‘Maverick’ Lowell Weicker Seems Drawn to 3rd-Party Presidential Run

Forget the “Today Show,” autograph sessions and good notices in Publisher’s Weekly. Now the best way to sell books is to talk about running for President.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s flirtation with the race has helped propel his plan “To Renew America” to the top of the bestseller lists. While completing the autobiography due out later this year, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin L. Powell has carefully declined to dampen the presidential speculation that lands him on the cover of national newsmagazines.

And then there’s Lowell P. Weicker Jr., the former Connecticut senator and governor, who’s got a new book of memoirs (titled “Maverick”) on the shelves and a potential independent presidential campaign rattling around in his cupboard. Weicker isn’t nearly as well known as Gingrich or Powell. But as a possible candidate, he does have one advantage over them: He actually appears to be seriously considering the race.

Weicker has already commissioned research on what it would take to get on the 50 state ballots as an independent in 1996. He’s talked to Paul E. Tsongas, the former Democratic senator agitating for a third party, and John Anderson, the former Republican representative who sought the White House as an independent in 1980.

And, although he says he has made no actual decision to run, in conversation Weicker sounds plainly drawn to the prospect. “I haven’t made that decision, nor am I even trying to make that decision,” he says. “But if I want to, I will. There won’t be any production. I’ll just wake up one morning and say: ‘We’re going.’ ”

Could Weicker be a viable candidate? It would be very much an uphill climb. He’s not well known around the country, and although an independent candidate could compete by raising only $20 million to $30 million, he’s been out of the national spotlight so long that he would be challenged to raise that much.

Even so, throughout his career, Weicker has been a difficult politician to ignore. He’s large, voluble and opinionated. Even Weicker acknowledges that if he were to run he might function only as a gadfly. But there are few who buzz more emphatically. “He could end up being a louder John Anderson,” says one Connecticut Democrat.

For most of his career, Weicker exemplified a vanishing breed: the liberal Republican. He was first elected to Congress in 1968 as a Republican opponent of the Vietnam War. Two years later, he was elected as a Republican to the Senate. Over the next 18 years, he made his name first as a dogged investigator during the Watergate inquiry, and then as a persistent critic of Ronald Reagan’s economic and social policies. In 1988, Weicker was ousted from the Senate by Democrat Joseph I. Lieberman, who ran to his right on social issues and foreign policy.

Two years later, Weicker formed a third party and was elected Connecticut’s governor as an independent. His term was tumultuous. As a candidate, Weicker aired an ad declaring that he had long been opposed to an income tax for the state--one of the few that didn’t have one. But faced with a huge budget deficit, Weicker pushed into law the state’s first income tax soon after taking office.

In his book, Weicker writes that he was careful not “to rule [an income tax] out entirely” in his campaign. But that’s the impression his statements left with many voters. His approval rating plummeted after he imposed the tax. Although his standing had recovered somewhat by 1994, he remained an extremely polarizing figure and decided not to seek reelection.

“Weicker is one of those people who tends to inspire passion,” says G. Donald Ferree Jr., the associate director of the Institute for Social Inquiry at the University of Connecticut. “People either like him or hate him.”

If Jesse Jackson were to run as a third-party candidate in 1996, it would unquestionably hurt President Clinton; another bid from Ross Perot would damage Republicans by splitting the anti-incumbent vote. Weicker, who says Perot’s decision won’t influence his, could have a more unpredictable partisan impact.

To the extent he could make himself noticed in 1996, Weicker would probably draw most of his votes from the center-left. But he would probably direct most of his rhetorical fire at the Republican nominee. “In terms of message, he could hurt Republicans,” says GOP pollster Neil Newhouse. “But in terms of votes, he will hurt Democrats.”

Weicker is clearly spoiling for a rumble with his former party. In his book he says the GOP won back Congress in 1994 by appealing to “the dark side of America.” Of his longtime colleague, Sen. Majority Leader Bob Dole, who has tacked to the right on several issues to solidify his position as front-runner for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, Weicker says: “I get very antsy when I see somebody deny their own career . . . for a particular political exercise.”

Weicker’s eyes light up the most when he condemns the growing influence within the GOP of religious conservatives--or what he terms, with characteristic delicacy, the “Johnny-come-lately right-wing moralizing nuts of the Republican Party.” Weicker would undoubtedly raise as a central issue opposition to the Religious Equality Amendment that the Christian Coalition and Republican conservatives are pushing to allow greater religious expression in schools and other public settings. Strict separation of church and state, Weicker says, “was the great gift of America to the world, and it has proven out in practice. My God, they are not fighting over a National Football League franchise in Bosnia and Northern Ireland and the Middle East. It’s religion.”

Even Clinton’s statements last week affirming the right of individual (although not organized) prayer in school struck Weicker as a profound mistake. Although he backed Clinton in 1992 and has generally supported him since, “I’ve had it today,” Weicker says. “Unless you draw a very clear line, everyone is going to end up in trouble.”

In several specifics, Weicker’s ideological profile fits the opening that many analysts believe exists in the center of the electorate. He’s fiscally conservative (he wants to balance the budget in three to five years rather than 10, as Clinton proposes, or seven, as the Republicans plan). He’s socially tolerant (he supports abortion rights) and tough on gun control. And his experience in Connecticut gives him credibility to argue that it’s possible, even preferable, to govern as an independent.

But at a fundamental level, Weicker doesn’t appear quite in tune with the times. For one thing, he dismisses the significance of campaign finance and political reform--potentially among the most powerful issues for any third-party candidate. More important, his fundamental critique of the two major parties is several years out of date.

Weicker’s contention is that the two parties are failing because on “any tough issue, both . . . look for soft landings.” Rather than offering the public real choices, “everybody tries to fuzz it up so nobody knows really where they stand.”

Maybe that was true during George Bush’s somnolent tenure in the White House. But it’s hardly a credible characterization of the Gingrich era--when debate in Washington has become starkly polarized on the budget, taxes, welfare reform, environmental protection and just about everything else beyond boxers or briefs.

If anything, the opening in the center now exists because of an excess of contrast between the two parties. Rather than the old George Wallace line about there not being “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties, the most credible argument for a third party today is that centrist voters are being abandoned by a GOP committed to a conservative revolution and a Democratic Party imploding toward irrelevance. It’s not the suppression of conflict, as Weicker suggests, but rather its calculated exaggeration, that constitutes the best case against the two parties today.