May 30, 2006
Bipartisan Third-Party Bid? Hype or Hope?
I guess the game is starting early this cycle. That is, every four years, there is an effort to gin up a third-party presidential candidacy to take advantage of the "pox on both houses" mood that is ever latent in the electorate. Typically, this gathers steam the year prior to the presidential election. Think of the Draft Perot movement (which started in the fall of 1991), the media boomlet for Colin Powell in the summer/fall of 1995, and the buzz over people like Warren Beatty and Donald Trump possibly running in the summer/fall of 1999. (In 2003, I would argue that Howard Dean soaked up most of this free energy.)
I've always that this process was at least one part hype and one part hope. Hype on the part of the chattering class and the need to invent new stories to attract the public's interest and sell eyeballs and newspapers. Hope on the part of those of us who think that the two-party system is dysfunctional and in need of radical surgery.
Now, the Washington Post reports that a new wrinkle to the game, one that evokes some of the "Draft ________" movements of 2003:
A group of political consultants from both sides of the political aisle is taking steps to draft a third-party ticket for president in 2008, guided by a belief that neither the Republican or Democratic parties are adequately addressing the problems of average Americans.
"We believe that, while the leaders of both major parties are well-intentioned people, they are trapped in a flawed system -- and that the two major parties are today simply neither relevant to the issues and challenges of the 21st century nor effective in addressing them," reads a four-page summary document for "Unity '08," a copy of which was obtained in advance by The Fix (and which is now online).
"Unity '08" plans to formally launch its Web presence today, but several of its principals have already been courting potential donors as well as checking with the Federal Election Commission about the requirements of running a third-party slate for president in 2008. According to the Unity '08 Web site, the group "is organized under IRS rules as a section 527 political organization" while it awaits FEC guidance.
Among the major players behind the effort are: Doug Bailey, a former Republican consultant and the founder of The Hotline; Hamilton Jordan and Jerry Rafshoon -- veterans of the Carter administration; Nicco Mele, webmaster for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign; and Roger Craver, a Democratic direct-mail consultant intimately involved in John B. Anderson's independent presidential bid in 1980 (and a co-founder of The Hotline with Bailey).
Although details of the group's aims are somewhat spotty, Unity '08 hopes to harness the power of the Internet to build a community of activists who will be tasked with choosing a "unity" ticket (made up of one Democrat and one Republican) during an online "convention" in June 2008. "That will be after the two parties are likely to have decided in their primaries who their nominees will be, so the Unity '08 convention delegates would then be able to consider who is best to run against them," according to a four-page question and answer document being circulated by the group.
The document summarizing the group's plan outlines a series of "crucial issues" that it hopes its presence will force the national parties to address. These include "global terrorism, our national debt, our dependence on foreign oil, the emergence of India and China as strategic competitors and/or allies, nuclear proliferation, global climate change, the corruption of Washington's lobbying system" and many, many more.
Hmmmm. The Post missed some interesting clues as to what this is about. Take Unity '08's "Founders Council" (in formation). Hamilton Jordan's name jumps out at me, as he was co-director of Ross Perot's ill-fated 1992 campaign, along with Republican Ed Rollins. The Carter connection matters less than the Perot connection, methinks. Maine's Angus King is also on the list, which makes sense as he is one of the few independents to get elected governor in the last two decades. Jim Jonas, Unity '08's CEO, worked on Lamar Alexander's early presidential organizing in 1993-95. (I'm actually surprised to not see Joe Trippi's name on the list--given that he's been talking about this kind of independent, internet-driven candidacy ever since 2004--but maybe my friend Nicco Mele is his proxy?)
So these guys have some heft. But I hardly think their preferred plan--to draft a "unity ticket" of one D and one R--is going to fire up voters. (Their ticket will look like a horse designed by a committee, only with two heads.) Nor does it seem very likely that such a ticket could be cobbled together. (Far better to go outside the two parties for new leadership, if you ask me.) Of course, if you could get 20 million people to at least temporarily threaten to withhold their support from the major parties during the course of the 2008 election cycle, you could very well leverage some significant shifts--at least rhetorically--in those parties' directions. Which wouldn't be a bad thing.
