Carla Howell has been avoiding me. For the past several weeks I’ve been trying to interview her, only to be told by her staff that she was too busy to sit down and talk. So on a sunny Saturday afternoon in May I’ve come to check out a pro-gun rally on the Boston Common, where Howell, the Libertarian Party’s candidate for governor, is the keynote speaker.
I approach her beforehand and introduce myself. She smiles tightly and makes a little joke about being “stalked.” Soon it’s her turn at the podium. Her five-minute talk to a couple of dozen people–all but a handful of whom are Libertarian activists, rally organizers, or both–is standard pro-gun rhetoric, with a Mother’s Day twist: “Good mothers refuse to be victims. They refuse to allow their children to be victims. That is why many good mothers become responsible gun owners.” Behind her, a group of pro-gun women called the Second Amendment Sisters has posted a sign declaring firearms THE ULTIMATE IN FEMININE PROTECTION. Eddie Eagle, the National Rifle Association’s kiddie mascot, is posing for pictures and waving to passersby.
When she finishes, I try to intercept her before she and the Libertarians’ US Senate candidate, Michael Cloud, can leave. Will you do an interview? “I don’t think so,” she replies, moving away from me. Can you tell me why? She shakes her head no, stops to take a swig from a bottle of Poland Spring water, and says, “Thanks anyway.” Then she heads off.
at running for state office.
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of third-party politics in Massachusetts, where a candidate can complain bitterly that the media don’t cover her (“The Big Boston Media is censoring us. Silencing us,” groused the Howell campaign’s electronic newsletter on May 27), yet refuse to be interviewed for a nonpartisan political magazine. Why? The answer appears to lie in the party’s concerns about a political upstart–the Green Party–that, if successful, could cut into the Libertarians’ claim to be the only real alternative to the Democrats and the Republicans.
“I think the Libertarian Party has established itself as the newest major party in Massachusetts,” says Elias Israel, the state party chairman. “Really, there’s no one else who can stake that claim.” The Greens, for their part, are just as enthusiastic in insisting that the Libertarians have no support except for a few gun lovers and anti-tax extremists. Earlier this past spring I asked the Green Party’s gubernatorial candidate, Jill Stein, how she could reasonably expect media attention given how little coverage Howell received in her 2000 US Senate campaign against Democratic incumbent Ted Kennedy. Stein’s response: “I can see why responsible journalists might not have paid a lot of attention to the Libertarian and the Republican in that election. But I do find journalists take very seriously what I’m talking about.”
To borrow the old Henry Kissinger line about academic politics, the infighting is so fierce because the stakes are so small.
Yet at a time when both Democrats and Republicans in Massachusetts are wrangling over a narrow patch of ideological turf, the Libertarians, with their small-government message, and the Greens, with their emphasis on the environment, political reform, and old-fashioned progressive politics, could both enliven and enrich the campaign.
This is especially true in the wide-open gubernatorial race. Howell, a business consultant, is by now something of an old pro, having established the Libertarians as an officially recognized party with her strong runs for state auditor in 1998 and for the US Senate in 2000–when she garnered 12 percent of the vote, nearly pulling ahead of Republican candidate Jack E. Robinson (13 percent) in her campaign against Kennedy. The newcomer, Stein, a physician and environmental activist, is the standard-bearer for the Green Party, which won official status in 2000 on the strength of presidential candidate Ralph Nader’s 6 percent here.
Under Massachusetts law, a party gains official recognition by winning at least 3 percent in a statewide election. Legally speaking, the Libertarians and the Greens are no different from the Republicans and the Democrats. They’ll even hold party primaries this September, though none of their candidates–right down to the state-rep level–will face an intraparty challenge.
Still, few observers would suggest that either of these relative unknowns has earned equal billing. The question isn’t whether Stein and Howell deserve to be treated as political peers of Mitt Romney and whoever wins the Democratic primary in September, included in this fall’s gubernatorial debates and covered, by right, as extensively as the Democratic and Republican party nominees. The question is whether the public doesn’t deserve at least a chance to know them. The campaign should belong to the voters–not the parties, not the candidates, and certainly not the media.
Qualifying for the ballot in Massachusetts is not easy. To run for a statewide office such as governor or US senator a candidate must obtain 10,000 signatures, a hurdle that has tripped up a number of candidates over the years. But even that doesn’t mean everyone whose name makes it to the ballot has earned equal time. The media have some obligation to judge who among the candidates is a credible and viable contender and who is not. Candidates who represent officially sanctioned parties, such as Stein and Howell, may well deserve more attention than those who do not, if only because they have it harder than unaffiliated candidates rather than easier. (Non-party candidates get on the ballot by submitting 10,000 signatures from registered voters by July 30; those signatures can be from members of any political party and from independents. The deadline for the four official-party candidates was May 7, and the signatures they gathered could only come from members of their own parties and from independents. Given how few registered Libertarians and Greens there are, getting on the ballot would actually have been easier if they had not won official-party status.)
