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Are Two Parties Enough?

Think Tank Transcripts:Are Two Parties Enough?

ANNOUNCER: 'Think Tank' has been made possible by Amgen, arecipient of the Presidential National Medal of Technology. Amgen,bringing better, healthier lives to people worldwide throughbiotechnology.

Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, theRandolph Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I'm Ben Wattenberg. America has a uniquetwo-party political system. Does it still work? In 1996, beyond theRepublican and Democratic nominees, we may be seeing one more or twomore or even three more serious presidential candidates who say it'stime for something new.

Joining us to discuss the matter are Michael Barone, author of'Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan,'coauthor of 'The Almanac of American Politics,' and senior writer at'U.S. News and World Report'; Ronald Walters, chairman of thepolitical science department at Howard University and author of'Black Presidential Politics in America, A Strategic Approach,' anddeputy campaign manager for issues in Jesse Jackson's 1984 campaign;Michael Beschloss, author of 'The Crisis Years: Kennedy andKhrushchev, 1960 1963'; and Michael Vlahos, senior fellow at theProgress and Freedom Foundation.

The topic before this house: Are two parties enough? This week on'Think Tank.'

America is the only advanced democracy with a straight two-partysystem. Advocates say it helps unite a vast continental nation. Butmore often than you might think, third candidates and sometimes evenfourth candidates have had a major influence on American presidentialelections.

The presidential election of 1860 had four major candidates.Abraham Lincoln was elected, becoming the first Republican president.In 1912, former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt ran as athird-party candidate, finished second and split the Republican vote.This allowed Democrat Woodrow Wilson to capture the White House.

In 1968, presidential candidate Richard Nixon nearly lost theelection to Democrat Hubert Humphrey because the governor fromAlabama, George Wallace, took almost 14 percent of the vote, most ofwhich would have gone to Nixon.

GEORGE WALLACE (Former Governor of Alabama): (From videotape.) Gotsome folks out here who know a lot of four-letter words. But thereare two four-letter words they don't know: w-o-r-k and s-o-a-p. Youdon't know those two four-letter words, I'll tell you that much.

MR. WATTENBERG: And in 1992, billionaire Ross Perot ran a chaoticbut remarkably successful third-party campaign. To the surprise ofmany experts, Perot received almost a fifth of the vote. Perot maywell run again in 1996, and he may not be alone. There is intensespeculation that retired General Colin Powell could run as anindependent. The Reverend Jesse Jackson has publicly discussedbolting the Democratic Party to run on an independent ticket. Whattheir candidacies would mean for the Republicans or for the Democratsor for America is anyone's guess.

We are going to talk in a moment about the current situation, butlet's start first with a lesson in theory. What is the politicaltheory behind our unique two-party American system? Michael Barone,and then let's go around the group.

MR. BARONE: Well, I think the argument for third-parties is thatthe two major parties -- we've got two of the three longest-runningmajor parties in democratic societies in the world -- have their ownfixed kind of character and personality. They don't exhaust allpolitical possibilities of what people may want, so you should haveroom for something else.

The real argument, I think, against the third parties is that ourelectoral system works powerfully against third parties, theelectoral and for the presidency and the single-member district inCongress. And as a practical matter, third parties have not provedlasting.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Michael Beschloss.

MR. BESCHLOSS: Third parties tend to address issues thatoftentimes the major two parties do not address because they have tobe these great umbrella majorities, and oftentimes they've gottencandidates to focus. In 1992, if Ross Perot had not been so tough onreducing the deficit, I think Bill Clinton and George Bush would nothave tried to outbid him.

At the same time, during a period in which this country is gettingmore fragmented than ever, in a way the two umbrella parties seem alot more welcome because there are very few unifying factors in thissociety.

MR. WATTENBERG: Michael Vlahos.

MR. VLAHOS: Third parties are important in American historybecause the national third party as opposed to a regional third partyemerges in a time of a conflict of visions over the American idea.

