Download Merry column Nearly every American with a political memory recalls

Merry column
Nearly every American with a political memory recalls that Texas billionaire
Ross Perot captured 19 percent of the vote when he ran for president as an independent
candidate in 1992. Less well known is what happened to that vote afterward. Therein lies
an intriguing political lesson that bears on the today’s Tea Party movement, which
emerged on the political scene nearly 17 months ago and has maintained a powerful hold
on American politics ever since. Just this week the Tea Party set off another volcanic
eruption, this time in Delaware, where protest candidate Christine O’Donnell outpolled
establishment scion Michael N. Castle in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. It
was merely the latest in a string of political rebellions that have shaped this campaign
year much as the Perot phenomenon influenced American politics in the 1990s.
Two years after the Texan’s remarkable 19 percent showing, the Perot vote – a
protest movement spawned primarily by political anxiety over what was considered fiscal
recklessness at the federal level (sound familiar?) – washed away the Democratic
majorities in both houses of Congress. In a stern rebuke to President Bill Clinton, the
Perot constituency gave full congressional control to the Republican Party for the first
time in four decades. And then, just two years later, it turned around and helped elect
Clinton to a second term.
The political lesson, worth pondering in these times of Tea Party rumbling, is that
serious protest movements such as the Perot phenomenon or today’s Tea Party revolt
never just fade away. They linger in American politics, sometimes largely unseen but
sometimes quite overtly, and exert a heavy tug on the course of electoral decision
making. Eventually they get absorbed into one major party or the other. In the process,
they usually tilt the balance of political power in the country, occasionally for substantial
periods of time.
Back in the 1990s, the Perot constituency declared in word and vote that the
country was on the wrong track, that the federal government was dysfunctional, that bold
reform initiatives were needed to restore American democracy. These voters’ numbers
and intensity of feeling rendered them a potent political force. Yet Clinton utterly failed
to address their concerns during his first two years in office. He sought to govern as a
vigorous leader with a huge electoral mandate when in fact he was elected with a mere 43
percent plurality. He announced boldly that his aim was to ``repeal Reaganism’’ – in
other words, to throw his 43 percent mandate against the policies of the most popular
president in a generation.
Further, he sought to govern from the left at a time when many Americans wanted
the Democrats to reshape themselves into a more centrist institution. On issue after issue
– gays in the military, his big (for the time) stimulus package, his huge and complex
health-care initiative – Clinton positioned himself initially on the left, then sought to gain
votes by inching his way toward the center. Only on the North American Free Trade
Agreement, his lone signal accomplishment during those two years, did he begin the
process by going for a bipartisan coalition.
The Perot constituency reacted to all this with vengeful decisiveness. Election
Day exit polls told the story. In Tennessee, the Perot vote broke for the two Republican
Senate candidates by a margin of about 75 percent to 20 percent. In Pennsylvania’s
Senate race, it was 59 percent to 33 percent. In California’s Senate contest, it was 60
percent to 27 percent. In New York’s gubernatorial race, it was 70 percent to 16 percent.
It appeared that the Republicans would be invited to ride the Perot constituency
right into the White House two years hence. But then, reacting to major missteps by the
new Republican House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, and to Clinton’s forceful change of
direction (encapsulated in his declaration that the ``era of big government is over’’), the
Perot constituency rewarded a chastened president with another term in office.
Again, exit polls told the story in comparative numbers between the 1992 election
and 1996, when Perot’s share of the vote declined to 8 percent. Among independent
voters, Perot’s vote share declined from 30 percent in 1992 to 17 percent in 1996; among
Democrats, from 13 percent to 5 percent; among self-styled liberals, from 18 percent to 7
percent; and among moderates, from 21 percent to 9 percent. Meanwhile, Clinton’s share
of the presidential tally among independents rose from 38 percent in 1992 to 43 percent
in 1996; among Democrats, from 77 percent to 84 percent; among liberals, from 68
percent to 78 percent; among moderates, from 47 percent to 57 percent. It’s clear that
Perot’s 1992 voters gave Clinton his margin of victory in 1996.