But in an era of low voter turnout and disaffection from the political system, it would be unconscionable for the media and debate organizers to ignore Carla Howell and Jill Stein, who have overcome every legal obstacle put in their paths. They don’t necessarily deserve to receive as much coverage as the Democratic and Republican candidates, who will, in all likelihood, split 90 percent of the vote this November. But they do deserve to be covered. And they certainly deserve to be included in public debates, which –sponsored as they are by the media–amount to journalism by other means.
“What you think journalists should do depends on a prior question that never really gets asked,” says Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University and the author of the 1999 book What Are Journalists For? “And the question is, what is your public role? To cover candidates from a narrow political-realism perspective? Or to widen the context of debate? I think the job of the press should be to widen the sphere of debate, and to recognize that some candidacies should best be understood as symbolic candidacies.”
None of the above
Independent and third-party candidacies are an afterthought of American politics. We have a two-party system in the United States, and not just because of a failure of the imagination or the fecklessness of the media. Rather, it’s because our winner-take-all elections simply leave no room for a third party. Historically, the way minor parties have become permanent fixtures on the political scene is to knock off one of the two big parties. That hasn’t happened since the 1850s, when the Whigs gave way to the upstart Republicans.
There are ways to make third parties relevant. Perhaps the best known is a system called instant runoff, whereby a voter ranks candidates in order of preference. Had such a system been in effect in the 2000 national election, most Ralph Nader supporters presumably would have made Al Gore their second choice–and Gore would have won the presidency. Nader today would be shown great deference in Democratic circles rather than being treated as a pariah.
for Ralph Nader’s Green Party.
But though instant runoff is used in Britain, Ireland, and Australia, and in a few cities in the United States (Cambridge has a form of it, and Vermont may be moving toward it), it’s not likely to be the law of the land anytime soon. So third-party candidates will continue to seem like gatecrashers.
Yet what right do the media have to act as gatekeepers, preventing the unwashed from gaining entry to the club? By restricting the electoral conversation to Democrats and Republicans, the media pander to politics-as-usual, and in Massachusetts, as elsewhere, politics-as-usual is precisely what turns the public off. About 36 percent of registered voters here are Democrats and 13 percent are Republicans. Thus fewer than half of Massachusetts voters pledge allegiance to either of the parties that monopolize state politics. Most of the rest are “unenrolled,” the official term for registered independents. Perhaps some–or even most–of those independents would be interested in hearing from someone other than a Democrat or a Republican.
The decision to exclude, or to play down, third-party candidates is generally based on the pragmatic judgment that they can’t win, and since they can’t, their presence in any race is just a distraction from the main event. But is that really true? It’s been true in Massachusetts, where every governor elected in the 20th century was either a Republi-can or a Democrat. But independent Angus King has been governor of Maine since 1995. And according to Bowdoin College political scientist Christian Potholm, the author of An Insider’s Guide to Maine Politics: 1946-1996, when King is term-limited out of office this November, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that a Green Party candidate could be elected to succeed him.”It’s wide open, and people are used to assuming that their votes count,” says Potholm.
In Vermont, independent Bernie Sanders, a socialist, has been elected to Congress repeatedly, seemingly growing in popularity over the years. In Connecticut, Lowell Weicker went from Republican US senator to independent governor in the early 1990s, succeeding by playing Democrats and Republicans off against each other.
The best known third-party governor in the country, of course, is Minnesota’s Jesse Ventura, the former WWF wrestler who was elected in 1998 over two major-party candidates from longtime political families. “The biggest problem the media have is that they cannot break through this notion that it’s still a two-party system,” says Bill Hillsman, a Minneapolis-based political consultant who worked for Ventura and later served as an adviser to Nader’s presidential campaign. “It’s easier to do an A-versus-B type of story and to limit it to the issues that they want to talk about.”
Besides, third-party candidates can have enormous influence even when they don’t win the election. Much of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party platform of 1912 found its way into Woodrow Wilson’s administration. George Wallace ran for president in 1968 to protest Lyndon Johnson’s liberal racial policies–thus helping Richard Nixon, whose so-called Southern strategy was aimed at winning over disaffected white voters who’d been stirred up by Wallace. Perhaps the most impressive example is that of Ross Perot, whose 19 percent showing in 1992 likely cost George Bush the elder the White House, and whose deficit-bashing rhetoric became Bill Clinton’s mantra. Perot’s campaign also demonstrated the potential for third-party politics in Massachusetts: He won nearly 23 percent of the vote here, and actually came in second, ahead of Bush, in Berkshire, Bristol, Franklin, and Hampshire counties.
