In Chicago in 1912, there were three anthems echoing around the convention hall of the Progressive Party. One was “Onward Christian Soldiers.” The second was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And this was the third:
I want to be a Bull Moose
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And with the Bull Moose Stand
With Antlers on my forehead
And a Big Stick in my hand.
In this colorful bit of history and in a few others, there is an object lesson for Ross Perot and all of those who would build third political parties from the ranks of the disgruntled: It’s not that easy.
Much of America loved former President Theodore Roosevelt immensely, and thus the battle was joined when he returned from an African safari to watch President William Howard Taft-not loved immensely, but simply immense at 326 pounds, the only president ever to get stuck in the White House bathtub-shifting the Republican Party to the right.
It was the first big “other party” candidacy of the 20th Century and the high-water mark of a progressive political movement born of the pox-ridden politics of the late 19th Century. The Progressive Party, which adopted the Bull Moose as its symbol, drew do-gooders to politics the way juicy fall fruit draws hornets to a farmers market.
Grand thinkers, social workers, disgruntled Republicans, businessmen drawn to Roosevelt’s proposed “New Nationalism,” folks urging more progressive immigration laws, people who wanted direct election of U.S. senators and voting rights for women-they all flocked to the Progressive Party to make a great noise and threaten the established powers in American politics.
They sang up a storm for Teddy, a candidate so valiant he gave a one-hour speech in Milwaukee with parts of a bullet lodged in his chest after he had been shot by a fanatic who was upset Roosevelt had broken his pledge not to seek a third term.
Thou wilt not cower in the dust,
Roosevelt, O Roosevelt!
Thy gleaming sword shall never rust
Roosevelt, O Roosevelt!
Of course, they were all dead wrong.
What it all amounted to, despite the presence of one of the most stunning candidates of all time, was a split Republican vote, with 27.4 percent shifting to Roosevelt and his Progressive Bull Moosers and 23.2 percent staying within Republican ranks, opting for Taft.
The outcome made Democrat Woodrow Wilson president. He had collected 41.9 percent of the vote but won an Electoral College landslide. It probably shouldn’t have happened, because he ran worse than his predecessor on the Democratic ticket, William Jennings Bryan, had run in three failed attempts in 1896, 1900 and 1908.
But that is third-party politics for you. Myopia infects the politically passionate to the point that they see only their own flame, their own reality.
And it is a message for Perot and Bill Bradley and Colin Powell and Lowell Weicker and for anyone else who would cobble together a coalition to assault an entrenched, admittedly frustrating two-party system: Don’t be blinded. Measure your potential impact before you leap.
Times have changed greatly, of course. Today, a viable candidate with a big wad of money could use paid television and smart media-computers and direct mail and the like-to construct quite a political wave, although no one knows yet whether it would be enough to create an independent candidate who could win.
Perot, using a big wad of his own money, created himself on television three years ago, a character who was not telegenic and so given to “moth-in-a-mitten” down-homeisms as to be laughable, on occasion.
On Monday night, Perot announced on “Larry King Live” the formation of something called the Independence Party, a title that displays, first, a serious lack of imagination and, second, questions about how independent it actually can be.
The new party will depend on Perot’s money to get started and he has already proclaimed that any candidate accepted for the top of the ticket will have to embrace his basic do-gooder agenda of campaign reforms, balanced budgets and so on.
The attention immediately shifted to retired Army Gen. Colin Powell, who has said he would consider it, or to Bradley, the brainy retiring U.S. senator and former pro basketball player from New Jersey, and Weicker, the Republican-turned-independent who was a U.S. senator and later governor of Connecticut.
The speculation is that it is time for a third party because people are so upset about the choices presented by the Republicans and the Democrats. There seems to be some truth to that.
The Times Mirror Center for the People & The Press checked on the ratings of the parties and incumbents over the summer and concluded that a little more than a quarter of the voting-age population said they would like to see an independent elected next year.
President Clinton, whose ratings mostly have been stuck around the 43 percent level that sent him to office in the first place, seemed frozen in a glacier. And the more people knew about the conservative Republican agenda in the Congress, the less they seemed to like it.
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Perot had the worst evaluation of any national figure tested in the survey. Only 40 percent viewed him favorably, while 53 percent had an unfavorable view of the Texas billionaire. Even Powell, seemingly so popular in the wake of a book tour and wet-kiss profiles from the national magazines, saw his ratings decline.
The problem with these numbers is that there is always a big collection of potential voters-generally the people who don’t vote-who are distraught about the status quo and eager for some improvement. That is a reality that is at the heart of all “other party” candidacies.
Perot’s strange on-again, off-again campaign in 1992, which drew 19 percent of the vote, John Anderson’s 7 percent showing in 1980, George Wallace’s strong 13.5 percent performance in 1968 and the emergence of the Dixiecrats, led by Strom Thurmond, and the Progressives of Henry Wallace in 1948 as a leftist response to Harry Truman’s hard line against the Soviet Union, were all the creations of parts of an electorate frustrated with the direction of the traditional parties.
Calling it a “third party” isn’t really correct because there are oodles of “third parties” already, everything from Greens to Communists to Socialists to Libertarians to what have you, available as political options. But none of them carries the institutional weight of the Democrats and Republicans, which is the inherent goal of any new-party effort.
The problem, as the record shows, is that it is difficult to predict how much weight another new party effort might gather and what impact that might have on a campaign.
Roosevelt’s backers in 1912 were a clearly defined group of reformers. George Wallace went shopping among those who made decisions based on race and the Democratic Party’s position on the matter. Anderson gathered a small collection of reformers. Perot tapped the disaffected.
What might happen this time?
If the polling data are correct and Clinton remains the favorite of the 43 percent who elected him three years ago, then it is unlikely a third-party effort would pull many votes from him.
But it could well present enough of a magnet to Republicans who are moderate and feeling uncomfortable about the rightward swing of their party to shift allegiance, along with drawing a lot of support from the big bloc of “independents” who have played an increasingly important role in presidential contests.
It could take a good six to eight more months of politicking to see where this whole Perot/independent party movement is headed. But it’s not difficult to construct a scenario in which its course carries politics right back to the Bull Moose days of 1912.