But, as I said in my earlier post about Thomas Friedman's musings on the same topic, this feels too soon to be ripe. The 2006 election has to play out first. If Democrats retake part or all of Congress, they may be able to deflect the third-party mood of 2007 by beginning to restore effective government to Washington. Or, they could fuel that mood if all they produce, with Republican connivance, is more grid-lock. And if they fail to dislodge the Republicans in 2006, then there will be a wholesale reshuffling of the Democratic leadership deck, and past that moment it is just too hard to see what comes next.
So Unity '08 is mostly a media play, at least for now.
May 26, 2006
Travelogue
I'm on the road, in the middle of an eight day trip to the west coast. I don't think I can possibly convey the whirlwind of ideas, images and experiences that are playing in my mind, but here's a taste.
My trip started with one of those serendipitous moments that you occasionally have, where a friendly conversation with the person next to you on the plane from Chicago to Seattle turns out to be a fellow traveler in many more senses of the phrase. I had the good luck to sit next to John Scherer, who is a leadership development consultant, but that barely describes what he really is. I think he uses the term "spirit warrior" but all I can say is that I was absolutely enthralled to meet someone who has gone from being a Lutheran minister at Cornell to working with top corporate execs on how to operate on the maxim that "your work is more than your job, and your life is more than your work." (That's how Sweet Honey in the Rock puts it, but it was just one of the phrases that John and I clicked on.) Believe it or not, our conversation ranged on everything from organizational change in a networked age to blogging to the Jesus Seminar, the Gnostic Gospels and the radical tradition in Judaism. John wrote a book called Work and the Human Spirit which I am now looking forward to reading...
Arrived in Seattle late Wednesday and met up right away with my colleagues Ellen Miller and Mike Klein of the Sunlight Foundation. Since December, we've been close collaborators on an incredible journey--setting up a new foundation funded by Mike and run by Ellen that is devoted to using the Internet and the social web to increase transparency and accountability in government. Ellen is a longtime friend and colleague, from my years at Public Campaign (which she founded in 1996, after leading the Center for Responsive Politics for more than a decade). It's amazing that she can start something new, and learn all kinds of new tricks, at an age when most people would be happily coasting into early retirement. (Ellen, I hope I'm not giving anything away when I say you look and act much younger than you are!) Mike, who I've only known for a few months, is one of the most amazing people I've ever met and certainly the sanest and kindest person of means I've ever worked with (and believe me, I could write a very entertaining essay about the various billionaires and centi-millionaires I've worked for and encountered over my years in political, journalistic and public interest work).
I won't go into all the details of the meetings we had in the last 48 hours, but my head is still spinning from the view from my hotel window this morning:
Thanks, Mike, for ruining me with that view. It was kind of like getting seats in Yankee Stadium right behind home plate. Very hard to go back to the upper decks after that.
My head is also spinning from the many fertile and intriguing conversations we had with people like Craig Newmark of Craigslist (who, yay!, is joining Sunlight's advisory board), Mitch Kapor of the Open Source Applications Foundation (who, yay!, is going to help Sunlight figure out how to bridge the DC and Silicon Valley data wonk cultures), Becky Bond and Michael Kieschnick of Working Assets, Tantek Celik, Peter Hirshberg and Kevin Marks of Technorati (as well as that little brother of mine), Zack Rosen and David Geilhufe of Civicspace, Martin Collier, Chris Messina, Tara Hunt, Al Chang, Peter Waldheim, Jerry Michalski, Shannon Clark, and last but not least Chris Nolan of Spot-on.com, who hosted a lovely dinner party last night for almost all of the above.
I'm looking forward to a few days R&R in the Carmel-Monterrey-Santa Cruz area this weekend, and then gearing up for the NetSquared conference Tuesday/Wednesday, where I'll be "immoderating" a panel on politics and the internet. More thoughtful blogging to come, I hope...
May 12, 2006
Trends to Watch
Style beats substance.
