You can already hear and read the rumblings: “Maybe it’s time for a third party…If only there was a good third party candidate I’d vote for him or her in a second…This country needs a third party to give us an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans…There needs to be a centrist third party.”
Realistic? If you look at American history, third parties have not proven to be a genuine alternative. And, in a post here that should be read in FULL, Dick Meyer, editorial director of CBS News.com, takes a look at third parties and whether the idea is a realistic one or not. Some key excerpts:
In springtime, a young wonk’s heart turns to, um, third parties. Really.
No young person who has ever followed politics with the ferocity of a sports fan, no citizen who has been an idealist for at least a few hours, hasn’t daydreamed about a third party or independent candidate – a third party winner, actually. At some point everyone with a civic soul, no matter what their ideological flavor, has yearned for an independent spirit to break through the homogenized, cuisinarted horse manure that is modern American politics.
Italy this week seems to have elected a new prime minister who isn’t a party guy. Romano Prodi ran as the head of a coalition of parties, not one party.
Yet we are stuck with the same two parties, ad nauseam…
He likens it to a world in which there were just two baseball teams. Then he writes:
I want a third party right now. I can’t take the Yankees and the Dodgers anymore. I’m not even that picky who the candidate is: Colin Powell, John McCain, Bill Bradley, Warren Buffett, Rudy Giuliani, Gary Hart, Lee Hamilton/Tom Kean, Oprah Winfrey, Russ Feingold, or Antonin Scalia. I’d support just about any one, provided they had money, buzz and a fighting chance.
The Constitution says nothing about parties. The great and wise founding elders detested political parties, and promptly formed them and divided up. Thanks so much.
Meyer then offers an excellent thumbnail sketch of third parties in recent times.
Of course, we always point to Ross Perot, the guy who in early 1992 seemed to have an actual chance of getting elected President — but he pulled out and by the time he jumped back in much of his anti-George Bush (the first) support had switched over to Democrat Bill Clinton. Yet, he was still able to get 19 percent which siphoned away many disgruntled Republican voters and helped elect Clinton. Meyers writes:
Third parties do not exist because the two big parties don’t want them to. It’s bad for business and it’s that simple.
There are three kinds of barriers to third parties, two of them created by the monopoly parties. The Constitution, however, is a problem. The American system is winner take all: you win a plurality of votes; you win the whole state or congressional district. Most other democracies have various forms of proportional representation where parties are represented in proportion to the percentage of the vote. So in Italy, for a rough example with fake parties, if in a national election got the Conservatives got 60 percent, the Socialists 30 percent and the Liberals got 10 percent, the seats in the parliament would by divvied up almost in that exact proportion. In America, it’s win or lose.
Make sure you read his entire piece because he then refutes the idea that there’s a polarized America: it’s just the way the system is set up, he notes.
A primary system and ingrained stupidity pushes monopoly politicians to ignore the center except in their blandness.
So a daydream about a radical centrist is very practical, in a totally unrealistic sort of way. All it takes is celebrity, brains, money, guts and an honest mouth.
Who’s in?
So far there’s no one on the horizon. In fact, if you study third parties they have served mostly to (1) inspire major parties to co-opt some of their measures and eventually put them out of business, (2) serve as spoilers (sorry about that phrase Ralph Nader but it’s true, as you illustrated in 2000) that merely siphon votes away from one major party and help the other major party to win.
Yes, we’ve gotten lots of emails and are aware of strong sentiment to create a moderate party, a centrist party — but these third parties would probably be as politically effective in winning the White House as a Halloween party.
A third party? A nice sentiment. But the “rigged” system will have to be changed first.
You can also discuss this post on Gather.com
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.