Clinton’s Woes Open Door to Four-Way Race

The Fourth of July marks the annual commemoration of America’s great leaders: the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the architects of the Constitution, men like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. But this year, the rest of July and August will celebrate the ungreat: the Republican and Democratic national conventions and their nominees, Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore.

The weaknesses of these two men could make the race seriously four-cornered: Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan are already giving Gore and Bush minor-party fits. If that continues, the Republican-Democrat outcome will be tight, turnout will climb and excitement levels will surge. This is a real prospect.

Public contentment with the economy may not be enough to elect Democrat Gore, which is a great irony. The views of swing voters have been moving away from the militant conservatism of the mid-1990s--one reason Congress has been so muted--and the upbeat business cycle has set a longevity record. With all these factors, the Democrats of 2000 should be winners, but President Bill Clinton and his scandals are a moral drag, just as Watergate hobbled the Republicans of 1976, even though the nation was beginning a conservative era. The threat of impeachment warped the beginning of the Republican presidential cycle a quarter-century ago, and now an impeachment could give it an artificial ideological extension.

The apparent minor-party candidates could hold the balance: Nader for the Greens and Buchanan for the Reform Party. If Nader can garner 6% or 8%, he could shred the Democratic presidential coalition enough to elect Bush. But if Buchanan targets the populist-nationalist third of the GOP presidential coalition and gets 8%-12% of the total vote, he would probably elect Gore. It’s been a long time since four candidates each got more than 5% in a presidential race, but it’s possible this year.

No one should underestimate the take-no-prisoners atmosphere of a four-way match. Supporters of the two minor candidates even have combative labels: Nader’s Raiders and the Buchanan Brigades. The three previous major quadruple jousts in U.S. presidential history were among the most fascinating: the four-way race of 1912 among Woodrow Wilson (42%), Theodore Roosevelt (27%), William H. Taft (23%) and Eugene V. Debs (6%); the pre-Civil War match of 1860 among Abraham Lincoln (40%), Stephen A. Douglas (29%), John C. Breckinridge (18%) and John Bell (13%); and the 1824 clash that elected John Quincy Adams (31%) over Andrew Jackson (41%), Henry Clay (13%) and William Crawford (11%). Hard as it is to suggest similar historical import for an interaction involving Bush, Gore, Nader and Buchanan, the excitement could be real enough.

Democrats can’t bank on experts who declare that the party in the White House keeps the presidency when real family income is rising nicely in the six to nine months before the election. The Democrats lost the White House in 1968 because of Vietnam and urban riots, even though incomes were climbing; and President George Bush was defeated in 1992, in part because many voters didn’t believe the economy was as good as statistics said. This year, Washington economic policy-making is split among a Democratic president, a GOP Congress and a Republican Federal Reserve Board chairman reappointed by Clinton. Voters aren’t sure who to credit--or blame.

The Democrats’ bigger concern should be Clinton’s role as a moral and ethical albatross. The new independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr’s successor, is thinking about indicting Clinton after he leaves office, and an Arkansas panel has recommended taking away his right to practice law. Over the last 50 years, when a party has been in the White House at least two terms and was recently tied to a scandal, it wasn’t able to retain power: in 1952, 1960 and 1976. For some months in 1988, Bush, then the vice president running for president, looked like he might be pulled down by the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra scandal. To put it bluntly: Democratic principles and policies would be doing a lot better if Gore weren’t the handpicked heir of the second Democratic president to be impeached.

On the other hand, George W. Bush reaps substantial benefits from the comparison between his family’s image of rectitude and Clinton’s behavior. Bush Sr., if a bit preppy and ineffectual, is honest. Barbara Bush’s temper, rarely seen by the public, has been submerged by her gray-haired “national grandmother” image. The idea of a moral restoration--George W. as the hearth-and-home dynastic heir to the Oval Office--threads through the current GOP campaign and gives the Texas governor virtually his only claim to stand for reform.