Form tops function.
Fantasy beats reality.
But truth tops lies.
And love beats hate.
Hard not to be fascinated by the new Google Trends, which allows you to compare search patterns on several terms at a time.
May 10, 2006
Yearly Kos Goodness
I'm very hard at work with last-minute work on my own conference, but here's a link to a panel on election reform that I'll be participating in at the YearlyKos mega-conference taking place June 8-11 in Las Vegas. Don't wait til the last minute to register; this one is going to be big.
May 09, 2006
For the Common Good
My old Nation colleague Mike Tomasky (we were interns there a few years apart) has written a long and thoughtful essay in the American Prospect that is getting a lot of well-deserved attention, including in today's New York Times. Mike's now the editor of the Prospect, and this essay will certainly mark his putting his stamp on that magazine.
Leaving aside a few unnecessary swipes at the left (who actually believes "the Democratic left wants it to be 1968 in perpetuity"?), Mike makes one central point very well: the interest-group politics at the heart of the Democratic party has failed. You can't build a majority by cobbling together different groups along their disparate identities--women, labor, blacks, Hispanics, gays, environmentalists, etc. A larger uniting theme is needed. His answer: We're all in this together.
That's exactly what I wrote in a piece for TomPaine back in June 2003:
If American progressives hope to counter the Right, we're going to need more than a laundry list of grievances and a souped-up infrastructure for projecting our message. We're going to need to articulate a counter-vision to the Right's drumbeat themes. Greater competence in placing our talking heads on TV or feeding our policy proposals to legislators won't be enough: we need a common world-view, or what used to be called an ideology.
I pointed out how well Grover Norquist's ideology of "Leave Us Alone" had worked in knitting together the disparate elements of the Republican right. And then I suggested:
To counter "Leave Us Alone" I suggest "We're All In This Together." Its rationale might go like this:
We must protect the environment because its degradation threatens us all. We must invest in universal health care because disease observes no boundaries -- gated communities won't protect you from SARS, AIDS, asthma or anthrax. The benefits of democracy are not reserved for the wealthy, they belong to everyone -- we fight for an equal voice for all Americans and to protect politics from the distortions of big money. We are only as well off as the poor, elderly and disabled among us, and there but for the grace of God go I -- we need a viable social safety net. We believe every person has the same intrinsic worth, that society's health depends on everyone having an equal stake, and that there is strength in diversity -- we want an inclusive society that values everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or religion. Money is not the measure of all worthwhile things -- markets left to their own devices will not care for the poor, educate our children, create public parks or seek justice for all. Those who benefit most from what democratic society provides have a greater obligation to give back to it -- we believe in progressive taxation. The multiple crises facing the world require multilateral cooperation, not go-it-alone imperialism.
On reading Mike's essay, I think he's done a terrific job of fleshing out this picture in a number of ways. He calls this politics of the common good "a new civic republicanism" (nice appropriation of the GOP brand) and says it:
can justify collective action far more powerfully and persuasively than anything the Democrats have done or said in a long time. Such arguments can be constructed on behalf of almost every single thing the party purports to stand for: health-care coverage for those without it, the need to protect the planet and take global warming seriously, energy independence, asset-building for African Americans and other disproportionately poor groups, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and more. Such rhetoric can surely be wedded effectively to core economic matters. Last month in these pages, my colleague Harold Meyerson wrote brilliantly about the crisis of the American economy [see “Not Your Father’s Detroit,” The American Prospect, April 2006] -- about the need for an industrial policy that addresses the flight of jobs, the health-care and pension crises, and the rest. If the Democrats, when addressing these concerns, sound like they’re offering one more sop to big labor, they will inaugurate the same old round of embittered cat-calling; if their proposals are rooted in notions of communal sacrifice toward a greater good in which all citizens will have a stake and a share, the terms of the debate are changed.
I still have huge doubts about whether the Democrats in office are the ones who can enact anything like this vision. They seem far too corrupted by power and money, and I suspect the best you can say about some of them is they might respond to Mike's ideas mainly out of opportunism.
