Sunday Discussion Group

May 6, 2007

At a forum in DC earlier this week, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said he believes a third-party candidate could excel in the 2008 presidential race. “I think the public is fed up,” he said. “If the two major parties don’t hear this going into ’08, there is a real chance of an independent third-party candidacy — and watch out if that happens.”

Yesterday, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who is on the far-right on every policy issue except the war in Iraq, suggested he might be the guy for the job.

An independent bid “is possible,” Hagel, 60, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” scheduled to air [yesterday]. “I don’t ever foreclose any options.” He will decide in the next few months whether to run for a third Senate term, pursue the presidency or leave politics altogether, he said.

As this relates to Hagel, his interest in a possible independent bid is interesting, if for no other reason, because it suggests a critic of the war in Iraq is simply unelectable in the Republican presidential primaries. Hagel has been eyeing a White House run for several years, and by toying publicly with a third-party bid, he seems to concede that his disapproval of the war puts the GOP nomination out of reach.

But in the bigger picture, is this folly? Is there really an audience looking for a serious third-party bid? Are there circumstances whereby an independent candidate has a realistic shot at competing?

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.’

Obama, some others, and you-know who (sort of).

And then there’s the Lie-Berman, for whom independence is the only form of existence he knows.

  • Personally, I think 3rd parties are a waste of time for anything other than protest. And when it comes to protests, they seem like a lot of work for very little effect. Does anyone still take the Green Party seriously? Does anyone even remember the name of Ross Perot’s party?

    If a 3rd party came along and actually won big, they’d probably just end up consuming one of the other two. There’s be some realignment, but in the end it would be the same professionals, the same focus groups, and the same fundraising, sloganeering and advertising. Within 10 years, I doubt you’d notice the difference.

    Hagel would be an interesting 3rd party candidate. I’m sure he’d get quite a bit of popular support. I doubt he’d win, but he’d attract disgusted repubs in droves. This would be the repubs worst nightmare. He’d do to the eventual repub candidate what Nader did to Gore, but by a factor of 10.

  • At a time when one party is hellbent on single-party rule and the other is struggling to thwart that effort, a third-party candidate could singlehandedly and unwittingly save or doom the republic. It’s just a matter of which of the major parties the third-party draws from.

  • The word “independent” sounds attractive because our candidates (of both parties) are deeply dependent on special interest money. Sweeping campaign reform would be a declaration of independence for elected officials of all stripes.

  • Are there circumstances whereby an independent candidate has a realistic shot at competing?

    Yes. 2012, when a collapsed GOP offers up, oh, Bill Frist for president. I think Mike Bloomberg will have a helluva shot with the Green Party.

  • This argument is a lot of baloney. The third party issue and the whole Unity ’08 thing is basically being brought out by disaffected Republicans who realize that Bush has screwed the pooch for conservatives and the Republican party but who have demonized the Democrats for so long that that can’t possibly be an alternative to the right wing party of hate and incompetence. The third party talk is from people who see the pendulum swinging back in the Democrats favor but just can’t tolerate that someone from the party of Clinton with liberal leanings will gain power. The third party that is being postulated will not be a real alternative, only a repackaged, rebranded Republican Lite candidate who gets to shed some of the baggage the righties have accummulated since 1994.

    Between this and folks like Leon Panetta who speak against Democrats exercising their political power as being “partisan” and causing “gridlock,” I perceive that there is a movement to maintain some sort of conservative hold on power in Washington when it’s obvious the right wing movement is losing favor and control. Screw them all. It’s time for a political correction to take place instead of a “soft landing” for the right wingers who have so badly botched the course of this nation for the past six years.

  • Joe is not happy as a Democrat and is not really accepted as a Republican, ergo the third party where he is loved and appreciated.

    This party exists only in his inadequacies.

  • petorado @6 calls this exactly.

    The only people I’ve seen floating the Unity 08 crap have been Republicans who see the handwriting on the wall.

    With Bush less popular than OJ Simpson, they are running away from the criminal enterprise that hijacked the Republican party.

  • Is Hagel really that far-right? He’s one of the most liberal republicans there is (not that that says much).

    There very much is room for a third-party team. It’d be 1992 all over again.

  • But in the bigger picture, is this folly? Is there really an audience looking for a serious third-party bid? Are there circumstances whereby an independent candidate has a realistic shot at competing?

    You are conflating “independent candidate” and “third party”. If the candidate runs independently, he has no party (John Anderson, Nader 04) and therefore no coattails or any real leverage. AND does nothing to help others get on the ballot next time around. At least if one runs under a party (Libertarians, for instance) there is at least the hope of building the party. So much for theory.

