Commentary : A Shot of Ectoplasm to a Dull Season : Politics: Buchanan’s flirtation exposes the freak show also known as the Reform Party.

It is probably inevitable in a time in which the two major American parties offer serious, earnest, experienced hopefuls, that a kind of antic spirit infects the political world and makes people susceptible to the lure of improbable movements and impossible candidates. That is the current noisy spectacle surrounding Pat Buchanan’s threatened defection from the Republican Party and possible embrace of a party whose members are split over whether they want him as their standard bearer. Aside from infusing a dull political season with a shot of ectoplasm, the Buchanan affair has had one highly beneficial effect. It has exposed to the world the kind of freak show the Reform Party has become: a psychotic salad bar of political eccentrics, recycled demagogues, plutocrats on the make and a blustering ex-wrestler with vivid reformist visions.

People always are taking third parties too seriously. They rarely survive their first exposure. By the second time they contest a presidential election, what commends them most--their novelty--has worn off. They are, moreover, uniquely vulnerable to having their signature issues snatched away by the major parties, thus leaving them forlorn asterisks at the end of a column of political statistics.

In the 19th century, the Republican Party emerged from the wreckage of two minor anti-slavery parties and the internal contradictions in the Whig Party that, in the two decades before the Civil War, was the Democrats’ chief rival for national power.

Not since then has there been a minor party that has attained major party status. And only in 1912 did the diversion of votes to a third party have a decisive impact on the choice of a president. That was the year that Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive, or “Bull Moose,” Party drew off enough votes from the GOP’s nominee, President William Howard Taft, to throw the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. While he can sometimes resemble the great progressive in his bombast and strutting, Buchanan is no Roosevelt.

The combined strength of the two major defecting factions of the Democratic Party in 1948--the Dixiecrats on the right and the Progressives on the left--could not defeat Harry S. Truman. That year, all minor parties won less than 5 1/2% of the popular vote. By 1952, all minor parties combined gained less than half a percent of the total.

In the tumultuous 1968 election, George Wallace’s American Independent Party won almost 10 million votes and 46 electoral votes. Yet if we assume that all Wallace voters were defectors from the Democrats and his electoral votes had been added to Hubert Humphrey’s, the Democrats still would have failed to get an electoral college majority. If the fears and anxieties of 1968 were insufficient to give a third party a kingmaker role, what can be said of the prospects of such a party in these quiescent times?

The votes that John Anderson siphoned off from Ronald Reagan could not have saved the White House for Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Ross Perot’s 19 million votes in 1992, the most impressive showing by a third party candidate since Roosevelt in 1912, did not win so much as a single electoral vote. Certainly if every Perot vote had been added to Bush’s total, the Republican would have finished far ahead of Clinton in the popular vote, but it is not clear that a vote for Perot was a vote that might otherwise have gone to Bush.

By 1996, Perot’s bar graphs and snappy homilies had worn thin, and his vote sagged to fewer than 9 million. This year, the party and the $12 million due it as a result of Perot’s 1996 showing is up for grabs. Lacking any consistent philosophy or even an organizing principle, the Reform Party has become a large body of money entirely surrounded by disembodied political spirits eager to get their hands on it. It is less a party than a political menagerie in which Lenora Fulani, a leftist and one-time follower of Louis Farrakhan, rubs uneasy shoulders with Jesse Ventura and Pat Choate, the isolationist economist who was Perot’s running mate in 1996.

Were Buchanan to be added to the assemblage, you would need a wiring diagram to figure out what, other than a hazy desire for reform, the Reform Party stands for.

Perhaps if the likely nominees for the Democratic and Republican parties were obstinate defenders of the status quo, the Reform Party, for all of its ramshackle jangling, might have gained some traction. But reform is on the lips of Democratic candidates Al Gore and Bill Bradley, and GOP frontrunner George W. Bush is not his father’s kind of Republican. Finally, while single-issue minor parties in the past have fared poorly, their leaders could at least agree on what their issues were.