Posted on 05/13/2002 8:24:05 AM PDT by sheltonmac
America's third parties tend to be regarded by political insiders as something of a joke. No candidate from the Libertarian or Green parties has won a high-profile state or national election — or even come close. That significant failure aside, representatives from these third parties insist that they are poised to make an impact this November. In fact, this time around they might have a few candidates with enough money and support to make things interesting. Establishment politicians who recall the contentious outcome of the 2000 presidential election and the bizarre shift in Senate power last spring regard this possibility as no laughing matter.
Just ask former vice president Al Gore. Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader shaved a critical margin away from Gore — most notably in Florida, where Nader grabbed more than 97,000 votes, most of which probably would have gone to Gore in an election decided by approximately 500 votes. In a less-publicized political fracas, the Libertarian Party (LP) played a critical role in tossing control of the Senate to Democrats and now Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). The Senate was evenly divided (and ripe for Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont to defect from the GOP) at least in part because in 2000 incumbent senator Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) lost to Democrat Maria Cantwell by fewer than 3,000 votes. In that race, the LP candidate received more than 64,000 votes, most of which probably would have gone to Gorton. A similar fate had befallen Republican challenger John Ensign in his 1998 bid to unseat incumbent Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). In March 2001, National Review referred to "The GOP's Libertarian Problem" as "what may be the most underreported political phenomenon of the last two election cycles."
The Greens and the Libertarians still itch for the role of spoiler. One of the most interesting races this year will be in Georgia, where redistricting has paired two incumbent Republicans — conservative Reps. John Linder and Bob Barr — in the GOP primary. Ron Crickenberger, political director of the LP, tells Insight that the party plans to spend as much as $100,000 in the race to attack Barr's hard-line position against medical marijuana and give the primary to Linder. An LP position paper entitled "Spoiler Targets for 2002" presents the case in stark terms: "Bob Barr is target No. 1, both in terms of time criticality and in overall importance. To the medical-marijuana movement, Barr is the equivalent of the Antichrist."
Linder does not support medical marijuana, according to his office, but he has a much lower profile on the issue than Barr. A spokesman for Linder tells Insight that the LP has not contacted the congressman about these expenditures, but adds that Linder has a good working relationship with them because of his support for tax reform.
A spokesman for Barr says he, too, is unaware of the LP strategy, but in a written statement to Insight the congressman does not shrink from the challenge: "I'm proud to be the antidrug candidate in this race. … I have been a leader in the war against [illegal] drugs and if the pro-drug folks want to target me with negative ads then that tells me I've been doing a good job in that effort."
In preparing to resist the Libertarian push, Barr might consider consulting with the other vocally antidrug incumbents the LP has targeted. They include Sens. Tim Hutchinson (R-Ark.), Max Cleland (D-Ga.), Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-Texas). Crickenberger says Americans are ready to move away from drug prohibition, and his party is focusing resources accordingly. "We believe this is a substantial opportunity to move public policy in a Libertarian direction," he says.
Asked for races in which their candidate has a legitimate chance to win, LP officials point to Wisconsin. The Libertarian candidate for governor there is Ed Thompson, a former meat-cutter, prison guard and boxer who currently owns a bar/restaurant called Mr. Ed's Tee-Pee Supper Club and serves as mayor of tiny Tomah. He is polling between 7 and 11 percent, depending on which Democrat wins the primary.
Thompson reportedly was arrested in 1997 for operating illegal video-poker machines out of his bar and charged in 1998 for refusing to cooperate with police after being stabbed in the stomach by a friend. On the surface, he appears about as likely to win as shock-jock Howard Stern, who once toyed with the idea of running for governor of New York on the Libertarian ticket. But Thompson's brother is Tommy Thompson — probably the most popular politician in the state — who resigned as governor of Wisconsin to become President George W. Bush's secretary of health and human services. In an interview with Insight, Ed Thompson says his family name has given him added exposure and insists he is a serious candidate. "I am going to win," Thompson says. "There's no doubt about it."
Acting Gov. Scott McCallum is a Republican who was appointed when Tommy Thompson left for Washington, and he appears vulnerable. The Democrats will not hold primaries until later this summer and, in the meantime, Ed Thompson has been lapping up media attention and increasing his name recognition. He already has appeared on the Today show and was featured in a lengthy piece in the Style section of the Washington Post. In his interview with Insight, he pointed out that he is doing much better in the polls at this stage than another "hopeless" gubernatorial candidate who eventually went on to victory: Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura.