    I’m in favor of anything that will destroy the myth of the two party system. Take a poll of average citizens (as opposed to we political wonks) and I am sure the vast majority say we have a constitutionally mandated two party system.

    As I am in a state where, thanks to the Electrol College, my vote doesn’t count anyway, I always vote 3rd party (NOT independent candidates) in the hope they will accumulate enough votes to get a permanent spot on the ballot.

    The system is rigged against parties not the Dems or Repubs, and any independent candidate who thinks he/she can get on enough ballots AND win enough electoral votes is delusional. If they are not in it for the long haul of destroying the two party system, they are just running as spoilers/egoists.

    Taking out the electoral college would be a nice touch, too.

  • An independent candidate would mean disaster for the republicans. Think Ross Perot and everything he did for the Republicans.

    I like the idea.

  • There is already a third party. It is the Libertarians. There is a fourth party it is the constitution party. There are several other ones. The REBUBS worst nightmare has already happened. Ron Paul is running as a Republican.
    If the Libertarians and the Constitutionalist registered as Republicans you would only have to add some of the disenfranchised nonvoting young people to take over the Republican Party.
    That is what the bankers who run the corporations including the corporate media who buy politicians who refuse to follow the Constitution really have to worry about.
    Joseph Bergrath

  • Are there circumstances whereby an independent candidate has a realistic shot at competing?

    The primary and general election process has been rigged to prevent third party and independent runs. It would be impossible to get on the ballot in enough states to win in the general election. If/when the country abandons the electoral college and goes with the popular vote an independent canditate would have a shot. And it would require a very charismatic hybrid candidate. Hagel has a weird kind of charisma, however he is not a hybrid – he’s a REPUBLICAN.

  • In every election in the last century in which a huge scandal or failure has been tied to one party’s tail, the other party has ended up winning.

    As Wallace demonstrated in 1968, in such cases a 3rd party can, to some extent, negate this. However, the 1968 example leads me to believe that such a 3rd party would only be successful in such a case if it were a splinter off the Democratic (or at least, anti-Republican) party in the current case.

    Hagel’s chances are somewhere between infinitesimal and 0.

    What would be far more interesting would be a splinter party off the Democrats. This is, indeed, what Lieberman is thinking, I suspect. It would serve his aim doubly, by giving him a chance to continue to act as a power broker, and also by weakening the Democratic party, whose current leadership isn’t very enamored of him. He hopes to draw off some Democrats, and also to draw a large number of disaffected Republicans, plus the support of the opportunists in the GOP who are at present facing a generation of being out of power.

    It would also, may I point out, be completely in line with his triangulating methodology.

  • The only reason Clinton won in 1992 was Ross Perot, who was able even then to attract moderate and sane Republicans at a time when the GOP had not yet gone into its fascist psychosis. Any third party candidate of any stature in ’08 will inevitably draw Republican votes, and possibly quite heavily. It’s the recipe for a Democratic presidency in ’08, and I hope it happens. This assumes that election fraud or the Supremes don’t work their magic again.

    If traitor Joe actually has delusions of running he will consolidate his status as a pariah with both parties, but he certainly won’t win.

  • Neither of these halfwits – and I rank Hagel as a halfwit who talks a lot and does nothing other than act as a loyal Republican (which is how he sounds like a “liberal Republican” to those who don’t watch what he does) – will accomplish anything. As others have pointed out, an “independent candidacy” is not the same as a third party, and chuck Hagel and Joe LIEberman aren’t going to organize one in the next 17 months, or more specifically in the next 6 months which they’d have to do to be even marginally competitive. And the antidote to them is to keep asking Democrats “do you think Nader was right 8 years ago that there’s no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans?”

    Screw the morons who let the far radical right take over their party. Let them fall from the heights of power to a good solid surface where they break their bones. In addition to Joe and Chuck, let Panetta and all the other Clintonista traitors be among them.

  • Is there an audience for someone like Hagel or Bloomberg? Yes. Is that candidate going to be competitive enough to win? No. Democrats don’t particularly like their leaders at the moment but they do like them a hell of alot more than they have for a decade or more so the Democratic candidate has a floor of roughly 40%. It’s the Republican party that’s fracturing. The interesting hypothetical is what happens to the Republican party as a whole if their presidential candidate finishes third? It probably won’t happen, most likely the independent will get under 10% like they usually do.

    And if I hear one more TV talking head say “Romney hasn’t said anything interesting but he just looks like a President” I think I’m going to throw up.

  • To become president, regardless of whether or not you have the most public support, you need money and organization. In 92 there was a Perot boomlet that for a time showed him right up there in the polls with the two major party guys. But his organization was weak to nonexistent, and rich as he was, he couldn’t raise the kind of cash needed (plus, it became apparent that he was a dick).