But even though Mike has pitched his argument at Democrats, there's no reason it can't be applied from below, by small-d democrats. It would be a very good thing if progressives starting asking each other, whenever we're faced with particularistic interest-group demands, how does this advance the common good? I think we have plenty of good answers, and none of those groups I mentioned above--women, labor, blacks, Hispanics, gays, environmentalists, etc.--need fear a politics of the common good.
May 06, 2006
Neil Young: Gimme Some Truth
I'm writing this while listening to Neil Young's new album, Living With War. It's a great record, and I mean that not just musically, but also in the old sense that Ani Difranco sang about,
people used to make records
as in a record of an event
the event of people playing music in a room
Young filled a record studio with one hundred of LA's best session singers, none of whom had any idea what they'd be singing that day, and in one twelve hour day of recording they created a raw, passionate and human sound that is perfectly suited for Living With War's theme of protest and redemption. Young also uses a trumpet to punctuate his melodies, and I love how it slices through the gutteral sound of his trademark electric guitar.
I titled this post Gimme Some Truth because throughout Living With War, Young is making one demand, for the truth. "Don't need no more lies," he cries. "Let's impeach the president for lying." Bush's lies, about the Iraq War, the NSA wiretaps, "Mission Accomplished--these are the big lies that Young is outraged by.
I know Young's approach to politics is hardly a consistent one--that he supported Reagan in the 1980s, that in the early days of the AIDS crisis he made homophobic statements, and after 9-11 he recorded the pro-war song, "Let's Roll." But he's an artist, not a politician or an academic. Like Whitman said, he's large, containing contradictions. If anything, when he sings in "Shock and Awe," that "we went with what we knew and now we can't go back, but had a chance to change our mind," I think he's admitting that's he's changed his. Neil Young, swing voter.
Truth is painful. I think it's hard to live with truth everyday. Like I said the other day, if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention. But today, the truth hurts and it's easier to be numb, or to shut it out. In the record's mournful title song, "Living With War," Young sings: "I'm living with war everyday, I'm living with war in my heart everyday, I'm living with war right now" but he also says "I take a holy vow to never kill again" and "try to remember peace." As he sang those words I thought of what he did with John Lennon's "Imagine" on the 9-11 memorial album. Remember? He changed the line, "Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can," to "I wonder if I can." That was some truth.
"No one can now doubt the word of America," Bush says at the end of a series of contradictory speech clips that Young weaves into the "Flip/Flop" section of "Let's Impeach the President," and you know what BS that is.
Remarkably, Living With War is not just an angry record of a moment, but also a hopeful statement for what we could yet do. When Young put this record on the internet, he said he wanted people to have to listen to the album's songs in the order that they appear, not to jump straight to the most controversial title. And so it's significant that after "Let's Impeach the President," he sings
Looking for a leader
To bring our country home
Reunite the red, white and blue
Before it turns to stone
Lookin' for somebody
Young enough to take it on
Clean up the corruption
And make the country strong
I especially liked this stanza (maybe because I'm for Clean Elections):
Yeah we've got our election
But corruption has a chance
We got to have a clean win
To regain confidence
America is beautiful
But she has an ugly side
We're lookin' for a leader
In the country far and wide
We're lookin' for a leader
With The Great Spirit on his side.
Yesterday at GEL2006, Craig Newmark made a joke about wearing more black and "trying to be more cynical," but I'm glad that Neil Young decided to wear his heart on his sleeve with this record. If this country isn't going to go down the tubes, it'll only be because a lot more people decide they're going to do the same thing.
Tags: Neil Young
May 05, 2006
PDF2006 Schedule is Out!
The detailed, minute-by-minute schedule for this year's third annual Personal Democracy Forum is now live. We've also added a bunch of exciting speakers, including Chellie Pingree, the president of Common Cause; Roger Simon, the co-founder of Pajamas Media; Bill McIntyre of Grassroots Enterprise and Juan Proano of PlusThree.
