(Via several sources, including Donklephant) New York Magazine is running a set of articles advocating the creation of “The Purple Party” — essentially the middle/centrist party I’ve wished for in this blog previously.
The entire set of articles is interesting to read, even if I don’t necessarily agree with some of the author’s political stances. Some representative quotes:
Some lifelong Republicans (such as my mother) abandoned ship in the nineties when the Evangelicals and right-to-lifers finally loomed too large in her party and Gingrich and company tried to defund public broadcasting and the national cultural endowments. As for us lifelong non-Republicans, we don’t want taxes to be any higher than necessary, but the tax-cutting monomania of the GOP these days is grotesque selfishness masquerading as principle”and truly irresponsible, given the free-spending, deficit-ballooning policies it’s also pursuing. We are appalled by the half-cynical, half-medieval mistrust and denial of science”the crippling of stem-cell research, the refusal to believe in man-made climate change. And Republicans’ ongoing willingness to go racist for political purposes (as Bush’s supporters did during the 2000 primaries) is disgusting. Demagoguery is endemic to both parties, but when it comes to exploiting fundamentally irrelevant issues (such as the medical condition of Terri Schiavo), the GOP takes the cake.[...]
As for the Democrats, the Republicans still have a point: Where are the brave, fresh, clear approaches passionately and convincingly laid out? When it comes to reforming entitlements, the Democrats have absolutely refused to step up. Because the teachers unions and their 4 million members are the most important organized faction of its political base, the party is wired to oppose any meaningful experimentation with charter schools or other new modes. Similarly, after beginning to embrace the inevitability of economic globalization in the nineties, and devising ways to minimize our local American pain, the Democrats’ scaredy-cat protectionist instincts seem to be returning with a vengeance. On so many issues, the ostensibly “progressive” party’s habits of mind seem anything but.[...]
So why hasn’t there been a serious attempt to start a third party since Perot? Every big-name politician who has looked at the idea has come to the same conclusion: The institutional barriers to creating a third party are too high. The first and most discouraging obstacle is that America’s ballot laws are a mishmash of arcane procedures that were written by the two parties to keep third parties out of the system. “The biggest problem that I faced back in 1980,” says Anderson, “was simply the question of ballot access. How do you get a new party on the ballot? You can’t start a new party and expect it to take wing and soar if it can’t even get on the ballot. I at one time had lawsuits going in about nine different federal courts. We spent somewhere between $2 million and $3 million paying lawyers to knock down restrictive ballot-access laws.” Eventually, Anderson made it onto all 50 state ballots, but his campaign turned into one for ballot access rather than president.
The Dean campaign proved many things, but its most enduring legacy may be that it gave us a glimpse of the beginning of the end of the two-party system. First, he showed the next budding Ross Perot how to manage a 50-state ballot-access project easily and cost-efficiently. It is not widely understood, but candidates running in the presidential primaries of the two major parties also must qualify for the ballot of every state they want to contest. Dean was the only insurgent Democratic-primary candidate in history to qualify in all 50 states, a stunning organizational achievement. Using a ballot-access function of the campaign’s Website, Deaniacs in every state had downloadable petitions and details about the rules for their state. Goals were tracked in real time. “Both parties have set up nominating and ballot hurdles, so an insurgency can’t happen,” says Joe Trippi, Dean’s first campaign manager and now an evangelist for a third party. “We blew through that in 2003.”
The second hurdle”fund-raising”also has a technological solution. Dean proved a message candidate could work outside any established infrastructure and raise massive amounts of money. After Perot, the assumption was that only a self-financed candidate could mount a credible third-party challenge. Dean exploded that conventional wisdom.
And so forth. Like I said, it’s an interesting read, and the authors seem to do a good job of describing the problem and the hurdles surrounding getting a viable third party going (including personalities). I think they didn’t address (or under-emphasized) the hurdle of what a third party’s platform would look like…but what do you expect from a regional print magazine.
The Purple Party. I think I like the sound of that.
