Minor Parties Boost Share of State Electorate

When Ross Perot qualified for all 50 state ballots last month, he was actually the fourth presidential candidate to do so. The third was Libertarian Party nominee Andre Marrou.

Marrou knows his face will never be on the cover of Time magazine. And he is not going to be interviewed on the network morning talk shows, like the only other three White House candidates on every state ballot--President Bush, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and Perot.

Nevertheless, Marrou predicts he will lead his party to its best year ever in a presidential race.

That’s because, like other minor party candidates, Marrou says that Perot’s groundswell of support last spring is only the most obvious example of an angry current in the electorate that expresses itself in the form of opposition to the Republican and Democratic tickets.

The three minor parties with candidates on California’s presidential ballot in November--Libertarian, Peace and Freedom and the American Independent Party--still represent just a tiny fraction of the state’s voters.

But all three have increased their share of the state’s electorate while both major parties have slipped.

“Clearly there is an issue overriding party affiliation in this campaign, and it is the economy,” said Howard Phillips, the American Independent Party’s candidate for President in California. “Perot provided a bridge; he made it legitimate for people who are unhappy with Bush or Clinton to look for an alternative.”

Nationwide, there are 23 presidential candidates this year. But only about half of those are on the ballot in more than five states. And besides the four candidates who appear on all 50 state ballots, only three others have qualified in 20 or more states.

California’s ballot will list six presidential candidates, including the three minor party tickets, which by themselves represent a cornucopia of choices.

On the political right is the American Independent Party. On the left is the Peace and Freedom Party. And combining elements from both ends of the spectrum is the Libertarian Party.

The gulf of opinion that separates these candidates makes the debate between Bush and Clinton look like fine-tuning. But they are also united in a goal to shake up the two-party status quo.

Here is a look at the choices.

Libertarian

The candidates: Marrou, 53, a former Republican, comes from the pioneering politics of Alaska’s Legislature, where he was the third Libertarian to serve in the Statehouse. His running mate, Nancy Lord, comes from the country’s liberal movement, where she was an anti-war crusader in the 1960s and the childhood friend of a student killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University.

The party: It was started in 1971 and this is only the second presidential campaign in which it has qualified for all 50 state ballots. Officials said the party also has a record number of more than 800 Libertarian candidates on November ballots throughout the country. About 100 Libertarian candidates are on the ballot in California, where the party has about 67,000 registered voters.

The platform: Marrou contends that America has broken from its constitutional roots and gone off on an uncharted course toward socialism and communism. Marrou’s plan to severely cut taxes would shake even the most conservative Republican. On the other hand, his idea of a limited government would also include the legalization of drugs, prostitution, abortion, gambling and speeding.

Government collecting money from its citizens is essentially theft, Marrou said. If people earn their money, they should be able to keep it. And nobody should tell them what to put on their property or how to treat their bodies, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else, he said.

“Libertarian philosophy is to maximize individual liberties; and to do that you have to limit government powers,” Marrou said. It’s not a radical idea, he contends. It’s just that the country has strayed so far from its roots.

“They’ve taken us so far away from the Constitution that when I come along and say the same things that Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln did, it sounds strange,” said Marrou, a former restaurant equipment wholesaler in Alaska who now lives in Las Vegas.

Marrou would probably be able to hold his Cabinet meetings in the Oval Office, since the Cabinet would not be a very big crowd. He would eliminate most government offices like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Federal government’s role would be limited, essentially, to protecting the country from foreign aggressors and ensuring domestic security. Marrou said the revenues that government needed could be raised through user fees, such as highway tollways, the sale of federal property and cuts in the military.

Marrou plans to spend up to $2 million on the campaign this year, which will include television commercials in California. On Election Day, the candidate’s goal is to get more than 1 million votes nationwide, setting another record for the party.

“We will elect a Libertarian President and Congress,” he said. “The only question is who and when.”

Peace and Freedom

The candidates: Ron Daniels, 50, is trying to build America’s next multiracial movement--called Campaign For a New Tomorrow--following his former role as executive director in Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. In 1988, Daniels was deputy campaign manager of Jackson’s presidential bid and the chief organizer of the Super Tuesday primaries. Daniels announced his campaign on Columbus Day last year to call attention to the country’s celebration of a man who enslaved the populations he discovered. His running mate, Asiba Tupahache, is an American Indian.

The party: It was launched in California in 1967, primarily in opposition to the Vietnam War. It gained ballot status in 1968 and it has fielded a presidential candidate in every election since except 1988, when the party was torn by competing internal factions. Today, the party represents about 68,000 registered voters. But despite its seniority, Peace and Freedom has not expanded beyond California. For Daniels, who lives in Ohio, Peace and Freedom provided access to the California ballot that he otherwise could have only gained through a massive signature gathering drive. Daniels, who is on the ballot under three different party names in the nine other states where he is on the ballot, assumed Peace and Freedom’s place on the California ballot when he was endorsed as the presidential nominee at the party’s summer convention.