    If one or the other of the two current parties were to wither so badly as to become truly irrelevant, a new party might coalesce around some charismatic person, but as someone mentioned above, the name might change but the faces in the smoke-filled rooms would be familiar ones. I don’t see it happening any time soon.

  • One of many things that have always bothered me about the U.S. system of government is this: that we only have two major political parties. I realize that there are advantages to this, but remember- a two-party system is only one party away from totalitarianism.

  • Rich, this isn’t correct.

    The only reason Clinton won in 1992 was Ross Perot,

    In August of 2005 The Sunday Discussion Group was: what are the most persistent and irritating political myths? Perceptions that are false, but seem to be broadly accepted as true? Your claim that Clinton only won because of Perot was the myth that Zorro for the Common Good listed. He also gave a link to an analysis of the 92 election. From that analysis,

    Perotís vote totals in themselves likely did not cause Clinton to win. Even if all of these states had shifted to Bush and none of Bushís victories had been reversed (as seems plausible, in fact, as Bush won by less than 5% only in states that a Republican in a close election could expect to carry, particularly before some of the partisan shifts that took place later in the 1990s ñ Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, South Dakota and Virginia), Clinton still would have won the electoral college vote by 281 to 257. But such a result obviously would have made the race a good deal closer.

    So for Zorro’s sake you may not want to repeat the myth again.

  • It’s hard to imagine mounting the kind of marketing campaign it takes to elect a president in this country without the resources of a truly national political party. We only have two of those. Perhaps that’s changing with the internet and all but I think it’s still the current reality for the time being. Historically, third party presidential candidates can occasionally rise to the level of spoiler but rarely even accomplish that much — Ross Perot certaily did in 1992. I contend that John Anderson in 1980 and Ralph Nader in 2000 probably did not.

    I was thinking the other day that Hagel would be hard to beat if he had a chance in hell of snaring the Republican nomination. Looking at the current crop of primary front-runners in both parties, it’s hard to predict who Hagel would likely hurt most if he ran as an independent. My guess is that the more liberal the Democrat and/or the more radical right the Republican were perceived as being, the more of a bite a center-right indie candidate might be able to take out of the middle.

  • ***“I think the public is fed up,” he said. “If the two major parties don’t hear this…there is a real chance of an independent third-party candidacy — and watch out if that happens.”***

    Isn’t this pretty much what Joe Lie started spewing when he first found out that he was facing a serious challenge in the Connecticut primaries last year? I’d like to see someone crunch the numbers, just to see how he’d do in a three-way matchup. We already know he’ll probably syphon off the blue-dog vote. How much would he drain away from the reThugs? He wouldn’t need a full majority; just a plurality—and the way the country’s polarized right now; that’d be pretty easy to do. Take 15% from the Dem camp and 20% from the ReThug, add in several percentage points’ worth of indie votes, and he’s got the damned thing….

  • I wouldn’t pay much attention to what Joe Lieberman says about anything anymore after all the nonsense he’s spewed over the last 4 years about the war in Iraq.

  • CB:

    He (Hagel) will decide in the next few months whether to run for a third Senate term, pursue the presidency or leave politics altogether…

    1) The silo needs painting Chuck…..
    1) The tractor engine is missing a beat…
    1) And the hex symbol on the barn fell off last Spring…

    Let me make this clear Chuck:

    1 + 1 + 1 = Get out of politics now.

    Old son… the times they are a-changin’
    It’s evolution.
    And the repugs they are a-dying….

    Get out while you can old boy.

  • From what I understand of the 1992 election of Clinton was not that the vote total of Perot was enough to shift the total to Clinton. It was that he changed the conversation from Foreign Policy (Kuwait), to economic issues (the starting of the recession). GHWB had his support crushed and shifted to Clinton as it became apparent he had no solution for these problems.

  • It’s certainly true that Perot’s presence in the ’92 race helped keep the focus of the debate on economic issues, although the recession didn’t hurt either. It’s also true that as the poor schmuck who got stuck with the bills for the Reagan administration — well, he and the rest of us — George HW would much rather have talked about his foreign policy accomplishments which were not inconsiderable.

    But Kuwait was over and done with at that point and people were already back to wondering what Bush had done for them lately. That election was going to be about the economy, Ross Perot or no Ross Perot. Perot did get 19% of the popular vote nationwide and almost certainly took more votes from Bush than Clinton. There’s no doubt in my mind that it would have been a much closer race without him.

  • Chris Mathews floated the opinion today that the early primaries might make an independent candidate viable. If the nominations are all wrapped up by February, there is so much time before the election that the electorate could get a case of buyers’ remorse and turn to one of the previously “mainstream” candidates to run as an independent.

    Mostly I think he just can’t get his mind around the idea that Hillary might become the next President. Tool.

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