The warping of Democratic opportunity by voter reaction to Clinton’s scandals reverses a similar disarray of the Republicans in the early 1970s after Watergate. Back then, the GOP had the growing U.S. conservative wind at its back but saw the critical early part of its 1968-1992 presidential cycle disrupted by the Watergate scandals and the resulting fallout.

Clinton has given Republicans the chance for a narrow 2000 victory based on morality and integrity, the same themes Democrat Jimmy Carter successfully emphasized in 1976. If the GOP recaptures the White House it lost in 1992, Republicans could wind up with a 1968-2004 presidential era, warped by impeachment politics at both its beginning and final years.

But it might be too early to proclaim this. The uninspiring presidential race between two candidates who are 1) heirs of famous families and 2) creatures of rival (if partly overlapping) sets of megabuck donors and Washington lobbyist cliques has mobilized the splinter parties to dismiss the GOP and Democrats as bought and paid for. What still divides the Naderites and Buchananites, of course, are cultural issues.

Nader and Buchanan both hope to institutionalize their respective parties by getting the 5% of the national vote needed to guarantee $12.5 million in federal funding for 2004. But their chances are not equal, and neither is their potential impact.

Of the 4%-5% Nader scores in current national polls, 75%-85% comes from Gore, potentially fatal in a close race. Buchanan’s current 3%-5%, by contrast, comes about equally from Bush and Gore. But this will change greatly if Buchanan gets the Reform Party nomination and $12.5 million for the general election.

The catch with Nader is that he’s making his second run in 2000. He says this time he’ll really run, unlike his 1996 meander. Four years ago, he was only on the ballot in 21 states and chalked up less than 1% of the vote. So far this year, he has failed to get ballot position in North Carolina, but says he will wind up on 47 ballots, missing only three states. Maybe. If he fails in four or five, though, his credibility will start sliding toward 1996 levels, probably capping him at only 2% to 3% of the national vote. What Gore has to worry about is a Nader who comes alive, gets enough ballot positions and starts drawing 7% to 10% through a ringing appeal to liberal and radical Democrats.

Assuming Buchanan survives attempts by libertarian Reformers and Natural Law Party activists to supplant him during the early August Reform convention, he could have far greater impact. For one thing, he’s fairly certain to be on all 50 ballots and, as the Reform nominee, he’d collect $12.5 million in federal campaign money. His nomination drive has made enough enemies among social-issue moderates and state Reform Party leaders that it will be impossible for him to put together anything like the centrist-dominated 19% of the vote that Ross Perot launched the Reform Party with in 1992. But if Buchanan focuses on the populist, nationalist, isolationist and cultural right, his potential 8%-12% of the vote would come largely from Bush and the Republicans.

During the 20th century, it was populist nationalism, outsiderism and isolationism, not liberal progressivism, that scored double-digit minor-party showings under Teddy Roosevelt, Sen. Robert M. La Follette, George C. Wallace and Perot. Buchanan would lose most of the 1992 Perot voters with libertarian, high-tech or fiscal-conservative orientation, but stands to score with the other half of the Perot electorate.

It’s not widely realized, but from Kansas and Iowa west to Idaho and California, many of the strongest Perot counties in 1992 were the strongest for Wallace in 1968: Both men drew on issues of outsider populism and nationalism. There’s also a correlation between 1992 high county-level Perot strength in the Farm Belt and support in 1924 for the isolationist-progressive presidential candidacy of La Follette, who opposed U.S. entry into World War I. Because these voting streams would be mostly Republican in a two-way race, if Buchanan combines them with other significant groups of the cultural and Christian right, he could shape the outcome of the entire race.

Indeed, the 1990s trend within Group of 7 major Western industrial nations has been for breakaway right-wing or right-center populist parties to undermine governing conservative coalitions: the radical right in Italy and France, and the Reform parties in both Canada and the United States. Buchanan may hope for a similar role.

If Nader outscores Buchanan, Gore becomes the clear underdog. But if Buchanan builds a European-style party with overtones of nationalism, isolationism and anti-immigrant politics, plus elements of the Christian right, Bush is probably the one in trouble. As four-way races go, one among Bush, Gore, Nader and Buchanan might not be edifying, but it will definitely not be boring.