The platform: Today, Daniels’ fledgling movement believes a prerequisite for the nation’s economic health and global influence is the healing of its own racial scars. Daniels said at a recent appearance in South Central Los Angeles that Clinton’s campaign is “racist” because it has ignored the issues of urban minorities so that it can appeal to white suburban voters.

Daniels brought his nine-state campaign to South Central Los Angeles on a recent Saturday afternoon, where he spoke to a rally of about 40 people from the back of a flatbed truck in Martin Luther King Park. He was surrounded by riot-scarred buildings and playground equipment spray-painted with gang graffiti.

Los Angeles’ inner-city neighborhoods are evidence of the problem with government, Daniels said. The emphasis is upside down. Instead of helping its constituency, he said the government only caters to the wealthy individuals and corporations at the top.

To supporters wearing buttons for Malcolm X, California farm workers and anti-nuclear issues, Daniels called for a government that would insist on corporate responsibility not only for employees, but also for communities.

“I want corporations to do well, but they need to be people-run,” he said. “If you become an organic part of something and then split, the community dies.”

Daniels, who lives in Ohio, proposed a $50-billion plan to improve urban America that would be financed by cuts in the military and an increase in taxes on the wealthy. He said he had not identified the income threshold for a tax increase or the proposed tax rate.

American Independent

The candidates: Phillips, 51, is one of Washington’s most conservative voices. For nearly 20 years, as leader of a lobby group called the Conservative Caucus, Phillips has positioned himself to the right of most of the country’s conservative Republican leaders. He served in the Richard M. Nixon Administration as head of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity, but then broke with the White House during Watergate to head a group called Conservatives for the Removal of the President. He is critical of Ronald Reagan for overseeing an explosion of national debt after preaching that he would shrink government. And he has exchanged harsh words with President Bush, who labeled Phillips a fringe element.

Phillips’ vice presidential candidate is Brig. Gen. Albion Knight, a retired Army nuclear weapons adviser.

The party: It has roots in one of the country’s last major third-party campaigns, that of former Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace. The party was created in 1967, largely as a vehicle for Wallace’s campaign the following year. The politically conservative group has remained on the California ballot in every presidential race since. The party has far more registered voters in California than its other minor-level competitors. Its rank and file of 217,197 California voters is more than triple the registration of either the Libertarian or the Peace and Freedom parties. Like Daniels, Phillips’ campaign is also piggy-backing the American Independent Party’s California clout to gain access to the state’s ballot. Nationally, Phillips’ campaign is for the U.S. Taxpayers Party, a group he founded earlier this year.

The platform: In 1988, Phillips said he voted Libertarian for President.

On economics, his U.S. Taxpayers Party shares some of the Libertarian philosophy. Phillips would also eliminate the IRS and taxes.

Where the two separate, however, is on social issues. Phillips’ party, started earlier this year, favors a strong national defense and tough drug laws. It also opposes anti-discrimination laws for homosexuals and abortion rights.

“I think we’re in a period of political transition in the United States,” said Phillips. “I think there will be a (third) party on the left that emerges over the next few years. . . . We will become the party of choice for those people who feel there is a course of action needed in this country different from that being offered.”

Other Parties

There are two other major campaigns for minor party candidates that did not qualify for California’s ballot, although both candidates have been active in the state this year.

The bid by the Natural Law Party for a ballot spot was rejected by the secretary of state’s office because it missed the Aug. 7 deadline to file 134,000 signatures. Party officials complained, however, that even though they missed the deadline, they did collect about 250,000 signatures.

They appealed the rejection to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. As a result, the party is waging a write-in campaign in California.

The Natural Law Party was started in Iowa last April, but its founders clearly think it might find a home in open-minded California. The Natural Law platform seeks a government in harmony with the natural laws of the universe. Its presidential candidate, John Hagelin, says the first step to solve the country’s economic and social problems is for more people to practice transcendental meditation.

Hagelin, 38, said in a Los Angeles campaign appearance last July that there is a cosmic threshold which--if enough people meditate together--will create change on an international scale. Hagelin, a nuclear physicist at Iowa’s Maharishi International University, said that number is 7,000 people or, the square root of 1% of the world’s population.

John Sugden, a spokesman for the party, added that the platform is broad and includes a number of scientific solutions to national problems, such as the use of alternative energy sources and natural medicines for health care.

Hagelin and his running mate, Mike Tompkins, are on the ballot in 28 states.

In 39 states, voters will also consider Lenora B. Fulani, the presidential candidate for the New Alliance Party.

Fulani, who qualified in all 50 states in 1988, has never shirked from controversy. And the New Alliance Party this year has raised more than $2 million in campaign contributions through street-corner and door-to-door solicitations, all of which have been matched by an equal amount of federal funds.

Fulani won the California primary in June for Peace and Freedom. But the vote was non-binding and the party chose instead, at its convention, to nominate Daniels as its standard-bearer.

In discussing that decision, some leaders of California’s Peace and Freedom party say Fulani’s New York-based party is actually a cult.