I must say that I cannot get excited over the furor about whether a holding company from the United Arab Emirates will compromise the national security of the United States if it owns the shares of P & O—the Peninsula & Oriental Steam Navigation Company of yore—which, in turn, has interests in various East Coast ports. As I get the drift of this outrage du jour, the U.A.E. is feared to be in the murky shadows of Arab fundamentalism, if not an al-Qaida oasis. Thus the risk on the waterfront is that containers swinging ashore in Staten Island or Baltimore could be the primitive delivery system of a so-called dirty bomb, the kind of nuclear Molotov cocktail that everyone fears Osama bin Laden is brewing under his desk in the Tora Bora.
The reason I can’t get excited is that if you decide that Arab capital is seditious or un-American, what kind of loyalty oath is required of the Fortune 500, which is replete with shareholders from shores more hostile than those of the U.A.E’s Barbary capitalists? For example, a Saudi Arabian prince, for a while, controlled about 10 percent of Citibank. (Dubai had 2 of the 19 hijackers; Saudi had 16.) Interests in American ports, already, are spread among a number of international companies. On other fronts German conglomerates own most of the large American book publishers, not to mention defense contractor Chrysler. Or take, for example, the national debt, which is largely pawned to countries like Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan. Why get worked up about container facilities in Philadelphia (essentially parking lots for large boxes) but turn a blind eye to the fact that the American dream is carrying a large mortgage with Far East lenders that have had—how shall I put it—mixed historical relations with the United States.
At the same time I take the theatrics over terminal investments to be the first skirmishes in the 2008 presidential election, which thus far has lacked both candidates and emotion. Among those in the bully pulpit, railing against terror’s strategic plans, is Senator Hilary Clinton, who clearly is looking to hoist the Bush administration on its own petard of homeland security. With U.A.E. shareholders, the senator has a good, safe menace—a convenient scapegoat without a lot of votes in the precincts of Nassau County. It’s a free shot at international capitalism, which can be cast as a bloated monster, one of Thomas Nast’s trust caricatures, not to mention a feel-good story for the Longshoremen’s Union, who cannot want their stevedores unloading the cargoes of terrorism. Even better, anger at Dubai Ports World outflanks Karl Rove’s permanent state of emergency, in that it shows the Bush administration cutting the corners of favoritism by quickly and quietly approving the transaction, and thus putting the interests of fat cats above those of guard dogs.
The question of who owns the shares of P & O is an electoral sideshow, something that cannot easily translate into congressional hearings or the storyboards of political action committees. If the Democrats and Republicans have to campaign on who will do a better job witch hunting the share registries of American stock markets, my sense is that both of the major parties have run out of serious ideas. Indeed, I often think it remarkable that America has been able to hang on to its two-party system for as long as it has, given that the parties strike me as being distinctions without any differences.
Analyze this: while Senator Hilary Clinton tries to position herself as the Democratic nominee for the 2008 election, her former-president husband, in theory the leader of the Democratic opposition, has decided that he and his party’s image are best served if he plays the role of the Bush family’s best friend. On any given day, he and the presidents Bush can be seen giving comfort to hurricane or tsunami survivors, if they are not squeezing in a round of golf. What this tells me is that parties count for little in the game to govern America, which since the 1960s has been run by a series of interchangeable political oligarchies—ones that have names like Kennedy, Bush, Clinton, and Dole. Indeed since 1976, a Bush, Dole, or Clinton has been a candidate in every election. If we are to believe those handicapping the 2008 election, the chances are good that a Clinton or a Bush will again be on one of the tickets, assuming that they don’t dispense with democratic niceties and run the country with a triumvirate of Hilary Clinton, Jeb Bush, and Elizabeth Dole.
What do the major parties stand for? I wish I knew. In theory, and according to the received wisdom, Republicans favor big business, budget restraint, low taxes, free trade, and isolationist tendencies in foreign policy. Imagine someone like Robert Taft or Henry Cabot Lodge. In contrast, the Democrats are there for labor unions, federal programs, farm subsidies, environmental protection, social security, and the odd war to end all wars. Hubert Humphrey comes to mind. Then what explains the seemingly Republican administration of President Bill Clinton, who balanced the budget, busted unions, posted surpluses, threw bones around Wall Street, and restricted jingoism to bombs over Belgrade? By extension, the current Bush administration would appear to have cornered the same markets in deficit spending that so enticed Democratic President Lyndon Johnson to go abroad in search of monsters and, at home, to federalize everything from school lunches to oil depletion allowances.
