Nobody has much good to say about the candidates for president this year.
Even the people who can sift through the gaffes and scandals and focus on policy seem reluctant or unwilling to defend, let alone praise, their candidate.
Not that we blame them.
We encourage writers of letters to the editor to focus on why they support a candidate instead of why they oppose one.
This seems easy to do for candidates for local office, but so far, nobody has much good to say about the candidates for president on our editorial page either.
They say if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.
We would propose an alternative: if you don’t have anything good to say about either of the major-party candidates, say what you would like to see in a future candidate.
You could also make an argument for a third-party candidate. Some of us here at The Lincoln County News are taking a long look at third-party candidates, particularly the Libertarian nominee, Gary Johnson.
We would especially like to see Gary Johnson participate in the debates. Maybe instead of requiring a candidate to reach 15 percent in the polls, the debate organizers should allow the highest-polling third-party candidate to participate.
It is difficult to imagine anything but a circus of name-calling and, at best, distortions of the truth in a debate between the two major-party candidates.
Johnson or another third-party candidate could shift the conversation to the issues, and might also serve as a buffer and improve the civility of the debates.
This week’s LCN contains a letter from a Jefferson man who co-chairs the Maine Green Independent Party and makes a case for Jill Stein, who is also gaining attention this year as a result of the weak choices elsewhere on the ballot.
Go much beyond Johnson and Stein and things get weird.
There’s independent James C. Mitchell Jr., who takes drug legalization to the next level – he wants federal health clinics to distribute free recreational drugs in order to end the illegal drug trade.
Then there’s Zoltan Istvan, the founder and presidential candidate of the Transhumanist Party, who lists as his top priority “to overcome human death and aging within 15-20 years.” The party’s platform prominently features a goal to “Lay groundwork for rights for other future advanced sapient beings like conscious robots and cyborgs.”
Sound crazy? Probably. But some of us would rather support someone who would welcome conscious robots than someone who would reject suffering refugees.
So keep the letters coming, but try to write in support of someone – even if it’s Zoltan Istvan.
