June 25, 2007

Please, Mayor Bloomberg, Not Another Third-Party Circus

Oh no. Not again.

Would it kill us to have an open-field presidential election without the carnival of an independent or third-party candidacy? Must we always give in to the yearning for a figure like Lee Iacocca, Colin Powell, Ross Perot . . . and now, perhaps, Michael Bloomberg?

If we want a serious campaign in which we debate serious ideas, we can only pray for a respite from such nonsense.

New York’s Mayor Mike is done pretending to be a Republican, as this pretension is no longer politically useful to him – as it was in 2001 when he wanted to become mayor and the primary field in his lifelong Democratic Party was too crowded.

He now presumably wants to be president. (OK, he says he doesn’t, but no one believes him, perhaps because just a few months ago he said he was proud to be a Republican.) He has no chance of winning either party’s nomination, and he has lots of his own money, so the most politically expedient affiliation at this point for Bloomberg is no affiliation.

Bloomberg cannot win, but he has enough prominence to inspire a comical sideshow while preventing a serious debate of the issues between the major-party candidates.

Third-party candidacies kill campaigns. Perot was the biggest mass-murderer in the history of American politics. Utterly devoid of substance, personally unstable and completely unqualified for the office he sought, Perot nonetheless received nightly news coverage, which he parlayed into an invitation to join three debates between serious, qualified candidates George Bush and Bill Clinton. His campaign was so ridiculous, we were forced to endure the painful spectacle of Adm. James Stockdale – an honorable man completely out of his element – declaring himself “out of ammo” in the vice-presidential debate between Dan Quayle and Al Gore.

Perot short-circuited the serious discussion we should have had about tax policy and strategies for a post-Cold War world, diverting the debate instead to “giant sucking sounds” and the need to “get under the hood” and fix the country, whatever the bloody hell that was supposed to mean.

It was a joke. But the mainstream media didn’t treat it like a joke. Even after Perot quit the race, claiming terrorists were after him, then rejoined it in the final months, he was given serious, respectful coverage, and somehow persuaded 19 percent of the electorate to vote for him.

Do we have to do this again?

Michael Bloomberg’s prospective candidacy supposedly springs from his managerial competence in running the City of New York. Eh. Exciting stuff. Michael Dukakis tried that line too. Nothing fires up the electorate like managerial competence. Then again, Perot had nothing serious to talk about either, so why should Bloomberg be any different?

These poseurs are all using different ways of implying the same thing: The two-party system isn’t responding to your needs, people! They’re tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum! We need another option!

No. We don’t. What we need is someone with good ideas and the political skills and courage to implement them. The liberalism of the Democrats and the conservatism of the Republicans provide a perfectly good set of options. The problem arises when candidates compromise these principles, first on the campaign trail to hustle votes, then in office to buy off local constituencies and pander to present and future voting demographics.

The view here is that a serious, courageous, authentic, politically skillful conservative president would be great for the country and for the political process. A serious, courageous, authentic, politically skillful liberal president would be bad for the country in the short term, but good for the political process in the long term. The liberal vs. conservative debate is the right debate for America to have – when those engaged in the debate actually mean what they say.

Independent candidates who gain traction in presidential races only divert Democrats and Republicans from the touting of their core principles. I don’t want candidates of either party spending all their time making the case for their managerial competence. I don’t care. I want to hear their ideas, and it’s hard to hear above the cacophony created by unaffiliated frauds who know how to get on the news, but wouldn’t know how to run the executive branch of the federal government even if they could somehow win themselves the chance.

Perhaps Mayor Mike means it when he says he’s not running, in which case we might be able to skip the sideshow this time. But he hasn’t meant much else that he’s said, and that isn’t stopping the media from taking him seriously. All of this has me hearing another giant sucking sound – this time sucking the seriousness out of yet another presidential campaign.