The influential twentieth-century independent presidential candidacy that is perhaps most relevant to the conditions of the second decade of the twenty-first century is the one most distant in time: Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 effort to regain the presidency. Roosevelt had been president from 1901 to 1909 as a Republican. In 1912 he ran as a Progressive against his handpicked Republican successor in the White House, William Howard Taft, and the Democratic governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, who was elected. Roosevelt won 27.4 percent of the popular vote; he carried six states and so earned eighty-eight electoral votes. Wilson won 41.8 percent, while Taft, the incumbent, polled a mere 23.2 percent.
The Progressives were an established party when Roosevelt accepted their nomination, but so closely identified did the campaign become with the personality of the candidate that, after he proclaimed himself as “healthy as a bull moose,” his third party became known as the Bull Moose Party. Personal motives undoubtedly contributed to Roosevelt’s decision to run in that year. His ego was large enough that it was said of him that he wanted to be “the bride at every wedding, the baby at every christening and the corpse at every funeral.” But he also undertook his independent candidacy to promote measures that he regarded as vital for America’s future. He believed that Taft had done too little to carry forward the reform agenda that he had devised as president to deal with the challenges to the country of the new world that the Industrial Revolution had created. The growth of factories and cities, Roosevelt was convinced, required adjustments as sweeping as those America must now make to cope with the challenges of globalization and the IT revolution.
In 1912, the Bull Moose platform included proposals for such measures as the direct election of senators, direct primaries to choose candidates, women’s suffrage, the regulation of business, a minimum wage, an eight-hour workday and a six-day workweek, unemployment insurance, and old-age pensions. All of these were ultimately enacted. During the campaign, Wilson tried to co-opt Roosevelt voters by declaring that, like the former president, he too opposed the large business monopolies known as trusts.
The first two years of the Wilson presidency resembled Roosevelt’s vision of the office. Unlike Taft but like Roosevelt, Wilson made the executive branch an active agent of reform. Unlike William Jennings Bryan, the 1908 Democratic presidential candidate, but again like Roosevelt, Wilson acted as a progressive reformer, not an agrarian populist. He steered through Congress progressive legislation of the kind Roosevelt had championed, such as the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission and child labor laws. Roosevelt had a profound impact on the public policy of the United States when serving as its president, but he also changed the course of American history through his subsequent role as an unsuccessful third-party presidential candidate.
If the goal of the Bull Moose campaign of 1912, the Wallace campaign of 1968, and the Perot campaign of 1992 was to make the candidate the president of the United States, each of them failed. Insofar as the voters who supported these independent candidacies wanted to send a message to one or both of the major parties to pay more attention to particular issues, however, the three campaigns can be judged successful.
Could an independent campaign achieve similar success in the years to come? Specifically, could our kind of independent candidate, one who advocates a comprehensive revitalization of the traditional American formula for economic growth and serious steps to reduce the federal budget deficit, reform the tax code, and wean the country from fossil fuels, attract enough support to persuade Republicans or Democrats, or both, to make these policies their own? There are good reasons to believe that the time is ripe for this.
Recall that the extreme polarization of American politics has made the two major parties less representative of the country as a whole than ever before. Neither party expresses the preferences of a large slice of the electorate. The number of voters who register as independents has grown steadily over the decades and is now roughly the same size as the number who identify themselves with either of the two major parties. In fact, a Pew poll taken in October 2010 found that more voters identified themselves as independents (37 percent) than as Democrats (31 percent) or Republicans (29 percent). In this sense the United States already has a three-party system, but the third party—the radical center—has no formal platform or political leaders representing it.
Polls consistently show a high level of discontent with the direction of the country. A Pew survey at the end of 2010, to give just one of many examples that could be cited, found a staggering 72 percent of respondents dissatisfied with national conditions. Americans also hold the two major parties in low esteem. A Washington Post–ABC News poll taken in September 2010 reported that only 34 percent of the respondents said that Democratic candidates deserved reelection that year, and only 31 percent said that Republicans did—this in a year when Republicans went on to win a sweeping victory in midterm elections. A June 2010 poll conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, an independent movement to create a more open presidential election, found that 71 percent of respondents said they would like to see more than just the Democratic and Republican Parties represented on the presidential ballot.
Yet another sign of the public dissatisfaction with politics and government on which an independent candidate could capitalize is the pattern of voting in the last three national elections. Each has been what political scientists call a “wave” election, with the electorate swinging unusually sharply in one direction or the other. In 2006, the Democrats won thirty new seats in the House of Representatives and six in the Senate, gaining control of both bodies. In 2008, they won the presidency, twenty-four additional seats in the House, and eight in the Senate. In 2010, the electorate shifted even more sharply in the other direction, with the Republicans gaining control of the House by picking up sixty-three seats and winning six in the Senate as well. This is the behavior of an electorate—especially its independent voters, who tilted sharply to the Democrats in 2008 and just as sharply to the Republicans in 2010—searching for an approach to governance that, as of the 2010 election, it had not found.
