It’s the most brilliant political stratagem since Pat Buchanan kidnapped and murdered the Reform party in 2000: “Gridlock in a Can.”
Unity ’08 wants to run a bipartisan ticket in the next presidential election, mix-and-matching candidates from the two major parties with candidates from the other party or with independents. Among the names bandied about have been Nebraska Republican senator Chuck Hagel and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, Hagel because he has a presidentially craggy face and doesn’t like the way the Bushies do war, and Bloomberg because he’s a Republican who combines a degree of sanity with a much greater degree of wealth; he could finance his own campaign, relieving Unity ’08 supporters of that burden. The world of Kumbayah politics was recently set alight when Bloomberg and Hagel were spotted dining together in Manhattan, and is positively aflame now that Hagel has more or less declared that, contrary to some estimations, if he runs for president it won’t be as a Republican.
Sam Waterston, the tremolo-wielding Law & Order actor who fronts the group, says that the head of the oddball ticket would earn such political capital as a result of surfing to office on a tidal wave of formless voter anxiety that he or she “could summon the congressional leadership of both parties and both houses to the White House, shut the doors and get serious about finding answers they can all agree on.”
Even if we were suffering from gridlock — and O, would that we had been — the ideal solution to it wouldn’t involve installing a president who enters the White House with perhaps a bit more than a third of the popular vote and no support in Congress. But Waterston notwithstanding, the country’s biggest problem at the moment doesn’t arise from a gridlocked Congress but from the seven years during which exclusive control of the government has rested with the party whose philosophy mirrors that of the seagulls in Finding Nemo.
Fixing that doesn’t require a third party, just an effective second one. What’s required, and what the majority of voters are obviously prepared to support given the appropriate motivations, is the destruction of the Republican party as it currently exists, which is as a vehicle for a class of malevolent white collar thugs who regard democratic government as a hoax and govern accordingly. For all its myriad flaws, the Democratic party hasn’t operated as an organized crime syndicate for many decades, at least not nationally, and neither is it guilty of, as the Unity organizers suggest, pandering exclusively to its base at the expense of other voters; quite the sorry opposite.
The speculation about a possible Hagel-Bloomberg (or Bloomberg-Hagel) ticket highlights the essence of what’s wrong with Unity’s thesis. Almost the only thing the two men have in common are their habits of complaining about Iraq, other Republicans and the plague of excessive partisanship; on domestic issues, Hagel is a classical reactionary and Bloomberg isn’t. It’s hard to see how a presidential ticket that comes with built-in irreconcilable differences will fulfill Waterston’s fantasy, and that’s with two Republicans, not the bipartisan ticket Unity hopes for.
Here’s what Unity’s website lists as the crucial issues facing the country:
In our opinion, Crucial Issues include: Global terrorism, our national debt, our dependence on foreign oil, the emergence of India and China as strategic competitors and/or allies, nuclear proliferation, global climate change, the corruption of Washington’s lobbying system, the education of our young, the health care of all, and the disappearance of the American Dream for so many of our people.
With the probable exception of lobbying — and it’s a major exception — none of those issues is impermeable to a competent and confident Democratic administration. Even a Clinton administration, which is probably the least progressive Democratic ticket in the offing, would be capable of addressing the most politically troublesome issues, health care and economic justice, if backed (or prodded) by a Democratic Congress. And if the GOP continues to implode at its current rate, congressional Democrats will be both plentiful and legislatively aggressive in 2009. In fact, about the only hope Republicans have of not being relegated to a completely irrelevant minority is a third party presidential candidate who draws enough support away from the Democratic ticket to throw the election to the Republicans.
Even though the timing for a third party bid probably couldn’t be worse, one certainty is that when the Unity politicking gets underway in earnest, the group will receive massive and generally favorable notice from much of the Washington political press. They myth of the civil center is just too tasty to ignore.
