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Newsday
System stacked against Nader, Buchanan
By James P. Pinkerton
July 1, 2000
Ralph Nader has been making speeches for 40
years, and it shows. Although he'll never have - nor does he seem to
want - the soaring oratory of a John Kennedy or the emotional
chain-pulling of a Ronald Reagan, he knows what he wants to say; he
had a text for his 105-minute acceptance speech as the Green Party
presidential nomination, but it was clear that he knew it by
heart.
And so Nader
rarely broke eye contact with the audience as he speechified about
everything from the 19th-century populist revolt to his struggle
against the auto industry in the 1960s to an account of his recent
50-state listening tour. With Nader, there are no honeyed words;
it�s all spinach - and there is indeed a market for rhetorical
vegetables.
Yet, the fact remains: The U.S. electoral
system - as opposed to that of most democratic countries - will
never give him or his party power. The only relevant question is,
can he hit the magic number of five?
If Nader wins 5
percent of the nationwide vote in November, the Greens will be
guaranteed federal funding for their next presidential campaign. For
people with a lot to say but no much money to help them say it, cash
from Uncle Sam is hard to refuse; Pat Buchanan left the Republican
Party because he wanted the $13 million that Ross Perot's Reform
Party will get this year. Meanwhile, the Democrats and Republicans
will each get five times as much government money - not that they
need it.
Indeed, Nader and Buchanan ignoring their vast
ideological differences have formed an alliance on one issue
critical to both of them: access to the huge national audience that
will be watching the presidential debates in October. The Commission
on Presidential Debates has decreed that only candidates with 15
percent of the vote in public opinion surveys can take part; the
latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll shows Nader with seven percent
and Buchanan with four percent.
Speaking of Al Gore and George W Bush, Nader
said, "They should overcome their fear of facing new ideas and
alternative voices." Of course, if Nader gets in the debates, so,
most likely, will Buchanan.
This is the central irony of fringe politics in
America: The structure of the U.S. electoral system is so stacked
against third parties that the ideology that motivates them in the
first place must take a back seat to process questions. As Dean
Myerson, coordinator of the Green Party convention, put it, "The big
three for us are ballot access, public financing of campaigns and
proportional representation.
Of those three, proportional representation
will be the toughest nut to crack. In America, all national
elections are "first past the post." That is, the candidate who gets
the most votes gets all the victory. By contrast, in most other
democratic countries, some form of proportional representation
system is in place. That is, if a party gets a certain minimum of
the national vote, typically 5 percent, it is guaranteed that per-
centage of seats in the legislature. Such a system obviously
encourages small parties, since they need not win a majority
anywhere in order to win a share of power. In countries with
proportional representation, multiparty coalitions are the rule; so
it is, for example, that Greens are part of the government of five
Western European countries.
Closer to home, election law in multiparty
Mexico also enables the Greens to play serious power politics. In
the national elections to be held Sunday, the Partido Verde
Ecologista has forsaken its seeming natural allies on the left to
make a throw-the-incumbents-out alliance with the right wing
opposition party, led by Vicente Fox.
One can argue about whether the American
system, with, its overwhelming two-party bias, is better or worst
than the alternatives, but this much is certain: It's not going to
change anytime soon. And so the Greens are stymied. In a country
that counts more than half-a-million elected officials, just 79 are
Green.
The
Greens contend that Nader will give them the visibility they need to
become serious political players. He may well succeed in getting
them over that 5-pereent presidential hump, but that minor victory
will guarantee them government money, not government power.
James P Pinkerton
writes for Newsday. He was domestic policy advisor to President
George Bush. |