MR. WATTENBERG: Of visions?

MR. VLAHOS: Yeah, a conflict that's deep-rooted, that's powerful.We have them in the Civil War, right before the Civil War, 1896,1930s. The third party is a transitional device for Americans to playout this conflict of visions. What happens often is that it serves asa way of getting things defined so that it comes to terms in acritical election, where one of these visions predominates. And atthat point, once you have one vision triumph, those who are opposedto that vision still or who believe differently tend to take theopposition side and you go back to two parties again.

MR. WATTENBERG: All right. Ron Walters.

MR. WALTERS: Very complex. I think the philosophical cement whichhas held the two-party system together really is fraying at theedges, and largely because, I think, when you look at the grandcoalitions which have held these two parties together, the socialinterests behind them are coming unstuck. And I think that you lookfor the answers to that not in the political system, but in thesocial system. And I think when we look at the fact that there is farless unity about the great ideas of this time, I think it's naturalthat you will see that reflected in the political system.

MR. WATTENBERG: Why is that America alone of the modern industrialdemocracies has a straight two-party system, and I guess everywhereelse, there are more fragmented parties.

MR. BARONE: Well, one quick answer is the electoral college. Imean the fact is, you either carry all of the state's electoral votesor none, and the first one in there does.

MR. WATTENBERG: So there's a constitutional root to it.

MR. BARONE: It doesn't help out very much if you're running astrong third; you get zero in the electoral college. If you'rerunning even second, you get zero in the electoral college in moststates.

MR. WATTENBERG: Yeah, but if you run third party, you can get astate's electoral votes with only 34 percent of the vote.

MR. BARONE: But in fact what's happened is that the residualloyalties typically to the two major parties, about which people atdifferent points in our history have had really passionateattachments to, tend to make it hard. I mean, we saw Ross Perot, in1992, was running first out of three in the polls in the spring. Ifhe hadn't withdrawn from the race, perhaps he would have been a --that is not impossible, but it's a hard threshold to meet.

MR. VLAHOS: But there is a cultural reason for having two parties,and that is that, unlike the other cultures of Europe and Japan,America isn't the same kind of structured class society where youhave a dominant upper class that organizes society and that class canstructure its political system in ways where it's less central to howyou define your identity, whereas here, in some ways the politicalsystem is the way in which we structure a sense of elite leadershipin society and ratify it in ways that work for us.

The ratification of authority in European states does not dependupon their electoral system as much.

MR. WALTERS: Well, I was going to say something just I think theopposite of that -- (laughter) -- because I think that there is asense, really, of class in a lot of this --

MR. VLAHOS: Well, I'm not saying there isn't a sense of class, butit isn't as structured as -- MR. WALTERS: All right, well, let medefine it my way. I think that one of the ways in which the politicalparties, especially in the 20th century, was predominantly out of thequestion of class. When you look at the way the Democratic Party hastended to mirror the development of industrial society, you can seethen the root of that party system and the way in which it servedblue-collar interests.

By the same token, in the 20th century, you look at the emergenceof the Republican Party and the way in which it tended to serve theinterests of those who own capital.

And I think that that -- what's happened I think in the post WorldWar II period is that that division has broken down as we movedtoward a service economy. Two guys live in the suburbs. One works forIBM, the other for AT&T. They're a Democrat and a Republican.They wonder, what's the difference between us anymore?

MR. BESCHLOSS: I think another thing, if I might come in, is thatespecially on the Democratic side, in recent years you see somethingof a lack of political courage of the kind that you used to see inthe 19th century. By that I mean that Democrats in recent years whowould like to be old liberal Democrats with the kind of view aboutactivist, perhaps central government that was the case that was verypopular in the 1930s, now people say Americans have turned away fromthat, but we still want to win, so we'll try to fuzz that up andpaper over the division in the Democratic Party.

