Critics of an ideological, partisan American politics especially those who would alter that politics by adding a third major party to the mix — generally complain as much about the tone of public discourse as about its substance. Washington has become a mean, soul-destroying place, they say. So mean, in fact, that good folks interested in commonsense solutions to basic problems no longer want to work there. And the media — delighting in their game of”gotcha,” eager to “twist” meaning in the service of a “food fight” — are greatly to blame for this sorry state of affairs. That’s what Ross Perot tells us, anyway. From his regular perch on Larry King Live.
It’s undeniable that political journalism is easily distracted by conflict, the nastier the better. And daily reporting can be inaccurate, malicious, or distorted through “spin,” a process that sometimes leaves appalling incompetence unpunished and worthy careers destroyed. Why, then, do politicians submit to the harsh rigors of publicity? Because it is “part of the job.” But also, truth be told, because media attention offers a tremendous psychological reward. It feels good. And for a certain kind of public figure, it may feel too good.
Awash in the pleasure of celebrity, he forgets the distinction between his pe rsonal press clippings and the public cause they are meant to help advance. He confuses the national interest with the interests of his own ego. He becomes a media junkie. Particularly susceptible to this addiction are marginal and retir ed politicians, and nitwitted, unelectable demagogues, whose claim to represent a serious, popular platform is tenuous to begin with.
Which brings us right back to Ross Perot and the other people now advocating a third American political party. The idea is vanity. Nothing more.
Consider the latest, most comical outbreak of third-party fever. In Private discussions beginning in October, a small group of “prominent” Democrats and independents, all but one of them already or soon to be out of office, agrees that a coherent and increasingly desperate “majority constituency” exists in America for . . . well, for them. The conversations are “secret”; only PBS, CBS, NBC, Time, and the New York Times are kept informed. But Paul Tsongas, the most aggressive of the conspirators, lets us in on the One True Platform. The “huge” mass of our citizens wants something neither existing major party provides: balanced-budget fiscal conservatism blended with activist, social- issues liberalism. And if Democrats and Republicans do not “respect” this ” passionate center,” a third-party movement will and should arise.
It was supposed to arise at a press conference on Dec. 18, when Tsongas & Co. nailed 11 theses on the indulgences of the two-party system to the door of the Minneapolis Hilton. But the plan flew apart. Retiring Senator Bill Bradley and Maine’s independent governor, Angus King, broke with the group and refused to sign its manifesto. Gary Hart didn’t show up. Tsongas and former Colorado governor Richard Lamm publicly rejected the third-party presidential aspirations of their erstwhile colleague Lowell Weicker. The three men spat at each other in wire service reports.
“I had hoped against hope that the power of the idea would pull us through,” Tsongas sighed. No such luck; the idea has no such power; it is hardly an idea at all.
There is no significant market among the many millions of Republican voters for a “progressive” social agenda of new rights and new regulations, as Arlen Specter’s abortive presidential campaign proved this year. And most Democratic voters are not prepared to buy economic austerity; if they were, Paul Tsongas would be president. Tsongas admires the “balanced-budget liberalism” he sees in the mirror, and imagines his press coverage reflects an “astonishing reaction” of approval at the nation’s grass roots. Nope. What great gobs of money activist liberalism spendeth, a balanced budget taketh away. Asked to pick, as they have been this year, most Americans will be for one or the other agenda. And they’ll be smart enough to understand they have no serious third choice.
Paul Tsongas’s third-party dreams are an aristocratic vanity; he flatters himself that no existing partisan coalition could ever satisfy so fine and delicate a sensibility as his. Ross Perot is neither fine nor delicate. His vanity is lumpen. He, too, wants a balanced budget. But we have a Republican party for that. Perot’s agenda is otherwise pure bile and resentment. “They,” Republican and Democratic partisans, are in. He and his people, nonpartisan “patriots,” are out. And he is willing to spend his millions on a third party presidential campaign intended to switch those places around.
This scheme can’t work, either. Perot can’t be president himself. Nor can he nominate anyone else with a realistic chance of victory; no such person will go near him. So Perot’s nascent party is reduced to a spoiler’s role in 1996 — as third parties almost always are in a nonparliamentary system of winner-take- all elections. Democrats will probably benefit from Perotism next year, as they did in 1992. But will that result make most voters genuinely happy? And will it be good for the public discourse Perot claims he wants to cleanse?
A new Field poll in California has 76 percent of respondents saying that voting for a third party “is like throwing away your vote.” And on Dec. 19 in Ohio, one of Perot’s stronger states in 1992, his Reform party failed to qualify for the March 1996 primary ballot. Too few registered voters signed the requisite petitions which embarrassment the Texan’s headquarters staff, always quick with an excuse, used as evidence that the system is rigged to prevent competition against the Republicrat duopoly.
Oh, yeah? Meet Dr. John Hagelin, 41-year-old Pittsburgh physicist and presidential candidate. He’s for a flat tax. And for transcendental meditation, though he denies his campaign has any “formal” ties to his close friend, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Hagelin’s Natural Law party will be on the Ohio primary ballot next March, having qualified easily.
American politics raises no significant technical bar against the existence of third parties. There are tons of them. It’s just that none has proved actually necessary for 135 years. And a third party has rarely been less necessary than in 1996.
It may once have been true, as the famous 1968 quip by third-party candidate George C. Wallace had it, that there was not a “dime’s worth of difference” bet ween the Democratic and Republican parties. But it was not true in last year’s congressional elections. It is not true now, as the two parties wage a slow and painful battle over a budget that would fundamentally recharacterize the relationship of federal power to private life. And it will not be true next year, in that battle’s aftermath.
Our two major parties are now organized around two firmly opposed and (by American standards) reasonably coherent views of proper governance and social order. “Consensus” cannot be achieved in such a dispute, either by wishing it into existence (Paul Tsongas) or by quashing the dispute in a demagogic appeal to “patriotism” (you know who). One side must eventually win. Assertions to the contrary are vanity. And they serve only the vain.
So may the third-party monster continue to suffer humiliations. And may we all have a happy partisan New Year.
David Tell, for the Editors