One must always be careful with historical analogies, and the Tea Party
movement differs from the Perot phenomenon in many important respects. The Tea Party
activists are more ideological, probably more intense in their anger, and much more
closely aligned with one party (the Republicans). If, as expected, these agitated voters
give the GOP a big victory in this year’s congressional elections, it is almost
inconceivable that they will turn around two years from now and foster a Barak Obama
reelection triumph.
And yet the lessons of protest politics apply equally in both instances. The Tea
Party movement will not fade away with this year’s election returns. It will hold the
balance of power in American politics for some time to come. Eventually, it will be
absorbed into the two-party system and cease to be an independent force – but only after
its angers have been assuaged, one way or another, by a change in governmental
direction.
The Perot phenomenon is not the only historical antecedent worth cranking into
any effort to understand the Tea Party movement. Consider the socialist and communist
sentiment percolating in American politics just prior to and after the rise of Franklin D.
Roosevelt. In 1928, with America enjoying robust economic growth and widespread
prosperity, the Socialist Party candidate, Norman Thomas, received 267,414 votes; the
communist candidate, William Z. Foster, picked up another 48,440. Four years later, with
the nation caught in the icy grip of the Great Depression, Thomas’s vote shot up to
884,685 while Foster’s increased to 103,000.
Then in 1936, when Roosevelt faced his first reelection challenge, Thomas’s vote
plummeted to 187,781, and the communists didn’t field a candidate. What happened?
The anguish of the Depression in 1932 rendered Thomas’s socialism and Foster’s
communism more palatable options than they had been before for a significant bloc of
voters. But then Roosevelt, charting a new course for the country that seemed promising
and credible, siphoned off most of that voter frustration and brought large numbers of
those estranged voters into the Democratic fold, where they remained throughout most of
the New Deal era. By 1940, the Thomas constituency was fading fast, and it ceased to
exist after 1944.
But the political agitations spawned by the Depression brought forth a new
independent candidacy in 1936, signifying that Roosevelt hadn’t quite consolidated his
political position on the left. That was the campaign of William Lemke, a prairie populist
from North Dakota who fused his own fiery message with those of other populist
firebrands, including Huey Long, Francis Townsend and Father Charles Coughlin, to
challenge Roosevelt from the left. He garnered nearly 900,000 votes. By 1940, however,
Lemke’s Union Party had thoroughly burned itself out, and Roosevelt had absorbed all
serious agitations from the liberal side of the party.
These sumps of socialist and communist sentiment never reached proportions of
serious political force back in the Great Depression, unlike the later Perot constituency or
today’s Tea Party movement. But one can see how this phenomenon works in the vote
totals of the 1920s and 1930s. Roosevelt never needed to embrace Norman Thomas’s
pure socialist doctrine or ape William Foster’s communist sentiments in order to lure
most of their voters back into the mainstream. All he had to do was address the concerns
of those voters with credible – and mainstream – policy prescriptions, and thus did he
siphon off that anxiety and bring those constituents under his tent.
The same thing happened on a much larger scale following the 1968 independent
candidacy of Alabama’s George Wallace, who captured nearly 14 percent of the balloting
and landed electoral vote pluralities in five southern states. Richard Nixon won that year,
but the Wallace candidacy rendered him a minority president, with just 43 percent of the
vote (the same percentage Clinton received during the first Perot year). But Nixon wooed
the angry Wallace constituency throughout his first term, and by 1972 he had
incorporated it into his coalition. He captured those five southern states and also siphoned
off a large proportion of the angry white ethnic voters in America’s big cities of the
Northeast and Midwest. Ronald Reagan built on that strategy in fashioning his more
powerful coalition and transforming the political balance of power in America in the
1980s.
Inevitably, both Nixon and Reagan were attacked from the left for employing this
``Southern strategy’’ and thus – according to the critics – encouraging racist and
venomous sentiments in the body politic. It was no doubt true that part of the Wallace
following stemmed from the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s. But it was much more
than that, as any survey of that era of political instability would attest. The critics seemed
to be saying that if the political system would just ignore Wallace and his constituency,
they would merely fade away. But of course they wouldn’t fade away; they would just
get more angry and probably more widespread. In fact, the incorporation of the Wallace
constituency back into the country’s two-party system didn’t render America more racist
and venomous, as the critics had predicted. Just the opposite occurred. The incorporation
of the Wallace constituency into mainstream politics rendered the Wallace constituency
(and its heirs in the ever-changing demographics of American politics) less racist and
venomous. That indeed is how the country’s two-party system always seems to work
when major protest movements emerge.