And the result of that has been that every presidential candidatein the Democratic Party for about the last 10 to 15 years has been ahostage of this effort to paper over that conflict. And what youmight see in 1996 is Bill Clinton trying to be both old and newDemocrat, and you might see, if Jesse Jackson runs, Jackson forcingClinton to choose one or the other, and essentially a third partydoing what it's done through most of our history.

MR. WATTENBERG: You don't really think that President Clintonwould try to have two faces on an issue, do you?

MR. BARONE: Well, I think he -- I'm not sure he'd want to limithimself to that. (Laughter.) No, he's an adaptive, and in a sensehe's almost a prototype of the nature and the character of theDemocratic Party, because through its long history, going back to the1830s, the Democratic Party has typically been a collection ofout-groups, of people who sense or are sensed by others to be somehownot quite fully American or hyphenated American or a littledifferent.

It was the Irish as it started in the 1830s, Southerners asopposed to Northerners, factory workers and union members in the1930s, black Americans, particularly after the New Deal and the civilrights revolution. And at its best, the Democratic Party becomes sortof the quintessential majority institution when it gathers enough ofthese groups together and can keep them together. But it's hardkeeping all these groups together.

MR. VLAHOS: Well, it worked in the industrial period, but theproblem is, we're entering into a different era in terms of how oureconomy is structured. And you add to that the fact that theestablishments of both the two parties don't speak to the peopleanymore. They're elitist establishments.

And in fact, the cleavages in both parties illustrate the factthat you have the old lines of ideological separation and partyallegiance shifting like this. So you now see libertarian Democrats,old, you know, hippies from the '60s, making common alliance with theGingrich types who want to have the same kind of libertarian approachthat fits the economic changes --

MR. BESCHLOSS: Certain Republicans?

MR. VLAHOS: Well, in fact, you know, the old class lines -- we'restill wearing the kind of attire that fits the old-line elites. Infact, that's really breaking down and that's traditionally --

MR. WATTENBERG: You can take your tie off.

MR. VLAHOS: I might loosen it a little. No, but traditionally, youhave this breaking down of elites when you have an economicrevolution.

MR. WALTERS: Let me throw something else in because we've talkingabout interests, and that is, I think technology has helped thisprocess because it's given groups the ability to project theirinterests into the political system without regard to the overarchingstructures of the party. Political scientists, for example, we talk alot about why the party has gone, you know, to hell. Well, the factis that the party used to be the main instrument of politicalsocialization, the main instrument of political information as a partof that.

But today somebody can turn on their television set and get morepolitical information or use some other means, Internet, whateverhave you. So that ability of groups to get together and to projecttheir interests, represent their interests is another reason why Ithink you're fragmenting the political party system at the base.

MR. WATTENBERG: Let's move now to the current situation becausewhen Ross Perot ran last time, in 1992, he made the case, and Ithought it was a pretty interesting case, wouldn't it be nice to havea non-partisan president, who was neither a Democrat nor aRepublican, who could take the best from each, who didn't get electedbecause this block or that block or this special interest had givenhim money, and then he could sit there and be sort of the nonpartisanguy who got under the hood and fixed things. Is that -- and now, howdoes that play out in -- now let's turn to 1995.

MR. WALTERS: The state law won't allow it right now. When you lookat the way in which the Congress has produced and the way in whichpeople have to run through a gauntlet of state laws, which are reallystructured to favor the two-party system --

MR. WATTENBERG: In congressional elections. MR. WALTERS: -- incongressional elections -- right now I don't see any room in statelaw for a totally nonpartisan result. And I think that's got to bethe problem.

But I will say this, that as far as the presidential level isconcerned, since the time of John Anderson, I think that what'shappened in states is that it's become easier and easier for seriousthird-party candidates to gain ballot access. And the technicalitiesaround ballot access really have stymied a lot of great third-partyefforts.

MR. BARONE: How late is it a candidate can get in the race, Ron,and get ballot access in all the states, do you think?

