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How "Third Parties" Can Win
It's fairly common knowledge these days that the donkeys and the elephants are pretty much after the same things. First among these things is money. (Multinational corporations are obviously the easiest source of this.) Money, in turn, is used to get the second most important thing: election.

"Third" parties don't go in for all that. It's why a lot of people like them; it's also why they seldom garner any real power. I've been a fan of these parties since I became a voter. They're "grassroots." They "keep it real."

I used to even vote for these parties in national elections, I liked them so much. Let's have a look at my personal record.

1980 - Libertarian - Gorman McBride (you never forget your first)
1984 - Libertarian - can't remember his name
1988 - Libertarian - can't remember his name
(Are you seeing a pattern here? I do remember standing in line for over an hour in near-rural Georgia to cast my vote for this nameless guy.)
1992 - Reform - Ross Perot.
(By this point I'd become discouraged with the Libertarians; Ross looked like he had, if neither a shot at winning nor an agenda to my liking, at least a shot at building a viable alternative, which is what I'd been after from the start.)
1996 - Democratic - Bill Clinton
(I'd been pulling down more money than I ever had in my life at that point, and was really pleased with the status quo, and everything that had to do with the status quo. Probably what follows was starting to dawn on my subconscious, as well.)
2000 - Green - Ralph Nader
(I was living in Texas. Though I knew the national polls were close, I also knew Bush would run away with the state anyhow, so I chose to throw my lot in with the shot at matching funds.)

So. Besides Bill Clinton, what did all this get me? Well...

A whole lot of nothing, that's what.

You might be thinking at this point that I'm one of those pathetic whiners who blames the GWB presidency on Nader's campaign. Let me assure you, that is not at all what this is about. (This should be evident further down.) I did learn a good deal from that campaign, but it probably wasn't at all what Ralphie-boy wanted me to learn.

What this is about, rather, is the reality of the national political system in the United States, and the fundamental difference between the national system and the local ones.

Although the U.S. Constitution is becoming increasingly moot with regard to the federal system in general, and national elections in particular, it's a good starting point. Read it, and it will dawn on you that we do not have a parliamentary form of government. The political reality it entails is a partisan one, involving tooth-and-nail fighting over even the smallest points of governance in a winner-take-all scenario. There is little room for coalition building (our nitwit-in-chief's pathetic dodging of criticism with calls for "nonpartisan politics" notwithstanding). Following the process resembles watching amateur golf in its slowness and inevitable, usually blandly unsatisfying outcome.

It's boring! Few people in this soundbite world have the attention span to even care about it. So, in the age of television, it became necessary to spice it up a bit. From this need came our Jello Biafras, our Howard Stassens, our Lyndon LaRouches. Our jaded public needed a bit of comic relief to relieve them of the immediate, sordid issues.

Unfortunately, our "third parties" saw the popularity of these candidates as a sign from above that they could actually win someday. I'm here to tell you, it ain't going to happen, not in our lifetime, not in our grandchildren's lifetime.

There's certainly room for third party candidates in more local elections; in 2000 I voted in Texas, and experienced a certain amount of glee in voting for Greens running for seats on the Railroad Commission (which, for those not familiar with Texas's byzantine political structure, is largely responsible for regulating the oil industry).

This local focus was the founding point for several third parties, Libertarians and Greens among them. "Work for the grassroots," they said, and it wasn't a bad idea. Fact is, if your third party doesn't have a single member on the state school board, it's silly to spend money running a gubernatorial candidate. Likewise, if your party doesn't have a single seat in Congress, why waste money on a presidential candidate? Unfortunately, the "third parties" lost sight of this, and got too big for their britches.

What a "third party" candidate for the presidency accomplishes, rather, is something more than the "spoiler" role popularly conceived. The end result is that the "third party" ends up drawing votes away from the viable candidates whose ideas are closest to their own. Nader in 2000. Perot in 1992. Wallace in 1968.