In the higher echelons of government, I fear, America is a one-party state, at service only to maintain the privileges of power. Party politics remind me of post-republican Rome, after the death of Caesar, when Cato was called “a doomed man in a doomed state” and when Augustus managed “to break the old combinations of nobles and clients and organize all the citizens of Rome in a single ‘party’, or, more correctly, into a group of clients, united in loyalty to the ruler.” What else explains the current absence of a Democratic opposition, save for some anger against port shareholders or the odd denunciation of torture, at a time when the country is losing a colonial war abroad, and the national debt is $8.2 trillion, of which your family’s share is $131,000?
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In the American past, whenever political parties have failed to offer the electorate choices on issues or government, third-party candidates have emerged. It happened in 1912, 1948, 1968, and 1992, although during many other elections through the 20th century third-party candidates both appeared on the ballots and in some cases may have altered the outcome of the election. Who does not, for example, believe that in 2000 Al Gore lost Florida, and thus the presidency, because of the presence on that confusing ballot of the consumerist, Ralph Nader?
As a joker in the American political deck, third parties lend drama and excitement to what can otherwise be as humdrum as choosing between a Buick and a Pontiac. They even have better names than Democrats and Republicans. Who wouldn’t want to be a member of a party called Whig, Mugwump, Anti-Masonic, Know-Nothing, Abolitionist, Free Soil, Greenback or Populist? But they never seem to get anywhere against the entrenched interests. Nevertheless, in recent weeks, I have spent considerable time reading and thinking about third parties—speculating that 2008 might be yet be another wild card election, decided by a candidate for a party that has yet to exist, but which could go by the name Abortionist, Second Amendment, Divine Inspiration, Flat Tax, Out of Iraq, Constitutional, or, to name my own cause, Anti-Astroturf.
Leaving aside 1860 and the accidental election of Abraham Lincoln, the mother of all third-party elections was 1912, a story recently retold in James Chace’s “1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs—The Election That Changed The Country.” Chace, who died last year, served as editor of “Foreign Affairs.” In 2004 he published his account of how Theodore Roosevelt, running on the Progressive line (nicknamed the Bull Moose Party), received 27 percent of the vote, thus effectively handing the presidency to Woodrow Wilson. In that election, President Taft, standing for re-election as the Republican, was consigned to 23 percent of the popular vote and 8 electoral votes—Vermont and Utah—as if maybe his only supporters were Mormons. The irony is that Roosevelt had picked Taft to succeed him in 1908, but Chace writes: “Theirs was a breach that would never be fully healed.” At his third-party nominating convention, Roosevelt proclaimed: “We are warring against bossism, against privilege social and industrial,” positions he defended on another occasion by saying: “If that is revolution, make the most of it.”
I disagree with Chace that the 1912 election “changed the country.” But it was colorful. Roosevelt, in addition to breaking with his protégé Taft, called Wilson “the apothecary’s clerk.” Debs, a socialist, ran for President while awaiting a Supreme Court decision on whether, in fact, he had violated the Espionage and Sedition Acts. Wilson dreamed of running as a populist and as a reformer, but, as another biographer wrote, the preacher “had a profound contempt for the Farmer’s Alliance, the Populists, greenbackers, bi-metallists, trades unionists, small office seekers, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, pensioners, strikers, armies of unemployed.” In fact, he owed his nomination to machine politicians. Chace breaks down the positions of the various candidates as follows: Roosevelt (“pragmatic nationalism”), Wilson (“self-righteous moralism”), Taft (“judicious conservatism”), and Debs (“socialist absolutism”). But he might well have quoted the McKinley power broker, Mark Hanna, who said, “all questions of government in a democracy are questions of money.” In 1912 the Democrats had the most money.