Since strange circumstances sometimes yield unexpected results, another gubernatorial race for Libertarians to watch might be in Massachusetts. Republican Gov. Jane Swift, the once-popular incumbent who gave birth in office to twins, earlier this year decided not to run when it became clear that Republican Mitt Romney, head of the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee, was throwing his hat in the ring. Several Democrats still are battling for the primary nod.
In the midst of it all sits Libertarian Carla Howell. A management consultant who now is campaigning full time, she collected more than 300,000 votes (11.8 percent) in her 2000 bid for the Senate seat of Democrat Edward M. Kennedy; she fell fewer than 26,000 votes short of the Republican candidate. It is impossible to know whether she will control those votes this fall or if they will move to Romney in a close race because none of the polls conducted so far have included her as an option — a snub she dismisses as "absurd" given her showing in 2000.
Howell remains confident, however. She tells Insight that her campaign will spend approximately $1 million by Election Day — an astronomical war chest by Libertarian standards and one that will allow her to buy precious time on television. "I certainly have a chance," she says. "I'm a dark horse, but we'll see."
Howell says her campaign will get a boost from a possible ballot measure that would give voters the chance to eliminate the state's notoriously high income tax. She is cofounder and chairwoman of the ballot initiative — a measure none of the other candidates supports. Asked if she fears her candidacy might "spoil" the election for Romney and give it to a big-spending Democrat, Howell argues that neither Democrats nor Republicans advocate smaller government. "You can't spoil tainted meat," she says.
Dean Myerson, political director for the Green Party, also dismisses criticism that his party spoils elections. "The whole concept with spoilers is that we have a responsibility to protect Democrats when they run bad candidates," Myerson tells Insight. "We're running candidates because that's what our supporters want."
According to Myerson, the Green Party's best chance this year also is in a gubernatorial race, this one in Maine. He says Green candidate Jonathan Carter and his supporters slogged through the Maine winter to get 20 percent of party members to sign a petition supporting the campaign. Myerson says the signatures put Carter on the ballot and made him eligible for public funds. The political director says the campaign eventually should receive "close to $1 million. He's going to have the funds to run a serious campaign."
Opposing Carter will be a Republican, an independent and Rep. John Baldacci (D-Maine), according to Myerson. He says he is unaware of any polls so far, but adds that the crowded field might favor a dark horse. "It's a four-way race," he notes, "so you can win with 30-some percent."
Optimistic predictions aside, these third-party candidates are all long shots — just like Ventura. But Chuck Muth, chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus (RLC), is one political operative who takes the third-party threat seriously. The RLC derides as RINOs (Republicans in name only) those GOP officials who stray from their small-government promises and it urges the party to stick to fundamentals such as tax cuts. Muth has worked in Nevada to find common ground between Libertarian and Republican candidates for the state Assembly, cobbling deals so the two parties compete in as few districts as possible. "I wish someone at the national level would do it," he says, noting that more and more elections are coming down to the wire, and that tenuous majorities in both the House and the Senate are on the line. "Two or 3 percent is the spoiler level in a lot of these races," he warns.
Well...the Republicans are destroying the constitution more slowly than the Democrats....that's a plus isn't it?(sarcasm)
Yeah, that's for sure...higher education does have alot to answer for.
Nader certainly seems to be a socialist and it seems clear that environmentalism is just a lever to ram more socialism down our throats.
No, that's not it.
You said exactly what should be done in the beginning. You pointed to Ron Paul. He ran as a Libertarian. Lost. He ran as a Republican. Won! Get it?
This third-party thing is akin to reinventing the wheel. Monetarily and logistically it is unfeasible.
What should be done is run more Ron Paul-types as REPUBLICANS, not third-party candidates. I like the guy a lot, although I deplore his foreign policy stance.
Look at the late '60s and early '70s. What did the socialists do to the Democrat party? Mmmmm, hmmmm... They got far more of what they wanted by going the RAT route than they ever could be running as socialists.
Don't reinvent the wheel. Use the avenues that are already in place.
Be that as it may, get the candidates you want in place and use the means available to seat them in office. To me, getting elected is first and foremost. The rest in conjecture. We can rant and rave all we want about how bad the two-party system is, but, if we don't get elected, all else is totally moot.
Ruin whose victory? The victory of Republican socialists. Bring it on!! Though I am very disappointed to hear of the LP's attempts to assasinate Bob Barr over the drug issue. Bob Barr is one of the best friends of liberty in the House.
I was a county and state LP chairman for a while, and you can take it from me: nothing in politics is quite as grueling as trying to get people to work for a hopeless campaign. Most LP members get together for free donuts and coffee, and an evening's abstruse argument. Asking them to work is as near to self-defeating as makes no difference.
