Andrew Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.

Why Does a Third Party Fantasy Refuse to Die?: Andrew Ferguson

June 6 (Bloomberg) -- Already the vast agora of the Internet is echoing with their blood-stirring cries: ``Onward to victory, ye foot soldiers of freedom, but not too fast!''

And there's more: ``We're mad as hell -- well, perturbed as heck -- and we're only going to take it a little while longer, no kidding!''

``We demand change now, or rather we would prefer to enact some elements of moderate reform pretty soon, but we don't want anybody to overdo it, okay?''

That's certainly enough to get my heart started in the morning. How about you?

I didn't think so. Yet such are the sentiments behind Unity08, a political group fronted by has-been politicos -- Angus King, former governor of Maine, along with Gerald Rafshoon and Hamilton Jordan, electoral wizards from the White House of Jimmy Carter -- that hopes to grow into a third party by election day 2008.

Unlike those other two parties more familiar to us all, Unity08, which had its official launch last week, ``addresses the issues and challenges of the 21st Century.'' It will not ``waste time pointing fingers.'' It will be too busy focusing ``on how America can find common ground on critical issues -- to give the overlooked moderate majority a voice and a choice.''

Needing Jackson

Voice and choice? The heart leaps. Is the former poet laureate of U.S. presidential campaigns, the Reverend Jesse ``I'm a Tree Shaker Not a Jelly Maker'' Jackson, involved in this somewhere?

No such luck. The Unity08 crowd could sure use him. If nothing else, Jackson was a politician of unambiguous views, forcefully expressed. I suspect he would be appalled at the gluey porridge that Unity08 offers up as its platform.

The Unity08 manifesto rests in its entirety on a distinction between ``crucial issues'' and ``important issues.'' Crucial issues include terrorism, the national debt, nuclear proliferation and education. Gay marriage, gun control and abortion, by contrast, are merely important issues.

It's significant that Unity08 does not offer positions on either side of any of these issues, even the crucial ones.

Instead, its sole conviction is that the crucial issues are being ignored by our politicians in favor of the merely important issues. Thus our politics has become divisive, as the system has ``failed to address the realities that impact most Americans.''

New Agenda

This then seems to be the issue upon which Unity08 will build its movement, transcend partisanship, overcome ideology and unite the U.S. public: substituting one agenda (the crucial one) for another agenda (the important one).

A skeptic might point out that even if Unity08 succeeds in its great mission and a new agenda of crucial issues is placed before our politicians and the public, we will still face the knotty business of deciding what to do about them. And then what? Bickering may ensue, perhaps division -- even, God forbid, partisanship.

And before too long, we'll be right back where we started.

That some third party will appear to rescue the poor, disregarded voter from the pincer of the two-party duopoly is a recurring fantasy of U.S. politics. In Unity08 it has joined with an even more fashionable fantasy -- the techno-Utopianism of the bathrobe-and-house-slipper idealists who spend way too much time surfing the Internet and who believe their hobby will fundamentally alter human social arrangements, politics included.

Creature of Cyberspace

Thus Unity08, according to its manifesto, will be a virtual creature of cyberspace, unencumbered by the bricks and mortar of more conventional political parties. Both the presidential and vice presidential candidates will be selected over the Web in a ``virtual and secure online convention'' open to all voters.

This high-tech gloss has led some commentators to conclude that with Unity 08, the third-party movement will at long last be genuine -- more populist, farther reaching and longer-lasting. But it's hard to see how.

Two kinds of voters crave third parties -- the monomaniacs who believe passionately in one or two things and the good government reformers who don't believe in anything specific. What both kinds share is a distaste for politics as it's actually practiced in a democracy, which they find intolerably messy and dilatory.
{what a bunch of horse pucky - 2nd}

Yet voters of the first kind, brought together in a third party, can actually influence the course of politics, even if only briefly.

George Wallace

In 1968, for example, George Wallace's American Independent Party provided a temporary home for politically displaced Southern working-class whites who had been loyal Democrats but were suddenly dismayed by their national party's embrace of civil rights legislation, the pseudo-socialism of the Great Society and the 1960s counterculture.

Wallace's party vanished when savvy Republicans made room for its voters in the GOP. By 1980 they were almost all Republicans.

What similarly dramatic and deep-seated impulse can the good-government reformers of Unity08 give voice to? Vague discontent and impatience with the status quo is no foundation for a third party.

Of course, there may indeed be room for some genuine populist party to emerge in the next 20 years, offering a way station for voters migrating from one party to another.

But when such a party comes it won't rally around fuzzy issues like nuclear proliferation and education, and it won't be led by milk-and-water centrists like Angus King and Hamilton Jordan.

A third party needs tree-shakers, not jelly makers.

(Andrew Ferguson is a Bloomberg News columnist. In 1992, he wrote speeches for President George H.W. Bush. The opinions expressed are his own.)


To contact the writer of this column:
Andrew Ferguson in Washington at aferguson62@yahoo.com.

Last Updated: June 6, 2006 00:04 EDT
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