MR. WALTERS: I think about now.

MR. WATTENBERG: Perot didn't start till the spring of the electionyear.

MR. WALTERS: Well, in many states, you have petition requirements,and those petition requirements means that you have to get 30, 40,50,000-some, 100,000, some crazy number of petitions --

MR. VLAHOS: That's right, and a lot of them are thrown out.

MR. WALTERS: That's right, and you have to get them validated, andthey have to be ready for some of the elections that are occurringthis year in order to use that ballot access for next year.

MR. WATTENBERG: Is Jesse Jackson, in your judgment, going to dothat?

MR. WALTERS: I plead the 5th on that question.

MR. BARONE: Has he taken some of the beginning steps in that orhave others done that for --

MR. WALTERS: No. He's talked about it seriously, but I would saythis. When you look at a combination of groups that have already run,from the Peace and Freedom Party to Ron Daniels and many others, thathave already created ballot access in many states, I don't think hewould have to start over, you know, new. He could use, in fact, someof the lines that have already been created.

MR. VLAHOS: The only time that third -- national third parties arereally important and can be really important, and this isn't just afunction of local laws, is when one of the two major parties beginsto break up. And we have serious enough divisions in both parties,especially the Democrat Party, where you could begin to see that. Ifyou have a situation where people feel so unattached to a party, theprospect of a third party that two or three years ago might have justbeen based around a charismatic figure, like Ross Perot, now becomessomething that they begin to focus on. That's what you had in the1850s. But that reflects deep divisions.

MR. WATTENBERG: Is the Democratic Party breaking up? Anybody?

MR. BESCHLOSS: I guess I see it very differently because whatthird parties have done, certainly in this century, you see somethinglike the split that Ben mentioned, in 1912 between Theodore Rooseveltand William Howard Taft in the Republican Party. That was mendedagain.

Same thing in 1948. There was a suggestion that the DemocraticParty would break up because you had splinters on the left and right.They came back again. In 1968, George Wallace took a number of peopleout.

I think what it tends to do is not so much always cause a party tobreak up, although that certainly did happen in the 19th century --in the middle of the 19th century, but what it does is it gets aparty to focus.

What I would suggest in this time, one problem in the DemocraticParty at the presidential level during the last two decades has beenlack of focus. Do the Democrats believe in the idea of strong,activist government, or is this something that they're walking awayfrom? In 1980, that was papered over; very much the same thing now.So if you had a party, such as a Jesse Jackson party, splinteringfrom the Democrats, what it could cause is a much more focusedDemocratic Party in the future.

MR. VLAHOS: If I could just rephrase that. I mean, the point isthat the development of the Know-Nothings followed the collapse ofthe Whigs. What I'm saying is if one of the two major parties that'sbeen hallowed and around a long time loses a lot of its adherents andbecomes a kind of rump party, like the Whigs did, then you see thatas a consequence of a divide in which the issue has left its formerplace. It's left the party, it's gone somewhere else.

MR. BARONE: It's kind of a hard drill, though, to do this. One ofthe things we see in presidential races recently has been that you dobetter, as Ross Perot showed, if you're some kind of a celebrity.

MR. WATTENBERG: Yeah, well, all right. Let me ask you a question,speaking of celebrity. Suppose you had General Colin Powell --

MR. BARONE: The man with a --

MR. WATTENBERG: That's right -- former chairman of the jointchiefs of staff, running on a ticket, on a visionary ticket as anindependent with traditional values as his major theme. How would hedo?

MR. BARONE: Well, I think there's a real potential for thatcandidacy. You know, you can see it in the polls, and you can see itdepending on what General Powell does.

In a way, a presidency of this sort is almost what the foundersenvisaged. They did not think the president would be a partisanfigure. The person they had in mind for the first holder of thatoffice, George Washington, tried very much to hold himself aboveparty, although that became difficult in his administration.