The electoral success of the Tea Party movement in 2010 also suggests that the moment for another influential independent presidential candidacy may have arrived. Arising from the nation’s grass roots and outside the formal structures of the two major parties, its members organized themselves to express their opposition to the size of government in general and the size of the federal deficit in particular. Underlying their discontent, interviews with its members suggest, was a broad anxiety about the future of the country. In view of the large and so far unmet challenges America faces, such anxiety is warranted—although to meet the challenges will require not only the fiscal prudence that Tea Partyers demand but also activist government in selected areas—education, infrastructure, research and development—of the kind their ranks do not view favorably. The Tea Party might more aptly be called the Tea Kettle Party, as Tom has quipped, because its main effect has been to let off steam. It has not offered a coherent program—an engine—to harness that steam to move the country in the directions in which it needs to go.
In the 2010 election, Tea Party adherents supported the Republican Party, but as much because this was the obvious way to register dissatisfaction with the course of public policy—since the Democrats controlled both the White House and Congress—as because they had confidence that the Republicans could or would fix the things they regarded as broken. Many of those who counted themselves members of or sympathizers with the movement called themselves political independents. Many of those who identified with the Republicans might well be willing at least to entertain seriously supporting an independent presidential candidate. On balance, therefore, the rise of the Tea Party movement counts as further evidence that the time is once again ripe for an independent candidacy that can administer a shock to the American political system and compel serious attention to the challenges the country confronts.
Since a national presidential c
ampaign is expensive and an independent candidate cannot draw on the money normally available to major-party candidates, access to resources matters as well. Two wealthy supporters of Roosevelt financed much of his 1912 campaign. Perot had enough wealth of his own to fund his campaign himself. He spent an estimated $75 million on it.
But at the same time, modern information technology provides tools that were not available to Perot, let alone Wallace or Roosevelt, for overcoming some of the barriers to a successful independent presidential candidacy—specifically the raising of money and the dissemination of the candidate’s message. The presidential campaigns of former Vermont governor Howard Dean in 2004 and of Texas representative Ron Paul and especially Illinois senator Barack Obama in 2008, coming from different parts of the political spectrum, demonstrated that it is possible to raise impressive sums of campaign money in small individual contributions from many people through the Internet. The Internet and the social media such as Facebook and Twitter also provide channels for making known a candidate’s program that can serve as alternatives to established news organizations and that cost far less to use than buying television time for campaign commercials. By employing these channels a candidate can both raise money and save money.
When one sees how the Internet has leveled hierarchies and broken up monopolies everywhere, it is hard to believe that it will not have a substantial impact on the last big duopoly in America—the two-party system. That system has changed remarkably little since the nineteenth century, but we do not believe that, in the hyper-connected world, it can continue to resist change. The year 2012 might well be the moment when the Internet does to the two-party system what Amazon.com did for books and iTunes did for music—dramatically broaden both access and choices.
Imagine
It is impossible to know in advance how much support such a third party representing the radical center with a compelling candidacy could attract. It is entirely possible that polling on the subject before such a party and candidate emerge will understate its potential. Most Americans, after all, pay little attention to politics most of the time. The peak of national attention comes during our quadrennial presidential elections. A presidential election therefore offers an opportunity that is not otherwise available to educate and persuade voters. We believe the country is more open than ever to considering a serious independent candidate who can tap into the broad anxiety among Americans about their country’s future by explaining the challenges it faces and proposing a hybrid politics to meet those challenges. We would have no problem if a prominent Democrat or Republican should decide to bolt his or her party and become that candidate. Whoever it might be, if he or she is a serious person, we believe that such a candidate could do as well as Ross Perot did in 1992 and even conceivably as well as Theodore Roosevelt did in 1912. The only way to find out how such a candidacy would fare is to launch one.
Matt Miller, the McKinsey consultant who writes for The Washington Post, penned a column (November 11, 2010) in which he tried to imagine a Sunday talk show that included a serious third-party candidate:
Last Sunday, for example, you could see Christiane Amanpour chafing, with reason, at the fiscal nonsense emanating from [Republicans] Rand Paul and Mike Pence. This isn’t meant as a partisan remark—on another week the host would justly bristle at Democratic bunk …
How are the parties able to get away with this?
Because there’s a missing chair.
Rerun that Sunday show tape, but now suppose there’s a third “official” voice. “Mark Johnson from The Third Party,” the host says, “what do you make of it?”
