I’ve been mulling over the discussion of 3rd party candidates but haven’t had time to comment until now. I certainly think we would benefit from having more than just two parties/candidates to choose from. I do, however, think that most 3rd party Presidential undertakings are largely vanity campaigns (e.g. Nader in 2000) that effect very little positive change and can be damaging in a bunch of ways. They are damaging in that they help perpetuate the notion that 3rd party candidates are not (and by extension, never will be) viable candidates. But they are also damaging because, you know what, the lesser of two evils can still be a hell of a lot better than the greater of two evils.
I know a lot of other factors contributed to the results in 2000 (suspect counting in Florida, the archaic Electoral College system by which a candidate can get more votes and still lose, etc), but none of that would have mattered had Nader not been on the ticket. Gore would have won the state conclusively, even with only a portion of Nader’s 97,000+ Florida votes.
With Gore in the White House, we don’t go to war in Iraq, and those thousands of lives and trillions of dollars would not have been needlessly squandered. With Gore in the White House maybe 9/11 is averted (the outgoing Clinton administration warned the incoming Bushies that Al-Qaeda was where they needed to focus their attention, the Bushies said, basically, "Fuck off.") but even if it isn't, do we honestly think Gore would have torched the subsequent global goodwill as quickly and thoroughly as Bush did? Or that Gore would have so shamelessly exploited the tragedy to militarize law enforcement, justify torture, etc? And those are just a few things off the top. Would the EPA have been defanged, or the response to Hurricane Katrina been so anemic, or the home loan mess/stock market crisis been handled the way it was?
I think 3rd party Presidential candidates can play a valuable role even if they are not viable, as pot-stirrers. They can put questions on the table, or in some debates put them directly to the other candidates, that the two major parties would prefer to avoid and that the corporate media is uninterested in asking. But once that role has played itself out, they need to step out of the race unless there truly is so little difference between the two major party candidates that it literally does not matter which one wins (and when has that been true??). To remain in the race for the hell of it strikes me as ego and/or as a way to pad the future book deals and appearance fees.
As I said, I think we would benefit from have viable 3rd (and 4th) party Presidential candidates. But we are far from that being realistic, and we are moving further from it, not closer. Campaign finance has always been a monumental hurdle for candidates outside the 2 parties, at least for those who are not billionaires, and that situation has only worsened with the easing of restrictions on corporate donations to campaigns. The Electoral College structure itself bolsters up the two party system and if no one candidate receives a majority of Electoral College votes (a plurality is not sufficient) then the House of Representatives choose a President. So a 3rd party candidate would have to win the EC outright, not just get more votes than any of the other candidates, because realistically the House is going to choose based on party affiliations rather than who received the most votes. That doesn't even address the fact that if an outsider somehow managed to win the Presidency, they would have few if any allies in the House and Senate and their ability to get things done with be severely compromised.
So before we start getting too excited about the possibility of 3rd party Presidential candidates, I think we need to look at some serious, far-reaching campaign and election reform, and we need to focus on getting 3rd, 4th, and 5th party candidates into the House and Senate in noticeable numbers. That would yield immediate results because then neither of the two parties could count on gaining clear control of the House and Senate and they might be forced to engage in actual governing. Once those pieces are in place, I think we can start talking about a real 3rd party Presidency.
|