Clearly, then, voters and potential voters are ready to hear from alternative voices in the 2002 gubernatorial campaign. But will they? To get their message out, Carla Howell and Jill Stein need the cooperation of the media, both in terms of coverage and in letting them into televised debates. (See “Debating Points,” below.) But the media are still, after all these years–and all these third-party candidates–figuring out how to handle these political interlopers.
Making it up as they go along
By far the two biggest, most important media players in this year’s gubernatorial campaign are Boston’s metropolitan dailies, The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald. The way the Globe and Herald choose to cover (or not cover) Howell and Stein will have a lot to do with whether their candidacies can have a real impact in the November election. But what that coverage will look like is still very much up for grabs.
Globe editor Marty Baron–who’ll be managing coverage of his first Massachusetts election–is noncommittal, saying, “It’s always a tough issue. I think, certainly, that they have to demonstrate at least in some fashion that they’re going to be credible candidates. What that means is always a judgment call.”
Political editor Carolyn Ryan says the Globe has made an effort to include Stein and Howell in its campaign coverage, running pieces on the Green Party’s state convention and on the Libertarian Party’s ballot question to abolish the state income tax. The Globe also ran a piece on Howell’s failure to file an income-tax return in 2000, the year she ran for US Senate. (The Howell campaign said she didn’t have to file, since she had little income that year. The campaign also sent out to its true believers an e-bulletin blasting the Globe for asking why Howell hadn’t filed and seeming to be slow in accepting Howell’s explanation.) Says Ryan: “We have to be just as vigorous in covering them as we do everybody else.”
Joe Sciacca, the Herald’s deputy managing editor for politics, wrote a column earlier this year arguing that the Libertarians have won a place at the table based on their record in past campaigns. Certainly Howell’s anti-tax crusade has won a fan in columnist Howie Carr, who wrote in a May column, “Where do I sign Carla Howell’s abolish-the-income-tax referendum petition?”
The Herald, which will not be part of the media consortium that is sponsoring this year’s televised debates, plans to host its own face-offs this year. And though no decisions about format have been made, Sciacca says, “We definitely are going to have a difficult time not inviting Carla Howell.” As for Stein, Sciacca says, “I think we’ll sort of cross that bridge when we come to it.”
As for other media outlets, the consensus is that the third-party candidates will be covered enough that the public knows who they are, but not nearly as much as the Democratic and Republican candidates. At Channel 4, senior correspondent John Henning says he plans to include Howell and Stein on the Sunday-morning News Conference show that he hosts, but that doesn’t mean he’s comfortable with the treatment these also-rans get. “To be honest with you, they probably don’t get as much coverage as they deserve,” says Henning.
At Channel 5, president and general manager Paul La Camera says Howell and Stein will definitely be included on the station’s Sunday-morning show,Commitment 2002, which he says is intended to provide “candidate-oriented discourse” to supplement the station’s regular political coverage. As for whether they should be included in the broader debates, La Camera thinks they should, although he concedes that which third-party candidates are credible and which aren’t can be a tough call. “It’s like pornography,” he says. “I know it when I see it.” Channel 7 political editor Andy Hiller, who interviewed Howell as part of a May piece on the Libertarians’ ballot campaign to abolish the state income tax, believes Howell has earned the right to be included–and that Stein, as a major-party candidate, should be included, too, even though the Greens have not established themselves as fully as the Libertarians have.”Sometimes principles bring you to places you wish they didn’t,” says Hiller. “It would be so simple to say Carla Howell yes, Jill Stein no. But I like consistency.”
WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) news director Sam Fleming says his reporters will profile “as many qualified candidates as possible,” and expects to include Stein and Howell in campaign coverage when reporting on issues that intersect with their platforms. “They bring ideas to the table that represent a certain constituency,” Fleming says.
Talk-show host David Brudnoy, of WBZ Radio (1030 AM), plans to interview any candidate who comes in. “I think people who do what I do have an obligation to everybody to give them lots of time, because we’ve got the time,” he says. But the rest of the media, he adds, have to follow “common sense.” To him, that means not giving third-party candidates the same amount of coverage as the Democrats and the Republicans–a position he takes even though he himself is a registered Libertarian.
Staying on message
Mitt Romney’s not the only candidate for governor who makes PowerPoint presentations. Jill Stein is clicking her way through an Earth Day talk to about 60 people–mainly students–at Simmons College, where the Harvard Medical School-trained doctor works part-time in the student health center. Stein’s theme: how special-interest politics has created an environmental disaster, from dioxin in human breast milk to the hole in the ozone layer. Problems can’t be solved, she says, when corporate lobbyists are donating hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain the status quo. “This is why truth and justice don’t count for a lot when you go see your particular legislator,” she tells the students.
