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Originally Posted by Nodrog
There are countless reasons to hate Hilary Clinton so I'm not sure I understand the question. Do you mean why they hate her more than other similar people?
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Yeah, I suppose I do.
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Also while the American voting system is a sham, it shouldnt be forgotten that their third parties (eg Libertarian/Greens) are far stronger than any non-mainstream UK parties.
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Well, yes and no. At the presidential level in 2004 the Libertarians and Greens got 400k and 120k votes respectively (about 0.42% of the vote between them). The Greens in this country got about 1% (257k) of the votes and the BNP got 0.7% (192k) in 2005. Arguably they're a lot closer to the mainstream parties than the Greens/Libs in America, but meh.
Point is once you add them up, plus the plethora of loony left groups (one of whom one a seat) smaller parties got a larger share of the national vote in this country than in the US even if we exclude the "regional parties" (which includes, of course, political parties explicitly linked to terrorist groups). That's only the last election obviously, the one before was Nader (who did relatively well in a one off campaign using his own relatively high profile) and before that was Perot who spent a hell of a lot of his own money iirc.
On a local level, you're right. But that's more about local politics in America being vastly more important than in this country (which has got to be one of the most centralised in the world). You're always more likely to get some sort of break through at a local level and there's much more scope for that in America. I remember reading there's something like 800,000 elected positions in America - obviously a lot of those are within the grasp of a budding libertarian even if it's just local judge or whatever it is these people vote on.
But it's not all one way, the American media seems even more conformist than our own (but in a different way) and you do seem to need millions of dollars to run for Senate, let alone the Presidency.
p.s. I'd like to meet the main-party supported white candidate who could lose to a black candidate in a Presidential election.
p.p.s. Unless we're talking about in thirty years when demographics have changed or something.
p.p.p.s. And even then I doubt most Latino's would vote for a black guy either.