Opinion: If you’re blue and you know how to count past two...
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
The one man we can blame or thank for putting the Democrats in control of the United State Senate is...Stan Jones?
From the go-figure file, we find some pretty persuasive evidence that Jones was the spoiler in the Montana Burns/Tester Senate race, which went down to the wire. (Republican Sen. Conrad Burns held out for three days before conceding.) It’s enough to make you rifle through your pocket copy of the Constitution, have a drunken conversation with your portrait of Abe Lincoln, look up to the heavens, and ask: ‘Stan Who?’
But of course, you know Stan Jones by his real name, which is That Blue Guy. He’s the Treasure State’s frequent Libertarian Party candidate who a few years ago, in one fell swig of colloidal silver, turned himself a becoming shade of aquamarine and destroyed whatever (very slim) chance the LP had of ever being anything except the butt of many jokes. (Look up ‘argyria’ for more on Jones’ pre-Y2K experiments with silver-laced elixirs.) But as Brian Doherty explains in the D.C. Examiner, even the bluesers get lucky sometimes:
The GOP’s post-mortem also includes the realization that libertarians, a group they always assume will vote for them, cost them control of the United States Senate. Montana’s incumbent Republican Sen. Conrad Burns lost to Democrat Jon Tester by more than 2,500 votes. Stan Jones, the Libertarian Party candidate, whose claim to fame is his Star Trek-like blue skin, earned 10,339 votes, four times the number of votes Burns needed to hold on. Jones’ skin is permanently blue-gray because he drank too much colloidal silver thinking it would help prevent disease. Many pundits thought his presence in the Senate race was the perfect illustration of the complete irrelevance of third-party candidates in our two-party political system. Instead, he changed the outcome of the entire midterm elections... The GOP can consider blaming libertarians in Missouri, as well. Incumbent Sen. Jim Talent lost to Democrat Claire McCaskill by 45,000 votes, with Libertarian Frank Gilmour receiving more than 47,000 votes.
Jones is living it up in his role as a spoiler, though he loathes Democratic Senator-elect Jon Tester. Republicans, meanwhile, are cursing Jones’ name with all the passion Democrats used to damn Ralph Nader for ‘stealing’ votes that, they believed, rightly belonged to Al Gore. To engage the spoiler concept too seriously is to give too much credence to this all-your-votes-are-belong-to-us mentality: Your vote is your own, and you can use it to support whatever candidate or send whatever message you choose. (LP thinkers can lecture you all day on how your vote actually says more if it stands out from the pack, but I’m never sure about that math.) More broadly, this demonstrates a split between the world views of third-party voters and major-party voters. Third-partiers tend to like divided government, enjoy saying no for its own sake, and disdain a whole range of good-government bromides that go unquestioned in the mainstream discussion. (When was the last time you heard a prominent politician suggest that bipartisanship, for example, might not always be a good thing?) Faced with the party loyalist’s accusation that ‘You threw the election!’ a third-partier is just as likely to turn blue with laughter.