The closest a "third party" candidate came to actually winning a presidential election was in 1912, when the insanely popular ex-president Theodore Roosevelt ran on the Progressive ("Bull Moose") ticket, losing, but beating the Republican Taft, which probably made him feel pretty good, if nothing else, for beating a fellow Republican.

For those Republicans thanking Nader and those Democrats cursing Nader for the Florida fiasco (dumbly, in my view, without even considering the possibility of election fraud), I offer the following:

	Party	Vote Count	% Votes Cast
George W. Bush	GOP	2,912,790	49
Al Gore	Dem	2,912,253	49
Ralph Nader	Grn	97,421	2
Pat Buchanan	RP	17,472	0
Harry Browne	Lib	16,401	0
John Hagelin	NLP	2,273	0
Monica Moorehead	WW	1,805	0
Howard Phillips	CST	1,350	0
David McReynolds	Soc	618	0
James Harris	SWP	558	0

Note the "official" difference between the top two (crucial in our nonparliamentary system) is 537, which margin was exceeded by every single one of the "third party" candidates in Florida. I submit if you're going to bless or damn the Greens, you ought to do the same thing to the Libertarians, Socialist Workers, ostensibly nonworking Socialists, etc.

This country has had a two-party national system almost since its inception, and any fundamental change in that situation would be nothing short of revolutionary. Even the Republican party itself could not have come into being without the demise of the Whigs. The idea that a sensible third party can garner actual power in this system while there are still two formidable parties who purport to oppose each other is laughable.

Let's have a look at one of the very rare examples where a "third party" candidate wins an election: Gov. Jesse Ventura (Reform-MN). What did he accomplish during his term, besides make more or less of an ass of himself on more or less a monthly basis?

Not a whole lot that wouldn't have happened in the regular course of things anyway. Sure, Jesse "The Mind" Ventura turned out to be a much more savvy politician than his detractors originally speculated, but this wasn't terribly advantageous to the people of Minnesota. Things he and the legislature agreed on went their normal course. Things he and the legislature vehemently disagreed on (e.g. education) got stonewalled, and virtually left ignored for four years. These areas are in a very sorry state today because of the nature of the politics involved.

Unable to bend Ventura to their will, his opponents turned to mudslinging at his family in the press, much like a gang of thugs, and basically ran Jesse out on a rail. (As one local columnist noted (paraphrased), "There's a broken chair in the governor's mansion, and a pro wrestler is governor, and you're saying his son did it?)

This is obviously no way to overcome the old boys' network, and influence the government. So. What are idealists to do, besides running more or less independent candidates on a local level?

In my opinion, the answer is embodied in one Congressman Ron Paul. Here's a Libertarian (I remember now, he's the one I waited to vote for in '88; maybe homesickness had something to do with it), who had sense enough to join the Republican party and actually get elected to office, and serve his constituency and vote his conscience without betraying his original libertarian principles. Would that more Libertarians (and any Greens) had this kind of common sense.

"You can't change the entrenched culture of the top two parties," you say? Nonsense. Let's look at the GOP, as an example. Today's Republicans are a far cry from what Barry Goldwater knew a mere 40 years ago. Likewise, Goldwater's GOP would have been reviled in Teddy Roosevelt's time, which had little resemblance itself to Lincoln's Republicans. The top political parties change throughout time, despite themselves.

In my mind, the answer is for ideological Greens to assert themselves within the Democratic party, and likewise for ideological Libertarians to do the same with the GOP.

Could a man like Jesse Ventura (an ideological Libertarian, party affiliation notwithstanding) even make it in the GOP? Well why not, the GOP elected a B-movie actor as president, and currently reveres him as something close to a god. Anything's possible in politics.

"But they won't let me into their party," pules the unbeliever. "My ideals are at odds with theirs."

To this I say, "You're a politician, you know exactly how to handle that kind of situation."

"Lie."