Steve Kornacki: Why Tom Friedman's Third-Party Dreams Will Fizzle
[Steve Kornacki is the news editor for Salon. He’s previously written about politics for the New York Observer and Roll Call, and his work has also appeared in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and on the Daily Beast.]
In his Sunday column, Thomas Friedman offered an argument that has been made many times before. It goes something like this: Our country faces serious problems, Democratic and Republican politicians in Washington aren’t fixing them, and Americans are running out of patience. Therefore, a new party is on the way.
Specifically, Friedman supplied this prediction: "Barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her -- one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome."...
What’s most interesting, though, is that there is in recent history a fairly solid precedent that illustrates the folly of Friedman’s thinking: the 1980 election.
Back then, the Republican Party was going through the same internal upheaval that it now faces, with restive conservative activists declaring war on a party establishment that, they believed, was insufficiently committed to ideological purity. Once a party of spendthrift Yankee moderation and small-town Rotarians, the "New Right" -- emboldened by Ronald Reagan's near-miss challenge of Gerald Ford in 1976 -- was rapidly remaking the GOP as a fundamentally right-wing party that catered to the racial and religious politics of the South and the cultural resentments of white ethnics in the north. Longtime Republican officeholders like Clifford Case and Jacob Javits were purged in primaries, while Reagan easily dispatched George H.W. Bush, who ran with the blessing of the old Rockefeller wing of the party, in the ’80 presidential primaries....
Read entire article at Salon
In his Sunday column, Thomas Friedman offered an argument that has been made many times before. It goes something like this: Our country faces serious problems, Democratic and Republican politicians in Washington aren’t fixing them, and Americans are running out of patience. Therefore, a new party is on the way.
Specifically, Friedman supplied this prediction: "Barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her -- one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome."...
What’s most interesting, though, is that there is in recent history a fairly solid precedent that illustrates the folly of Friedman’s thinking: the 1980 election.
Back then, the Republican Party was going through the same internal upheaval that it now faces, with restive conservative activists declaring war on a party establishment that, they believed, was insufficiently committed to ideological purity. Once a party of spendthrift Yankee moderation and small-town Rotarians, the "New Right" -- emboldened by Ronald Reagan's near-miss challenge of Gerald Ford in 1976 -- was rapidly remaking the GOP as a fundamentally right-wing party that catered to the racial and religious politics of the South and the cultural resentments of white ethnics in the north. Longtime Republican officeholders like Clifford Case and Jacob Javits were purged in primaries, while Reagan easily dispatched George H.W. Bush, who ran with the blessing of the old Rockefeller wing of the party, in the ’80 presidential primaries....