You may recall that, in the most recent national election — after Abu Ghraib, after the complete failure to stabilize Iraq or install a democratic regime or install a regime — both presidential candidates ran on a strongly pro-war platform. You may also be aware that — after more Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, worsening situations in Iraq and Afghanistan — the minority party's leading candidate for the next election continues to support the war aggressively, while the majority party whips up a constitutional amendment on gay marriage that proposes about the exact same thing that the current minority party already signed into law as the Defense of Marriage Act back when they held the presidency, when they were also busy engineering and signing NAFTA so the other party wouldn't have to waste their effort or ink.
To some, this may seem an alarming and blurry sameness; indeed, to the cynic, it may appear that the two parties are not offering you the actual spectrum of human possibilities. Or meaningful product differentiation, which is your right as an American.
However, you may take a different view of what the full range of possibilities is, and what's more you may be more open to nuanced distinctions. Indeed, perhaps you find yourself dizzied by the choices on offer betwen the Republicans and Democrats. You are, let's say, unable to navigate the yawning gap between whether we should not discuss retrieving troops from Iraq for at least a year, or not discuss it at all; exhausted, perhaps, by the labor required to parse whether one ought to prefer an estate tax which effects three persons in every thousand, or none.
This is why a third party is needed. The two parties are simply too different to allow for rational choice, and how can anything get done in such circumstances? We need some clarity, some narrowing of the gab between these insanity-threatening polarities.
This is where Unity08 comes in. A serious player on the national stage, founded by veterans of the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations, it promises to bridge these impassible political chasms and heal the national wound by nominating and electing a ticket with a Republican and a Democrat (or even an independent, as long as said person displays their independence by "committing to a Unity team"). You say that, although the two parties do not offer you an option to favor a woman's right to choose, nationalized health care, an end to the death penalty, greater social support, the equal protection of marriage for all persons, or ten thousand more things that any European person might cast a vote for (much less a ban on SUVs, an end to home ownership and animal testing, or a 1% tax on every international business transaction) there is still too wide a range, too much polarization, too much national pain. Focus08 hears you. Free at last, free at last — no longer are we bound by the panoplies of choice so fearsomely threatened by American politics! Let the healing begin.