MR. VLAHOS: The problem is that so many people in the elite arelooking to Powell to kind of paper over and bring together a cleavagein America that you can't get away from.

MR. BARONE: Your example of the Whigs earlier -- the Whig Partydisappeared in part because it refused to confront --

MR. VLAHOS: Right, right, absolutely.

MR. BARONE: -- or take a stand on the moral issue of the day:slavery and extension of slavery. They said, hey, we're neutral onthis. And everybody else had strong feelings about it. They said, wedon't need a party that's neutral on this; we'll go with theDemocrats who like slavery or we'll go with the Republicans, thatsort of dislike it.

MR. VLAHOS: That's beginning to happen now.

MR. WALTERS: This is the David Dinkins solution. Paper it over,hope that he can bring everybody together. MR. WATTENBERG: DavidDinkins is the mayor of New York, the former mayor of New York.

MR. WALTERS: Former mayor of New York City. And it didn't work.

MR. VLAHOS: I agree with you on that.

MR. WATTENBERG: Who spoke about the great mosaic --

MR. WALTERS: That's right and it isn't working.

MR. VLAHOS: This isn't the same as Eisenhower, either. This isn'tthe same as Eisenhower because that was America --

MR. WALTERS: But let me say something about Colin Powell. I justwanted to just go just a little step further on Colin Powell becauseI think that the minute he opens his mouth and begins to articulatehis vision, the white population, which now in the polls shows himway up there, is going to splinter. So he's going to carry, I think,some of the white population. But I think the real damage is going tobe done in the Democratic Party. He probably will carry as much asone-third of people who consider themselves Democrats, and that'sgoing to be the death knell of the Democratic --

MR. WATTENBERG: Will he capture a majority of the black vote if heran?

MR. WALTERS: No. About a third -- about a third of the black vote,people who now call themselves Democrats.

MR. WATTENBERG: Michael Beschloss, you tell me, how would ColinPowell do?

MR. BESCHLOSS: I think he might win the election. I think it wouldbe a very problematical presidency. We have been talking about thirdparties and third-party candidates. If he runs, he would notparticularly be the candidate of a party.

MR. WALTERS: Right, right, that's true.

MR. BESCHLOSS: He would be an independent movement, no base inCongress. If Colin Powell were elected on the basis of personalityand his very considerable prestige, what could he really claim thiselection as a mandate for?

One advantage of having a Republican or Democratic label at thispoint in time is that, at the very least, a Bill Clinton can say in1992, whether genuinely or not, my election represents a mandate fora point of view on a number of issues and I'm going to use that indealing with Congress and the American people. Very hard for ColinPowell to do that if he runs a campaign that is as much aboveideology as we're talking about.

MR. WALTERS: I disagree because mandates are not given.Politicians create mandates out of victory. Look at Lowell Weicker inConnecticut. Here's a guy who ran on something called the ConnecticutParty and won, and right away claimed a mandate for doing what?

MR. VLAHOS: He's hated by so many Connecticutans.

MR. WALTERS: Raising taxes.

MR. BARONE: Raising taxes. Well, that's -- he'd said he'd considerraising taxes before, but --

MR. WALTERS: That's right, that's it.

MR. VLAHOS: There's a problem with Colin Powell, though. He'd grabthe basically uncommitted middle, and hanging out there on both endswould be the firebrands who want to change America in two differentdirections. And so the problem would just be postponed.

MR. BARONE: You know, we have a sort of polarized politics in thiscountry, in part because we've got a polarized people. I mean like,you know, the force in the Republican Party with the most elan andenergy right now seems to be the religious right. In the DemocraticParty, I would say it's the feminist left has been --

MR. BESCHLOSS: Right.

MR. BARONE: -- certainly in 1992 was the party with energy andenthusiasm and so forth. Neither one of those groups is sure thatGeneral Powell shares their basic vision. And, you know, any --when aperson comes forward as he does, who is widely admired but whoseviews aren't known, any enunciation of his views is going to subtractsome people from supporting him who otherwise would have done so.

