I voted after all

I had planned that yesterday be the first time since I have been old enough that I had chosen not to vote. I simply didn't want to endorse either flavor of crazy.

But at the last moment, I did. I was running errands with a friend who has a personal interest in certain issues, and as a favor to her as much as anything else I broke down and voted. I was highly conflicted about the governor's race here in Iowa; while I liked Gov. Reynolds' strong pro-life stand her support of privatized Medicaid and other such socially regressive stuff stuck in my craw. Her opponent, Fred Hubbell, is the scion of a very prominent Des Moines family who, like so many Democrats, turned me off with his demagoging of the "tax breaks for corporations" issue (dude, offering a favorable tax environment is how you get corporations to locate in your state and provide its people with jobs.  You know- like Brandstad and Reynolds have done). He also has ties to Planned Parenthood that were hard for me to ignore. So I voted for Reynolds despite my misgivings,

I have a good friend with a medical condition for which cannabinoids are the only effective treatment. While I am not a fan of recreational marijuana, I am very much in favor of medical marijuana, for which there are a number of valid and useful applications in health care and which can be regulated by prescription like other drugs. I strongly felt that our congressman, David Young, needed to be punished not only for his support of President Trump but for his unresponsiveness to the net neutrality issue. On the other hand, I couldn't bring myself to vote for Cindy Axne, his Democratic opponent, who was a bit extreme for my tastes. But the Medical Marijuana Now Party was running a candidate in my district, so I had a solution to my dilemma.

Reynolds and Axne won, and of course, the Democrats won control of the U.S. House while retaining the Senate and the state legislature. Could have been worse.

Our clueless (delusional?) president tweeted his gratitude to the nation for the great victory he achieved by losing the House. And there will be those among his supporters who in fact will believe him that it was some sort of victory- despite a poll taken yesterday which showed that fully 40% of voters cast their ballots as a means of expressing opposition to Mr. Trump, while only 25% cast their ballots as an expression of support for him. That, too, will, of course, simply run off the backs of the president's supporters. Denial, as Mark Twain pointed out, ain't just a river in Egypt.

Now I can turn my attention to 2020. Hopefully, John Kasich will be smart enough to recognize that challenging President Trump for the Republican nomination will be a waste of time and run as a national unity candidate, perhaps teaming up with a Democrat in a third party bid. Clearly, the two-party system has failed us, big time, and it has managed to survive in the past only through the emergence of a new party to take the place of one of the old ones. The Democrats will be around for a while, and the zombified remains of the Republican party will remain a haven for the alt-righters, conspiracy theorists, nativists, bigots, and the many decent folks who simply can't bring themselves to recognize or at least acknowledge the betrayal of every decent conservative principle by 45.

The time is ripe for a third party of the center. Now that the Supreme Court is safely in originalist hands, I expect working toward that end will be the focus of my political activity for the next two years.

Every election is heralded as "the most important election of our lifetimes." A meme I saw yesterday made that very point. The 2018 off-year election was no exception, But I strongly suspect that the 2020 election really will be the most important election of my lifetime. It will dictate the American political landscape for the rest of it, in all probability.