What’s interesting about the 1912 election is how skewed were the positions of the candidates, in relation to their party’s campaign buttons. Nominally one of the fathers of American conservatism, Teddy Roosevelt, according to Chace, “endorsed the graduated income and inheritance tax, a comprehensive workmen’s compensation act, prohibition of child labor, downward revision of the tariffs, and increased power for the Interstate Commerce Commission to supervise all corporations engaged in interstate business.” Labor agitator Debs spent as much time in prison as he did running for the presidency (he did both about five times). He was associated with radical socialism, although the man he most admired was Abraham Lincoln, for his “education, frugality, integrity, veracity, fidelity, diligence, sobriety, and charity.” Taft, a strict constitutional constructionist, was depicted as holding the moneybags of the party bosses, who instead were selling Saint Woodrow as if he were a patent medicine. Wilson won forty states and 435 electoral votes, and then spent the next four years assiduously incorporating the Bull Moose platform into Democratic sponsored legislation.
The eloquent American historian and Columbia University professor, Richard Hofstadter, observed that “third parties are like bees; once they have stung, they die.” Progressivism as a presidential party lasted a few more decades. But it never approached Teddy Roosevelt’s high water mark of 27 % of the popular vote, because by 1916 the Democrats had appropriated the third-party’s ideas. Wilson pushed through a federal income tax and various regulatory bodies. TR did try again in 1916 “to protect those who, under Mr. Wilson’s laissez-faire system, are trodden down in the ferocious scrambling rush of an unregulated and purely individualistic industrialism,” but during the 1916 campaign he was shot and by then, in any case, the Reverend Wilson was preaching from Teddy’s prayer book. He may even have fought the war to end all wars to get Roosevelt off his back.
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In 1924, Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette got 17 % of the vote as a third-party candidate, although the Jazz Age preferred Calvin Coolidge (54 %) to either the Progressive senator or the Democratic corporate lawyer, John W. Davis, who himself only secured the Democratic nomination on the 103rd ballot. Coolidge beat both of them although he never left his house to campaign. (How could they tell?) But the evolution of the Progressive party confirms the thesis of political scientist, Ronald Rapoport, that the success of third parties depends on voters either “pushing” away from major parties or the “pull” or attractiveness of dissident candidate ideas. In that, they are almost the push-me, pull-you creations of that noted political thinker, Dr. Doolittle.
During the four presidential elections that gave victory to Franklin Roosevelt, third parties candidates were seen but not heard. Norman Thomas replaced Eugene V. Debs as the perpetual candidate on the Socialist line, and ran on every occasion between 1932 and 1944. But he never got more than one percent of the vote, in part because the major parties offered clear, divergent platforms. If you wanted to soak the rich, you voted for Roosevelt; if not, you went Republican. In 1948, leaving aside the grammatical tautology, there were two third-party candidates: Henry Wallace for the Progressives and Strom Thurmond under the States’ Rights banner (sometimes called Dixiecrats). But collectively those on the fringe only stirred regional, not national enthusiasm, winning less than 5 % of the vote, although the Thurmond breakaway candidacy was the beginning of the end for the Democrats in the Deep South.
One of Thurmond’s spiritual heirs was Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama, who in 1968 ran on the American Independent Party, along with General Curtis Lemay, who thought the war in Indochina could be won if North Vietnam was “bombed back into the Stone ages.” (It was already there.) Pushing the segregationist line, Wallace got almost 14 % of the vote and 46 electoral votes, although it is not clear whether Wallace, nominally a Democrat, denied Humphrey a majority or Nixon a landslide. But as Rapoport has written: “All successful third-party candidates follow Wallace’s strategy of emphasizing the absence of a 'real choice' between the two major parties.” In 1972, after Wallace was wounded in an assassination attempt, his party ran a space orbiter by the name of John G. Schmitz (of National Rifle Association, John Birch, and American Legion credentials), who said during the campaign that “if people think you get up early, you can sleep until 11 AM.” He also came up with the campaign slogan that “When you’re out of Schmitz, you’re out of gear,” a play on the beer jingle of Schlitz. But Schmitz, with 1 % of the vote, didn’t even carry Milwaukee or make it famous.
Technically, in 1980 Congressman John Anderson was not a third-party candidate, in that he ran as an independent, without party affiliation. He won 7 % of the vote, but caused bigger damage to President Jimmy Carter in that he exposed the missing mojo in the Democrat’s presidency. In 1984 and 1988, the choices between the major parties, and their candidates were distinct (“Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”), and thus no third-party candidates emerged. But that changed in 1992, when out of the thrilling days of yesteryear came that masked rider from the plains, H. Ross Perot, a Lone Ranger who, according to Rapoport and his co-author Walter Stone, changed the complexion of American politics more than any third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt.