Eventually, I decided that third-party campaigns weren't doing any good for the cause of freedom, and might be doing some harm -- for sure they were doing me some harm -- and I declared my days as a third-party activist to be over. Life's been a lot more pleasant since then.
Still, I have yet to be convinced that voting for someone as far distant from my own principles as the candidates of the majority parties usually are is a good idea. One steals my liberty wholesale, the other steals it retail. Neither really conceals his intent to steal. On even the most fundamental matters of Constitutionally guaranteed rights -- what part of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" could they possibly misunderstand? -- no majoritarian candidate is willing to take an absolute stand.
Of the original ten Amendments to the Constitution, only the Third (no quartering of troops) has yet to be grotesquely violated and nullified, with no penalty to the nullifiers. Yet the Constitution and its Amendments are the "supreme law of the land," transcending all other legislation. Why is it that the supreme law is never enforced upon those persons whom it was specifically designed to limit?
Ask a majoritarian candidate if he believes that the Constitution means literally what it says, and is willing to stand by it letter for letter. You'd have more of a shot at getting him to subscribe to a literal reading of the Bible, including the part in Leviticus where it says to stone homosexuals and adulterers. Yet they all have to swear to preserve, protect and defend it! Why repose trust in such people? What good does it do the country to vote for liars and oathbreakers?
So, in the absence of a constructive alternative, I don't vote. And I've discovered something remarkable: that is what terrifies the minions of the majority parties. They have a sense that the total vote tally is a gauge of the perceived legitimacy of the two-party system, of the parties themselves, and of government in these United States -- and I think they're right.
I've taken to making it an explicit thing. "I don't vote," I say, "because none of the candidates strikes me as honest or principled. I wouldn't be willing to have them in my living room, so why would I want them to have power over me? So I'm withholding my affirmation from all of them." And you should see the faces go pale. Because each and every person in the room has been harangued about how "it doesn't matter who you vote for, so long as you vote" until it's coming out of their pores -- and now they've been given a cogent reason why the reverse is true.
George W. Bush strikes me as an honest man -- but look at the things he's done since his election. Granted, he had to promise many things to many people to get elected, but that doesn't make the promises themselves palatable; it just means that, however he really felt about those policies, as an honest politician (i.e., "one who stays bought"), he had to deliver.
Given the political power of the redistributionist paradigm, nothing will change meaningfully until we come up with an enforcement mechanism for the Constitution. Even an honest man needs a wall to put his back against, now and then, so that he can convince the pullulating mobs that screaming at him won't work. He has to be able to say, "Gee, I'd like to give you what you want, but if I violate the Constitution, I'll be guest of honor at a necktie party." When that day comes, we can expect genuinely honest men in substantial numbers to re-enter public life, where, out of distaste for the types they'd have to rub elbows with, they will not go today. And I'll return to the voting booth.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com
As a member of the Constitution Party, I can say that isn't part of our platform. But whatever floats your boat...
Third party candidates are always quick to cite Jesse Ventura to bolster public perception of their chances. But I have found that the vast majority of people do not understand what made Ventura successful. He succeeded for two main reasons, neither of which applies to the vast majority of third party candidates:
1. Celebrity
The fact that he is a celebrity, not just his national wrestling and movie persona, but also from a fairly popular radio talk show in Minnesota prior to the election, was worth millions in advertising. He had name recognition and popularity among traditional voters and non-voters alike. That's not true of the vast majority of third party candidates. They would need a very expensive and very successful advertising campaign to gain Ventura level name recognition and likability.
2. Same day polling place voter registration.
In Minnesota, an unregistered voter can show up at a polling place on election day. If he has proof of residence in that voting precinct (like a driver's license, or utility bill in his name), or (hold on to your hats) if a registered voter will vouch for him, he can register and vote. Ventura drew a tremendous number of previously unregistered voters to the polls on election day. A lot of them were unregistered voters who did so on a whim. Without same day polling place registration, Ventura would not have won. Since very few other states have such liberal voter registration laws, most third party candidates would not have this advantage.
Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.
Bush said goodbye to Kyoto, the World Court and yes to the Second Amendment.
Please name three or four pieces of legislation that Pat Buchanan has ever claimed responsibility for passage. [If Sarah Brady can help pass liberal legislation, Pat should be able to help conservatives.]
And while you are at it. Name three or four conservative, Constitution-believing candidates Pat Buchanan has helped push over the top to victory. [Are you going to have to admit that Jesse Jackson is more effective than Pat Buchanan?]
None of which had anything to do with signing something into law. He did, however, sign into law $26 billion more in education spending, the Patriot Act, Campaign Finance Reform, and is currently pushing for more health care legislation.
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