arthur-alpert-pic2Four-party system, anyone?

As Heath Haussamen reported here May 29, Alan Woodruff, a Libertarian candidate for Congress, has filed a federal lawsuit aimed at erasing New Mexico regulations that make it difficult for minor parties to get on the ballot. And the Greens were party to the challenge.

Good for them.

The major parties’ lack of enthusiasm for competition is expressed in the dry, demanding prose of the state’s election handbook on the New Mexico secretary of state’s Web site. But why shouldn’t New Mexicans hear dissenting candidates and new ideas?

That said, nobody knows what would happen if the Libertarians, Greens and other ”third parties” made the ballot more easily.

In a 1997 special election when Democrats chose a hack (Eric Serna)  to run in the Third Congressional District, the Green Party put up an attractive candidate (Carol Miller)  thereby sending Christian conservative Republican Bill Redmond to Washington. It could happen again.

New Mexico Greens care about bread-and-butter issues like health care as well as the environment. Conversely, the traditional state Democratic Party harbors lots of careerists less excited by issues than finding jobs for friends and family.

Sadly, some also tolerate “honest graft.”

(Credit George Washington Plunkitt, a 19th century Tammany Hall boss, for distinguishing between lining his pockets from a public project useful to the community and stealing to enrich himself only.)

The multiple scandals (including, perhaps, dishonest graft) swirling around New Mexico Democrats today could send a sufficient number of voters Green-ward next election to allow a fresh-faced, not-too-Republican candidate to win the governorship.

Long-term, however, Democrats could score by borrowing Green ideas. Many (mostly urban) Democrats are already there; not so, their country cousins who advocate for rural New Mexicans and their businesses – farming, ranching, mining and oil.

Aside: When Democratic state Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino of Albuquerque says he will run for lieutenant governor as a representative of the party’s “progressive wing,” he’s challenging the old guard ideologically, geographically and occupationally.

How a libertarian challenge would affect the state Republican Party is tougher to figure. The free market fanatics now call the GOP home, cohabitating with corporate and Chamber of Commerce conservatives and the religious right.

Since many modern Republicans see government as the fabled goose-for-the-plucking, once in power they indulge their equivalent of “honest graft ” — getting public money into private hands. Case in point: ex-GOP Gov. Gary Johnson’s privatization of Medicaid?

A Woodruff run next year against freshman Democratic U.S. Rep. Martin Heinrich and a GOP candidate yet to be named might make the Republican standard bearer look brilliant by contrast; imagine, in the depths of a Wall Street-born recession, voter reaction to a libertarian plea to “unchain the bankers.”

Or, his laissez-faire sect might follow Woodruff rather than an impure GOP candidate.

A libertarian certainly would add an idea — legalizing (or decriminalizing) drugs.

That eminently sane policy drives traditional Republicans mad, of course, which explains why former state GOP boss John Dendahl (virtuoso of the socialist smear) was anointed GOP candidate for governor only after swearing to swallow his views on pot.

Our two-party system derives from an ideological debate between the nation’s founders. Today the parties fight mostly over money and power.

So New Mexicans could do worse than stimulate the marketplace of ideas — and shake up the Establishment — by encouraging minor parties.