THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, June 19, 1996 TAG: 9606190005
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 51 lines
Would Ross Perot's Reform Party really consider running a presidential candidate other than Ross Perot? It's a tantalizing prospect but doesn't really address the fundamental issue. How does a third party do more than simply put issues on the agenda; how does it enact them into law?
And that's the only justification for a third party. At present, only a minority of Americans embrace either the views of right-wing Republicans or left-wing Democrats. The result is often a compromise on a discredited status quo.
That's how Ross Perot won 19 percent of the vote in 1992, by offering an alternative aimed squarely at the middle of the electorate. If the messenger hadn't been flawed, he might have won even more votes with such a message.
Bill Clinton won the presidency with 43 percent of the vote by promising to be a new kind of Democrat. But by 1994, voters disillusioned with Clinton's transformation back into an old Democrat turned Congress over to Republicans promising their own reform agenda.
Now there's evidence to suggest the electorate thinks the Republican revolution is out of touch with mainstream concerns and seems also to suspect, in the pungent phrase of George Wallace, that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between Dole and Clinton.
The Perot message of a need for fundamental budgetary, entitlement, campaign-finance, welfare and immigration reform is as salable as ever. And Perot is as flawed.
That's why the appearance of former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm to address the Reform Party convention in California was interesting. It was hinted that Lamm might become the standard bearer for the upstart movement.
It's fun to speculate, of course. Lamm is an interesting figure who has been willing to think about the unthinkable. He was an early advocate of real entitlement reform and honest government bookkeeping. Though he backed Clinton in 1992, he broke with him over his refusal to address the real problems with Medicare. Lamm has long implied that something like rationing is inevitable.
But Lamm is virtually unknown nationally. He might have a chance to make the presidential race interesting, but none to win it. And even if a third-party candidate could win the White House, he'd face a Congress composed of 535 members not of his own party.
That's the fatal flaw in Ross Perot's ego-driven decision to build a party from the top down. If he really wants a Reform Party capable of achieving reform rather than one that simply provides him with a soapbox, he needs to start recruiting candidates for office at the bottom and running them at the statehouse and the courthouse level, in every congressional district, for very Senate seat and governorship.
Until there are entrenched troops at the grass roots, it will be pointless for Perot to run candidates for the top job in the country. by CNB