MSN Tracking Image
MSNBC.com
Newsweek.com
Clift: A Third-Party Ticket in 2008?
Fred Thompson isn't the only 'Law and Order' character eyeing the 2008 presidential campaign. Inside Sam Waterston’s efforts to help promote a third-party ticket.
A WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Updated: 4:08 p.m. ET April 27, 2007

April 27, 2007 - The actor Sam Waterston, who plays the hard-hitting assistant D.A. in “Law and Order,” has a confession to make. “I’m a moderate,” he declared in a speech at the National Press Club. “You’re looking at a bird rarely seen in Washington, even in springtime.” Waterston was in town to promote Unity ’08, an Internet scheme to launch a third-party ticket, made up of a Republican and a Democrat, to run together against the two major party nominees.

Waterston is much more animated in person than is his character on the show; he smiles a lot and defers to the political pros seated with him who founded Unity ’08. He calls himself a skeptic but comes across more like an idealist. Tall and angular, he’s played Lincoln so much that he’s easy to typecast as a president. Asked if he might run, he said no, but thinks his costar Fred Thompson will get into the race. Waterston just wants to do his part to shake up the system. “I know I’m just a bug running around in the sun who doesn’t know he’s about to be squashed,” he said at one point. “To me, this is a liberating thing to say what I think.”

Only in Hollywood is coming out of the closet as a moderate considered bold. Waterston actually lives in Connecticut, but concedes his Hollywood friends are having a hard time getting their heads around the notion of a third-party candidacy. “Part of it is fear,” he says. “Ralph Nader fear.” Democrats don’t want another election stolen from them by an allegedly well-meaning idealist wanting to reform the system. Republicans are skittish, too. They like control, and the Internet by definition is an uncontrollable force. With the field already crowded with candidates, will there be room for a third party?

There’s a sense that politics as we know it could come apart this election season. With an unpopular war, scandals consuming the White House and a two-party system paralyzed by partisanship, voters are looking for an outsider, somebody who’s not tainted by politics as usual. If the two parties don’t satisfy this yearning with their nominees, there will be a third-party candidacy, maybe more than one. Even if the Republicans and Democrats choose candidates who are broadly acceptable, those choices will be made in early February--leaving nine months for buyer’s remorse to set in, or for the nominees to implode. Of course, the notion of third parties have come and gone in the past, usually falling victim to the institutional power and financial might of the two parties. Still, the political landscape is readymade for more choices to emerge in a culture geared to the next new thing.

Republican consultant Doug Bailey and Democrats Jerry Rafshoon and Hamilton Jordan, who worked in the Carter White House, originally planned to collaborate on a book about the broken political system. Then they decided not to just write about it, but to do something. Their idea: to attract 10 million people who would become delegates by simply going to the Unity ’08 site and registering. If 10 percent of them give $100, that would raise 10 times the $10 million to $12 million Unity ’08 needs to get off the ground and hold its virtual convention in June ’08. “The [Howard] Dean phenomenon was not some kind of fluke,” says Bailey, referring to the fund-raising potential of the Internet. The site is inviting “Dream Team” submissions, and the founders are briefing potential candidates. Among them: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who’s pro-gun control and pro-environment, and Nebraska GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel, an antiwar Republican. The founders don’t quite say it, but Bloomberg is the one they’re really after. He could inject big ideas into a policy debate that is already threatening to be overly careful and focus-grouped. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a billionaire, and could fund a campaign out of his own pocket.

Unity ’08 is determined to get on the ballot in all 50 states. If that happens, the group will become a force for the other parties to reckon with. Bailey told NEWSWEEK that he could envision one of the two major-party nominees deciding to seek the Unity ’08 nod rather than run against a third-party ticket. “But he or she would have to name a vice president from the opposition party,” Bailey adds. That could prove a major stumbling block, of course. But Bailey sees it as an opportunity to also showcase cabinet choices that would be a mix of Republicans and Democrats. It all sounds rather fanciful, and with the front runners in both parties tending more toward political centrism than extremism, Bailey’s concept of a centrist ticket could give way to something far different. George Vradenberg, a former AOL executive who’s backing Unity ’08, told NEWSWEEK that if the Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war, and the Republicans choose John McCain, who is pro-war, Unity ’08 could become the vehicle for an antiwar ticket that pairs Hagel with Barak Obama. Once you empower people via the Internet, anything can happen, which is the promise and the peril of any start-up.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18355633/site/newsweek/