Nuts, Nuisances And Nonpersons

Editor's Note; This is an excerpt from Micah Sifry's new book, Spoiling for a Fight: Third Party Politics in America (Routledge, 2002).

The democratic impulse is a muscle that must be exercised regularly; when people grow up in a political culture that devalues their participation and treats them as passive objects to be manipulated, that muscle atrophies.

The future of America's leading third parties -- the Greens, the Libertarians, the New Party, the Minnesota Independence Party, the New York Working Families Party, and the Vermont Progressives -- depends entirely on their ability to build those muscles. Can they?

While public interest in third-party alternatives remains high in the abstract, the actual level of tangible resources available to these projects to tap and channel that interest is fairly low. Three factors are critical: money, organizers, and public awareness -- the most precious and intangible of political commodities. This awareness can come from third parties' own efforts to project themselves into the public eye (high-level races, celebrity candidates, cutting-edge issue campaigns) as well as from sympathetic media coverage.

While the two-party duopoly keeps generating grassroots interest in fresh alternatives, if America's leading third parties are to truly thrive, there will have to be an alteration in the media's attitude toward the third-party phenomenon. Despite their current and historic contributions to the democratic process, third-party candidates are generally treated as nuts, nuisances, or nonpersons. The night that Jesse Ventura won in Minnesota, on-air correspondent John Hockenberry of MSNBC openly sneered. NBC's Tom Brokaw asked Ventura if he should be addressed as "Governor Jesse Ventura, or Governor Jesse 'The Body' Ventura." You could almost hear the snickers from the control room. The New York Times front-page story on his win couldn't resist poking fun at his roots in the professional wrestling business. Robert Scheer, a liberal columnist for the Los Angeles Times, said on his radio show on KCRW, "The people of Minnesota should be spanked for letting this happen."

Press coverage of the Reform Party shenanigans was equally telling. Granted, some of the oddballs who presented themselves at the party's meetings deserved criticism. But opinion magazines of the center-left and center-right, including The New Republic and The Weekly Standard -- places where so-called opinion leaders go to get their dose of conventional wisdom -- took remarkably similar approaches. Along with extensive investigative-features reporting on Perot, Buchanan, and Fulani's involvement in the party -- much of it quite good -- these magazines reveled in the opportunity to make fun of the average Americans who were attracted to the party. Their reports on its 1999 convention in Dearborn, Michigan, where support for Jesse Ventura produced a resounding rebuke of the Perot-Verney leadership of the party and set off Jack Gargan's ill-fated chairmanship, were full of derision. Their reporters seemed to be more interested in their own ability to write a colorful put-down than address any serious questions about the party's future.

For example, Dana Milbank's report in The New Republic on Jack Gargan's unexpected rise went out of its way to cite Gargan's "enormous ears" as evidence the "Perot legacy" would live on. One wishes that such talented journalists would feel as free to turn their poison penmanship at the truly powerful in America, as opposed to those average citizens who simply dream about opening up the political system to a little change. But such writing about the powerful is rare, for all sorts of obvious reasons.

To my knowledge, only three mainstream outlets -- ABC News, USA Today, and The Fort-Worth Star-Telegram, delegated a full-time reporter to the third-party beat in 2001. And even though these reporters did their jobs with much gusto, they often had to fight to get their stories aired or published.