Sorry, i forgot to toggle the output mode of my previous reply, here is the proper one:
-- The US has a long history of third parties springing up, or independents running for election. A recent example example is Ross Perot who won 19% of the vote in the 1992 presidential election. In 2000 it was the votes won by the Green Party (Ralph Nader) that were the difference between Bush or Gore winning.
Fact remains that the president always comes from one of the two big parties, the other parties are more a diversion then anything else. The same goes for england and others. It's not that there are only two parties, but that two parties rule so supreme that the others never actually get to power. Maybe I should've clarified this in my original post.
-- And at the local level it is even more pronounced. I've had neighbors get fed up with the current local officials, say on the school board and just up and run on their own. And get elected.
That is very possible, I was not referring to local politics.
-- Also let us know when in Europe a person of mixed race like Obama is elected President of a MAJOR state like France or Germany. That is when you;ll know you have a strong, open democratic process.
The election of someone of mixed race is by no means a measure of how democratic a country is. This is something that has been bugging me for so long. Americans are so afraid of everything being seen as racist, that they overcompensate in the other direction. For me race is simply a non-issue. I don't care. If someone of a different race got elected, I would not rejoice particularly hard, nor be overly depressed, as long as (s)he is qualified, that's fine by me. You have to understand that much of the rest of the world is not quite as oversensitive to race as you are and that we do not count our accomplishments by how non-discriminatory we are, for us equality is simply a given, not something to be proven.