In a cultural split, it will be interesting. I mean, you'rebasically writing a platform for him, Ben, that I don't know ifGeneral Powell agrees with or not.

MR. WATTENBERG: I'm writing a book about that platform for anumber of candidates, you know, one book for four or five candidatesof different parties.

MR. VLAHOS: You know, one of the problems I see here, and thishighlights my belief that this is a period of a conflict of visions,is that the two opposing visions are hellbent on demonizing eachother, the kind of demonizing you haven't seen since the 1850s, whenthe Republicans talked about the slave power and characterized theSoutherners as evil, and the Southerners turned around and did thesame thing.

MR. WATTENBERG: We are running out of time. Let's go around oncemore this way, and let me ask one simple question to which I wouldlike again a short answer, although it's hard to do. In terms of thenext presidential election, given the fact that none of us know thefuture, so stipulated, will there be a third-party candidate or afourth-party candidate or a third independent candidate for it? Andhow is this thing going to play out, stipulated that none of usreally knows? Ron Walters, Howard University.

MR. WALTERS: I think that there will be a third-party candidate.It's hard now to say who actually is going to lose. I think Perotmakes the Republicans lose. There could be the emergence of a JesseJackson or a Colin Powell to make the Democrats lose. The fact isthat the polls are showing that 47 percent or 50 percent of blacksthink it's time for a black party, so that they may not stay with theDemocratic Party if Clinton doesn't do right over issues likeaffirmative action. So I think there will be one. It's hard to sayright now what the configuration will be.

MR. WATTENBERG: Michael Vlahos, Progress and Freedom Foundation.

MR. VLAHOS: You'll have splits in both parties. They may lookminor in terms of challenges to the two parties, but you're going tosee an erosion of the old parties and the emergence of two newparties that better reflect the actual issue at hand in terms of aconflict of visions in America.

MR. WATTENBERG: Have two new parties?

MR. VLAHOS: Well, the parties will reshape themselves. They may becalled different names. But you need to have parties today thatattach themselves to the two visions that are driving America towardwhatever future it has.

MR. WATTENBERG: And just very briefly, what are the two visions --one, two?

MR. VLAHOS: Well, one vision is basically a paternalistic,multicultural vision of a balkanized America, run by a dominantelite. The other vision is a much more fragmented libertarian cumtraditional values vision.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Michael Beschloss, tell us the future,distinguished historian.

MR. BESCHLOSS: To govern is to choose, and third parties helpmajor parties, Republicans and Democrats, to choose. Republicans area majority party right now. The Democrats are the ones who are goingto have to decide what they want to do in the future. They havereally eluded that question. If there is a breakout from theDemocrats, they're going to have to choose one way or the other, leftor right.

MR. WATTENBERG: Michael Barone, surely you know the future.

MR. BARONE: Surely I know the future. I do not know the future. Ihave a hard time knowing the past. I will say there's about a 40percent chance that we will see a serious third candidacy. It willdepend on whether General Colin Powell thinks the Republicancandidate nominee is up to snuff. It will depend on whether JesseJackson believes that the Clinton administration policy isunacceptable. And it will depend on whatever Ross Perot'sdecisionmaking process depends on.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. I know the future, but I'm not going toreveal it right now. Thank you, Michael Barone, Ronald Walters,Michael Beschloss, and Michael Vlahos.

And thank you. Please send your comments and questions to: NewRiver Media, 1150 17th Street, NW, Suite 1050, Washington, DC, 20036.Or we can be reached via electronic mail at thinktv@aol.com.

For 'Think Tank,' I'm Ben Wattenberg.

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'Think Tank' has been made possible by Amgen, a recipient of thepresidential National Medal of Technology. Amgen, unlocking thesecrets of life through cellular and molecular biology.

Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, theRandolph Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. END

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