One day in June, over a slice of strawberry cheesecake and a cup of decaf mocha cappuccino, Dr. John Hagelin told the Knight-Ridder news service that it “would be nice” if he could put every American in a deep trance. Literally. Hagelin, a follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, is the Natural Law party’s candidate for president of the United States. He is running on a platform of transcendental meditation, a “Vedic” practice through which adepts seek a state of deep, mental rest. When you get really good at it, according to the Yogi — when you manage entirely to cleanse your head of anything remotely resembling rationality and your consciousness expands to encompass all of nature — your physical existence ends and you disappear.
It doesn’t really work, this dematerialization business. If it did, Ross Perot would already be invisible. Despite having long ago achieved the Vedic twofer of an ego as big as outer space and a mind just as empty, Perot stubbornly refuses to vanish. And the two major parties and the American press, no longer sure of their role as mediators between unreflective populist impulse and actual political governance, refuse to stop taking Perot seriously. Indeed, the New York Times editorial page argues that ” allowing him to debate seems minimally fair.”
Bosh. Perot wants an equal place, with Dole and Clinton, in any nationally televised presidential debates this fall. So does John Hagelin. Both men have a roughly equivalent claim to the honor. Which is to say, they have no legitimate claim at all.
Yes, Perot and Hagelin have each qualified for federal matching funds. Both are now campaigning with money earned by the labor of American taxpayers — the strongest imaginable argument for federal campaign reform. And, yes, it is technically possible for either man to secure a presidential victory in November. The Potemkin-village “Reform party” is on the ballot in states with a majority of electoral college votes. So is Hagelin’s Natural Law party.
Just the same, needless to say, neither Perot nor Hagelin will ever be president. Outside the transcendental-meditation cult, only a handful of college students even know who Hagelin is. Many people know who Perot is, of course. But most of them don’t like him. He barely rates in most presidential preference polls. Only 16 percent of respondents to the most recent Washington Post/ABC News survey say Perot has the “fitness and temperament” to occupy the Oval Office. Only 11 percent of registered voters report a favorable impression of Perot to New York Times/CBS News pollsters; 60 percent of those voters view Perot unfavorably.
John Hagelin’s candidacy is a farce; enough about him. But Ross Perot’s is every bit as much a farce. As THE WEEKLY STANDARD has exhaustively chronicled this year, Perot represents the absolute negation of serious representative government. He complains about fairness in Washington, but baldly rigs his own party’s nominating procedures. He talks about “having ideas,” but hasn’t any. He promises to address the important “issues” neglected by Democrats and Republicans — whom he accuses of treason, “just like Tokyo Rose” — but never quite tells us how. Accepting the Reform party nomination on August 18, Perot asked his audience whether they had “listened to the messages from the other parties during the last few weeks.” After receiving a thunderous answer of “No!” Perot smiled beatifically. He will take such violent ignorance with him to the capital, he swears. A World War II hero he knows once shot 15 Japanese soldiers while they were asleep in bed, Perot told the Veterans of Foreign Wars a few weeks back. That’s the spirit we need in our politics, he says. “That’s what made this country great.”
Who will rid American public discourse of this meddlesome twerp? Not the two major parties, it seems. A Clinton campaign adviser candidly acknowledges to the Boston Globe that Democrats will insist on Perot’s presence in forthcoming presidential debates because “Perot keeps us in play in places like Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Nevada and the Dakotas.” White House strategists believe, and they are right, that Perot hurts Dole by muddying the head-to-head substantive challenge Republicans desperately need to mount against Clinton. Perot will further debase American politics in the process, to be sure. But the Democratic party — which just made Al Gore’s dead sister a major theme of its 1996 national convention, after all — simply doesn’t care.
The Republican party does care to avoid sharing television time, and the status it confers, with Ross Perot. But only for similarly self-interested reasons. Bob Dole’s campaign cannot bring itself to say out loud that Perot is a blot on the honor of the American electoral system. That might seem (horrors!) exclusionary. So Dole spokesmen request four-man debates, not three: Clinton, Dole, Perot, and the even more marginal Ralph Nader, who Republicans calculate will draw votes from the president.
Both major parties have stumbled over ideological politics in recent years, Democrats in 1994 and Republicans in 1995. Each now embraces a vigorously antiideological politics instead. Each party declines most of its responsibility to guide and direct American public life and thought. Each prefers itself to be led — by reflexive popular sentiment and focus groups. The “power to persuade” in American politics is today largely unexercised.
But the man who coined the phrase “power to persuade” in a legendary political-science treatise decades ago now has an opportunity to step into the breach: Professor Richard Neustadt of Harvard. Neustadt leads a team of five academic experts advising the Commission on Presidential Debates, which intends to stage four of them later this month and in October. Neustadt’s panel will recommend which third-party candidates, if any, get invitations to participate. He and his colleagues have objective criteria with which to make that recommendation, and Perot admittedly satisfies many of them. The Neustadt group must also make a judgment about whether Perot has a “realistic” and “more than theoretical” chance to be elected.
He doesn’t, and it would therefore be perfectly reasonable for the Neustadt panel to recommend Perot’s exclusion. But electability is not the only reason to leave Perot out. A place on the debate stage shouldn’t go simply to those candidates who might actually win. It should go only to those candidates who deserve to be heard. Ross Perot doesn’t deserve it. Please, Professor Neustadt, do the right thing.
David Tell, for the Editors
