the two political parties say their year-end reports for 2001 will show they pulled in about $151 million in the large unlimited contributions known as soft money for this year's midterm elections. The Republicans raised $87.8 million, and the Democrats took in $63.1 million.

PITTSBURGH -- AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney proposed yesterday that organized labor begin diverting money it now gives to political parties and candidates into boosting its own political influence, by raising voter registration and turnout among its members.Kicking off the labor federation's first full convention since his insurgent takeover nearly two years ago, Sweeney called for a ban on unregulated "soft money" donations as part of broader campaign finance reform.Such donations, he charged, are "polluting our political system."

WASHINGTON -- With an eye on the 1992 elections and with an unusual show of political unanimity, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission is urging President Bush and leaders of both political parties to take "racial tactics" out of political campaigns.The commission released yesterday a letter containing the plea that it sent Friday to Mr. Bush and to the leadership of the Senate and House. The letter called upon the nation's political leaders to "prevent the use of irresponsible campaign tactics that only serve to divide the nation along racial lines."

As a septuagenarian (and Democrat), I was happy that President Barack Obama won re-election, but sad that the morning-after TV news shows reported the win as "the election results validated the Obama team's game plan," rather than the election was the result of a real choice of the American people ("Re-election," Nov. 7). Our elections are now reported by commentators who appear to have been trained primarily as sportscasters and who speak of who "wins" rather than who was elected, how many points ahead or behind a candidate's "game plan" may be and generally cover campaigns as sporting events.

According to letter writer Rani Merryman's reasoning ("Romney is a leader, Sept. 8), President Barack Obama promised unity but failed to unite the two political parties. In my way of thinking, Mr. Obama cannot be faulted for the results of a stone-walling obstructionism with which Republicans in Congress met him from day one. While in Mr. Obama's bid for the presidency a short three and a half years ago, his platform featured an important goal of breaking the existing gridlock in Congress, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that "the main goal of the Republican party is to make Obama a one-term president.

They are here to support Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, but a handful of Marylanders considering a run for higher office are also hoping to benefit politically from his convention. The concentration of news media - both from Maryland and from other states - serves to elevate their profiles, and that helps with fundraising. There are more subtle advantages to attending the conventions, too: networking with party leaders, befriending longtime campaign volunteers and hearing national politicians at the top of their game give the most important addresses of their political careers.

Former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has made another foray into Maryland politics, endorsing GOP candidate Dan Bongino in what she calls his "uphill battle" for the Senate, his campaign announced Monday. In 2010, the former Alaska governor backed Republican Brian Murphy in his unsuccessful GOP primary bid against former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. Bongino, a retired Secret Service agent, is challenging first-term Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin. "Dan has seen what politicians have done to our country, and he's decided, 'If I'm not part of the solution, I'm part of the problem,'" Palin said in a statement released by the Bongino campaign.

It was in 2008, the debate between vice-presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. Mr. Biden had just scored his opponent for failing to directly answer a question from moderator Gwen Ifill. But Ms. Palin was hardly apologetic. "I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear," she snapped, "but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also. " In other words, she felt no particular obligation to answer the questions she was asked.

Editor: The editorial "The founders" (July 4) describes the great accomplishments of our Founding Fathers in establishing the United States of America. The founders believed in the principles of smaller government, fiscal responsibility and a non-interventionist foreign policy. Unfortunately, our leaders today from both political parties violate all of these sound ideas. The Democrats waste our money on welfare, unions and minorities, running yearly $1.5 trillion budget deficits.

DEMOCRATS may have done the public a favor by filing a RICO lawsuit against House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. The suit alleges the Republicans' top congressional fund-raiser has extorted money from donors and laundered it through a series of nonprofit organizations. Should this suit go to the discovery stage, the public may get to see how utterly corrupt both parties have become in financing election campaigns. Partisan politics was behind the Democrats' suit. Rhode Island Rep. Patrick Kennedy, who heads the Democratic Campaign Committee, realized that the legal action could frighten donors and reduce contributions to Mr. DeLay's political operation.

Carroll County Democrats repelled a last-minute Republican rally last week and won by one, the narrowest of margins. That would be a run, not a vote. Area business leaders and officials organized a spirited softball competition to put the political parties on friendly terms. The bipartisan game, rescheduled three times, finally was played Thursday evening in downtown Westminster. "We wanted to prove to everybody in the county that people can just agree to disagree and not let politics polarize us," said Josh Kohn, a Westminster business owner.

In his 2007 book, "The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800," historian Jay Winik writes that among Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamiltonand James Madison, none "believed in political parties, which they feared would lead to 'rage,' 'dissolution,' and eventual 'ruin' of the republic... " The latest poll from the Pew Research Center, "Partisan Polarization Surges in Bush, Obama Years," seems to indicate that the American people have come around to their way of thinking.

Dan Rodricks ' column "Maybe Bobby Zirkin should be a Republican" (March 20) really cracked me up. Between Mr. Rodricks' column and the editorial slant of The Sun, I am led to believe that if you don't completely agree in lockstep with the party line, then you are not a good Democrat. I paid attention to this, and Sen. Bobby Zirkin said it best: One serving the people must not only be able to dissent against other political parties, but also within one's own. Not being able to do this doesn't serve those you were elected to represent.