“Actually, Republicans and Democrats aren’t giving you an honest picture,” Johnson says. “The truth is that once the economy’s back on track, taxes are going to rise in the years ahead no matter which party is in power, because we’re retiring the baby boomers. That means we’ll double the number of people on Social Security and Medicare. We’ve already got trillions in unfunded promises in these programs. Even if we trim their growth, and cut other spending, which we need to do, the math doesn’t work at current levels of taxation. And we can’t borrow the whole boomers’ retirement from China. So the idea that we can keep overall taxes where they are now, let alone cut them, is a Republican hoax.
“But Democrats are kidding you when they make it sound like we can solve the problem by taxing a few people at the top. The truth is that to pay for the boomers’ retirement, taxes will have to go up some on everyone. But there’s also good news—if we’re smart about it, and change the way we tax ourselves, we can pay for the boomers and still keep the economy humming. That’s the conversation we need to have. Here’s the kind of tax reform it would take …”
“If you find this missing voice appealing—and can imagine it weighing in across the hundred issues where both parties are in cahoots today to deny reality,” Miller concluded, “then you understand why we need a third political party.”
Picking up on Miller’s version of a talk show, imagine a televised presidential debate in which an independent candidate seriously committed to deficit reduction took part along with the Democratic and Republican candidates—just as Ross Perot shared the stage with George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the 1992 debates. The third candidate would challenge the two parties’ typical, mealymouthed evasions on the most urgent issue of the day—the budget—by beginning this way:
“What are you two talking about? It is absurd to talk about budget numbers without starting the conversation with far more important questions: What world are we living in? What are the new requirements of this world for educating our people and building our country? It is easy to spend without a strategy for the future, but it is lethal to cut without such a strategy. Let me tell you how I see the world we are living in today—a world, by the way, that we invented—and then connect the picture I have drawn with the spending I would cut, the taxes I would raise, and the new investments I would insist on making.”
The two major-party candidates would either have to offer comparably serious descriptions of the world and link them to their budget plans or risk appearing cowardly, ignorant, deluded, or duplicitous—or all four—in the eyes of the tens of millions of voters who were watching.
Beyond taking part in the debates and the campaign, ideally an independent presidential candidate would change the national conversation altogether—in a way that could move the nation toward the measures necessary to secure the American dream and sustain American power in the world. To do so, though, he or she would have to do on the stump what we suggested for that TV debate. At every stop, such a candidate would begin by raising and answering, candidly and in detail, that most important of all questions for public policy: What world are we living in? Presidential candidates, like presidents, have a bully pulpit. To move America in the right direction, a candidate would have to use it to educate the American people about the four major challenges they confront—globalization, the IT revolution, deficits and debt, and energy and the environment—and to outline the responses necessary to secure their future in this hyper-connected world. In particular—to paraphrase the political analyst William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution—a third-party candidate would have to tell the public not only why the Democratic and Republican approaches to our major challenges are “unacceptable,” but also why the status quo in each case is “unsustainable”—and therefore why a credible third approach is both vital and unavoidable. It is shocking how little teaching of that kind America’s elected leaders have done over the last decade.
As in the TV debate, the independent presidential candidate who can give the political system a constructive shock would then offer at each campaign stop a strategy to meet these challenges: raising more revenue through increasing taxes, including energy taxes; reducing expenditures by cutting government programs, including popular, beneficial programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and defense; and investing more money in education, infrastructure, and research
and development in order to upgrade the nation’s traditional formula for economic success. The candidate would have to make it clear that the three must go together—cutting spending, raising revenue, and investing in the formula. All are necessary. None can be left out. A governing program including only one or two of the three will not be fair, politically viable, or effective in dealing with America’s challenges or opportunities. The combination of taxing, cutting, and investing is mandatory in the short term to achieve what must be America’s primary policy goal in the long term—the economic growth to fulfill every American’s individual and national aspirations. The candidate America needs would demonstrate his or her seriousness about doing what the country needs by spelling out with specificity which taxes would rise, which programs would shrink, and where investments would be made and why they would be transformative for education, infrastructure, and investing—rather than falling back, as presidential candidates tend to do, on generalities and platitudes.
Finally, an effective third-party candidate would bring something else to the campaign—inspiration. Leadership involves more than honestly describing hard choices and specific policies. Leadership also involves the ability to get people up out of their seats. Americans do not want to be just “okay.” They want to be great. They want ours to be and remain a great country. A successful third-party candidate would be one who persuaded them that we have all the natural advantages to be great in the coming decades—by reclaiming our position as the world’s best launching pad, the place to which the most energetic and creative people from around the world want to come to start things, share things, build things, design things, and invent things. That is the foundation for American greatness. We have the raw materials to build that foundation. What is needed is the right leadership and collective action.
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Page 41
