The Third Party Delusion

Tom Friedman is at it again: he's wishing wistfully for a gallant knight to come loping out of the wilderness to become a moderate third-party candidate who would magically force the presidential campaigns to discuss substantive solutions to our problems.

Dana Milbank realized how silly this idea was last month when his Americans Elect pipedream evaporated. Jonathan Bernstein pointed the problems with third parties in his PostPartisan piece, "Elections are about the party, not the man."


The fact is, third-party candidates do indeed affect the election. But not the way you want them to. Generally, they steal the election from the candidate they're most similar to and give it to their opponent. In modern politics the party is more important than the candidate.

In the last four Minnesota gubernatorial elections a third party candidate has received a substantial number of votes. In 1998 Jesse Ventura won running as an independent. He remained in office for a single term, deciding not to run again because media jackals were hounding him and his family. But the real problem was that he had no base of support in the legislature and had a devil of a time getting anything passed because neither party was obligated to help him.


People like to think that governors and presidents can somehow make things happen through sheer force of personality. But the structure of our government requires that all laws originate in the legislatures. Unless a governor or president has the support of a party in the legislature, he can accomplish nothing. That's why Obama had only a very short window in 2009 to accomplish his agenda -- the few weeks after Al Franken was seated and Ted Kennedy died. Basically, only enough time to get the health care law passed. Before and after then Republicans in the Senate could stop any Obama initiative cold by threatening a filibuster.


In Minnesota, the Democrats generally worked with Ventura, but he had no permanent sway over them. Democratic and Republican governors can always count on the party to introduce their bills, and to deliver a certain number of votes for them, but Ventura had to depend on members of other parties to get his legislation drafted. That made his job much harder and, I imagine, very discouraging. Ventura was in many ways a jerk, but in office he mostly seemed to want to make things run well. After his term as governor Ventura bugged out on the Independence Party, fled to Mexico and grew a squidgely beard.


In 2002 a former Democrat running as an independent delivered the 2002 election to Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, by siphoning off votes from the Democratic candidate. In 2006 another former Democrat ran under the same independent banner and got Pawlenty reelected. And in 2010, a former Republican ran as an independent in that same party, giving the election to Mark Dayton, a Democrat.

And we all remember how Ralph Nader delivered Florida into the hands of George Bush, by taking hundreds of thousands of liberal votes from Gore, and helping make the Florida ballot that much more confusing, with the zillion candidates and all the idiotic manual hole punching that was involved. Bush won by some 500 votes, only after the U.S. Supreme Court stopped a state recount on a 5-4 decision.

Twenty or thirty years ago, when most Republicans in Minnesota were still reasonable, it was possible to split the ticket and vote across party lines. I voted for many Republican candidates like Al Quie, Dave Durenberger and Arne Carlson, and things worked out. These men were reasonable, but more importantly, the Republican Party was still reasonable. They wanted things to work smoothly, not wage endless ideological battles to score political points. No longer.

The Republican Party is now a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of Koch Industries and Sheldon Adelson's worldwide casino empire, dedicated solely to promulgating their power and wealth. Many people feel George Bush was just a figurehead and that Dick Cheney really called all the shots. If elected, Mitt Romney will be in even less control than Bush was.


Romney likes to pretend you can run a country like you run a corporation. Romney would be the "CEO of America." But CEOs don't answer to the employees or even the shareholders, they answer to the board of directors. And the Republican Party's board of directors consists of the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Grover Norquist and all the other wealthy fatcats we've never heard of who've been donating tens of millions of dollars to Republican Super PACs.


You see, no one in the Republican Party actually likes or trusts Romney: they only picked him because they believed he was the candidate independent voters would find least objectionable in a race against Obama. They hate everything that Romney did as governor, they hate that he's from Massachusetts, they hate that he's a rich elitist who's totally clueless about normal people live their lives, they hate that his wife rides dressage, they hate that he's a Mormon. But they knew full well the guys they actually liked (remember Gingrich, Cain, Paul, and Santorum?) were too far off the deep end to beat Obama.


By choosing Romney, the Republicans have made it eminently clear that it's all about the party and not about the man. But if Republicans have to hold their nose when they vote for Romney, why would anyone else want to vote for him? We won't be putting a rich Mormon businessman in the White House if we elect him, we'll be installing the party of Bush that brought the current recession down us with lax oversight over greedy and incompetent bankers, locked-in profits for big pharmaceutical companies, huge tax cuts for the richest people, needless and bungled wars in the Middle East, and hundreds of thousands of veterans with serious medical problems that will haunt them for the rest of their lives -- as well as cost us trillions of dollars over the next sixty years.