In an interview in the Simmons cafeteria after her talk, Stein shows an ability to stay on message that belies her status as a political neophyte. Her themes: the environment, universal health care, and Clean Elections, the voter-approved initiative that the Legislature–most notably House Speaker Tom Finneran–has refused to fully fund. Stein says that full funding for Clean Elections is not only crucial for reform, but that if she qualifies for it (at press time she appeared to have fallen short) this public funding will enable her to compete with the better-financed candidates.
I ask her how she’ll get her message out if the media don’t cover her, and if she’s not invited to the debates. Her response is to express optimism that neither predicament will come to pass. “I have to say, speaking from experience, that I’ve had great relationships with a lot of press,” Stein says, referring to her work on issues such as tougher environmental standards for power plants. As for the debates, she notes that she’s already been included in a number of forums, and that she expects to continue to be after the primaries, when the field has been whittled down to the four official-party candidates plus any independents that manage to make it onto the ballot. And if she is excluded? “We don’t have a formal strategy at this point, but we will certainly raise hell,” she says. “And I think we will have a very strong case with the public.”
Despite Carla Howell’s refusal to let me interview her this past spring, two years ago she let me accompany her for a day during her campaign for the US Senate. Her silence this time around is especially puzzling because back then she offered a useful critique of the media’s role in covering third-party candidates. “What the media owes its readers is to cover the candidates, cover the issues,” she told me during a swing through western Massachusetts. The media are especially perplexed when it comes to covering Libertarians, she added, because the “left versus right” paradigm they rely on doesn’t work. The Libertarians are anti-gun control and anti-tax, positions that appeal to conservatives, but they also oppose any bans on same-sex marriage and support drug legalization and a smaller military, positions that place them on the left. Howell argues that these stances are consistent, since they all point to less government. But they also make the media uncomfortable, she says, because they don’t fit pre-established political distinctions.
Still, the media have a responsibility to make judgments about fringe candidates–deciding whether they would enrich the public dialogue, or gum it up. While the major media tend to ignore fringe candidates, smaller news organizations often give them a free ride.
Example: William Ferguson, who ran in the congressional special-election contest to choose a successor to the late J. Joseph Moakley last year. Ferguson wasn’t a third-party candidate, but in the Democratic primary he did identify himself as a member of Lyndon LaRouche’s extremist political organization. The Quincy Patriot Ledger let Ferguson off with two mild profiles in which he inveighed against the international monetary system but was not probed on some of LaRouche’s less-mainstream views. (LaRouche, on his own website, larouchespeaks.com, wrote that the September 11 terrorist attacks were the work of a “cult of utopian military lunatics, typified by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, Henry Kissinger, or the current Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz,” who “engineered the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, then concocted the Osama bin Laden hoax.” )
Not to pick on the Ledger; at smaller news organizations far and wide, the general rule is to let every candidate have his or her say, and not to probe too deeply–unless the person has a serious chance of winning. Says Ledger editor Chazy Dowaliby of Ferguson, “We didn’t go out of our way to paint a positive picture of him. I do believe he spoke for himself, and that’s all we really needed.”
The trick in dealing with candidates outside the Democrat-Republican mainstream–are they nutcases or the political New New Thing?–is to be responsible and inclusive at the same time, and it’s not an easy trick to master. Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, calls it a “confounding problem,” in part because the weakest candidates are the most anxious to engage in debate, and the strongest the most reticent. But that doesn’t mean that minor candidates should be shut out from the public dialogue, he says. “There ought to be at least a minimum degree of coverage for the third-party candidates who are credible, but a lot of times they don’t even get that.”
If the also-ran candidates don’t get the attention they deserve, who’s the loser? Well, them, of course. But when qualified non-mainstream candidates are overlooked, there’s also a bigger, more important loser: us. Consider that of approximately 4.8 million voting-age adults in Massachusetts, only a little more than 1.9 million, or 40 percent, voted in the 1998 gubernatorial election. Even if you adjust for those who aren’t US citizens, that’s a lot of people who could have voted but didn’t–a lot of alienated Massachusetts residents, in other words, who don’t much care for what the Democratic and Republican candidates have to say. Doesn’t it make sense to open up the dialogue to other voices?
“I think democracy depends on a real marketplace of ideas and a marketplace of options,” says Boston University communications professor Tobe Berkovitz.”The reason 95 percent are voting Democrat or Republican is that a huge chunk of them have never heard of the alternative. Cranks are in the eye of the beholder, and what’s a crank concept now might end up becoming at least open for debate. That to me is the whole point.”
Of course, that could be messy. But this is, after all, a democracy. And democracy can be messy.
Veteran media critic Dan Kennedy is a freelance journalist and a contributing writer for the Boston Phoenix.
All that gnawing and gnashing and Dan suggests that the third party candidates should be included in the first debate. Oh Danny Boy. Issues, issues, issues.