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Rapoport and Stone, respectively chairmen of the departments of political science at the College of William and Mary and the University of California at Davis, have recently published “Three’s a Crowd,” an account of the 1992 election and the subsequent Perot phenomenon. One of the surprising conclusions from the book, published by the University of Michigan Press, is that while Perot may well have cost Republican George Herbert Walker Bush his chance for re-election in 1992, his followers influenced the subsequent Republican revolution—beginning with the 1994 Contract with America and culminating after 2000 with victories for the White House, Senate and House of Representatives.
Two descriptions from the 1912 election could be applied to H. Ross Perot. In describing the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, Teddy Roosevelt once said: “I found him vain as a peacock.” And Hofstadter, in writing of the likes of Woodrow Wilson, spoke of “the ruthlessness of the pure in heart.” Despite his peacock looks and ruthless purity, in 1992 Perot got almost 20 million votes, 19 % of those cast, and denied Bill Clinton a popular majority. His nominating convention was, in effect, an appearance on the Larry King Show when he dared his supporters to get him on the ballots of all 50 states. Collectively 5.3 million citizens signed petitions for Perot, who then campaigned as a classic outsider—for deficit reduction, against immigration and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for term limits, and against government waste. But 1992 wasn’t a good year for the major parties. Despite earlier Gulf War popularity, President Bush the elder was laboring under a cratering economy while voters were having a hard time inhaling the nightlife of the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton. As an aide said of his boss, Perot was someone there to “fix the damn problem.”
One reason that successful third parties “sting and die” is that one or both of the major parties make takeover bids of the insurgent ideas. Beginning in 1994, the Republicans courted Perot’s supporters and their issues, about which the Democrats were largely indifferent. But according to Rapoport and Stone, Perot’s faithful remain a loose but powerful cannon in American politics. When it rolled to the Republican decks, they won control of the Congress and finally the Presidency. Rapoport and Stone write that, after 1992, “the Republicans reached out to Perot and to the Perot constituency.” They conclude that: “By migrating to one of the major parties, Perot activists carried the potential to change that party’s stands on core Perot issues, such as reform, economic nationalism, and the federal budget.” Even though Perot himself polled only 8 % of the vote 1996 and by 2000 the Reform Party had become a joke—reduced to a scrum for federally-matched funding between the likes of Jesse “the Body” Ventura, Pat Buchanan, and Donald Trump—the bee’s pollen was already allowing the Republicans to flower.
Thinking he could tell me who might be elected the next president in 2008, I called Professor Rapoport at his William and Mary office, where he has worked since 1975. Other than having read his provocative book, I did not know him personally. But I do know and admire his parents, who have made The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Foundation a model of generosity for the causes of literacy and the disadvantaged—although their gift is not so much money but enthusiasm for individuals and ideals.
On the phone Ronald Rapoport compared the looming 2008 election with 1992, in that there is a burgeoning deficit, the aftermath of a Persian Gulf invasion, and little perceived difference between the major political parties. He still believes that the Perot constituency “remains distinctive,” an underground political current looking to vent its populist anger on one of the major parties. But the outcome of the 2006 mid-term election will give him a better idea if the conditions might be ripe, in 2008, for the emergence of a third-party candidacy. He emphasized that the “major parties have to create the opportunity for a third party.” He recalled a line from the book that “one of the ironies of the Perot movement was that it [nominally non-partisan] contributed to one of the greatest upsurges in partisan politics in American history.”
Rapoport speaks about political candidates, third parties, and presidential politics with insight and irony. He thinks the conditions could well be ripe for a third-party in 2008, with all its attendant threats to the established order. (Alexander Pope called political parties “the madness of many for the gain of a few.”) Rapoport speculated that if the 2008 election were between Hilary Clinton and John McCain, he could imagine the Perot bloc swinging toward the Arizona senator, who in 2000 gave his campaign bus the Perot sounding name, “Straight Talk Express.” Ironically, push me, pull-you Perotism might explain, after all, why Bill Clinton has become best friends with the Bushes. Is it to move Hilary’s image into the safe middle ground? Too bad for the Democrats that Perot doesn’t play golf.