All of this brings us back to the Tea Party movement. What it represents and
portends can best be scrutinized through an attempt to answer three fundamental
questions:
First, is this movement for real, and does it have legs? The answer is yes. It
represents a political wave more akin to the Perot or Wallace constituencies than to the
relatively modest Norman Thomas following of the 1930s. Polls indicate some 18 percent
of Americans identify themselves as Tea Party supporters – nearly equaling the vote
percentage of Ross Perot in 1992 and greater than the George Wallace constituency in
1968. The largest Tea Party group, Tea Party Patriots, says it has a thousand local
organizations with 15 million ``associates.’’ Overall, the movement holds the political
balance of power in this campaign year, which is why it has been able to wreak so much
havoc to the mainstream political system throughout this year’s primaries, banishing
establishment GOP candidates and pulling forward fresh-faced true believers such as
Rand Paul in Kentucky, Sharron Angle in Nevada, Mike Lee in Utah, Ken Buck in
Colorado, Joe Miller in Alaska and Marko Rubio in Florida.
Second, where did it come from? What precisely were the civic impulses, angers
and fears that spawned this seemingly spontaneous wave of civic energy? Tea Party
adherents say they embrace three general principles. The first is ``fiscal responsibility,’’
which includes a strong aversion to huge federal deficits and the yawning national debt.
But this element also includes an attack on federal policies that constrict the economic
freedom of citizens through excessive taxation. The second is ``constitutionally limited
government,’’ which implies states’ rights and the protection of individual liberties from
federal intrusion. And the third is ``free markets,’’ seen by Tea Party adherents as the
protection of what they view as intertwined ``individual and economic liberty.’’
In short, the Tea Party outlook is part of a long tradition in American politics. It
harkens back to the politics of Andrew Jackson during his battles with Henry Clay and
other Whigs who wanted to consolidate greater political and economic power in
Washington so it could be wielded in behalf of federal public works such as roads,
bridges and canals. Jackson’s hallmark principles were limited government and strict
construction of the Constitution. The Tea Party harkens back also, more recently, to
Ronald Reagan, who echoed Jackson’s call for smaller government and strict
construction of constitutional powers.
The third question centers on how the Tea Party will influence or shape American
politics in coming years? Clearly, it is a response in part to the policies of President
Barak Obama, who has sought to bring about the greatest consolidation of federal power
since Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s. Hence, it can be predicted that the movement will
throw whatever political weight it can muster against Obama when he faces reelection in
2012.
But the real battle now is against the Republican Party, which didn’t exactly
embrace Tea Party principles when George W. Bush was president. That’s why Tea Party
adherents are so bent on busting up the Washington establishment by first busting up the
GOP. In that sense, they resemble the 1964 Goldwater insurgency that took over the
Republican Party in 1964 as a means of later taking over the country. The intraparty
strategy differed from the later independent party rebellions of Wallace and Perot, but the
political principles surrounding insurgency politics remain the same.
As for today’s Tea Party partisans, they don’t trust Washington with its mutual
back-scratching, earmark collaborations, power grabs and what seems like unlimited
amounts of money sloshing around for buying votes and for the personal aggrandizement
of elected office-holders and their minions. The Tea Party aim is to clean up that
perceived mess by first capturing the forces of the Republican Party and then directing
those forces against the Washington establishment.
Will it succeed? Not clear. But it is clear that this political phenomenon, which
burst upon the scene so unexpectedly and has rumbled along with such force the past year
and a half, isn’t going away anytime soon. It will continue to wreak havoc in the
precincts of establishment politics until the political establishment finds a way to siphon
off a substantial proportion of this political anger by fashioning a brand of politics that
absorbs at least some of the Tea Party sentiment. That means the Tea Party will be the
Tea Party until it succeeds, somehow or other, in deflecting the course of American
politics, at least to some extent, away from the main thrust of the Obama powerconsolidation agenda, the Washington money culture, and the runaway fiscal ethos of
today’s politics. History suggests there is no other way to tame this beast.