Two additional highlights: Due to popular demand, we've decided to add a plenary debate to the PDF program between leading advocates on both sides of the "net neutrality" issue. They are Susan Crawford, professor at Cardoza Law School and a member of the ICANN board; Stephen Effros, for thirty years a leading spokesman for the cable telecommunications industry; Timothy Karr, campaign director for Free Press; and Chris Wolf, co-chair of the Hands Off the Internet coalition. Moderating the debate will be NY Representative Anthony Weiner, making his second appearance at PDF.
And, to add icing to the cake, we're very pleased that ABC News Political Director Mark halperin will be joining us to lead an intimate conversation with NY Attorney General, following his keynote address.
You'll note from the schedule that we've got one additional keynoter whose name has yet to be revealed. We're saving that surprise til next week...
There are still tickets available, but don't wait til the last minute to register.
May 03, 2006
Colbert was Highly Appropriate
One of my favorite bumper-stickers says, "If You're Not Outraged, You're Not Paying Attention."
So, I actually really enjoyed Stephen Colbert's in-character performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Using his O'Reillyesque TV persona to pose as one of President Bush's dumbest but most zealous fans, Colbert managed to fire bullets again and again into the heart of all that is rotten in Washington. (You can find links to his performance here. Transcript here.) While his jabs at Bush were tough, I think this was my favorite part of his speech, when he addressed the reporters and producers in the room:
Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.
But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!
Not surprisingly, most of chattering class is now tut-tutting and saying that Colbert wasn't funny. Chris Lehmann, who I used to know back when he was writing for places like In These Times, surprised me by writing one of those disdainful articles for the New York Observer. Chris, have you been living in Washington that long?
I was glad to see, however, that my good friend David Corn had the same reaction as me. David somehow manages to live in Washington, cover it, and yet not be completely of it. His was a lonely voice back in March 2004 when Bush memorably played a tape of himself searching for weapons of mass destruction under the desk in the Oval Office, behind the copy machine, and the crowd at the Radio and Television Correspondents Association Dinner lapped it up. (You'll remember then that Bush was still relatively popular.) David wrote this then:
...an awful you're-all-alone moment came during George W. Bush's comments that followed the sit-down dinner. The current president is often the honored guest at this annual affair, and the audience toasts him in what is supposed to be a sign of communal and nonpartisan spirit. And the tradition is that the president has to be funny; he has to provide us with an amusing speech that pokes fun at himself and his political foes. After all, political journalists love to see politicians engage in self-deprecating humor. Bill Clinton was quite good at these performances. Bush seems to enjoy them less. Rather than do straight standup, he sometimes relies on a humorous slide show, and that was how he chose to entertain the media throng this time.
It's standard fare humor. Bush says he is preparing for a tough election fight; then on the large video screens a picture flashes showing him wearing a boxing robe while sitting at his desk. Bush notes he spends "a lot of time on the phone listening to our European allies." Then we see a photo of him on the phone with a finger in his ear. There were funny bits about Skull and Bones, his mother, and Dick Cheney. But at one point, Bush showed a photo of himself looking for something out a window in the Oval Office, and he said, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere."
The audience laughed. I grimaced. But that wasn't the end of it. After a few more slides, there was a shot of Bush looking under furniture in the Oval Office. "Nope," he said. "No weapons over there." More laughter. Then another picture of Bush searching in his office: "Maybe under here." Laughter again.
Disapproval must have registered upon my face, for one of my tablemates said, "Come on, David, this is funny." I wanted to reply, Over 500 Americans and literally countless Iraqis are dead because of a war that was supposedly fought to find weapons of mass destruction, and Bush is joking about it. Instead, I took a long drink of the lovely white wine that had come with our dinner. It's not as if I was in the middle of a talk-show debate and had to respond. This was certainly one of those occasions in which you either get it or don't. And I wasn't getting it. Or maybe my neighbor wasn't.
At the end of the slide show, Bush displayed two pictures of himself with troops and noted these were his favorites. The final photograph was a shot of special forces soldiers--with their faces blurred to protect their identities--who were posing in Afghanistan where they had buried a piece of 9/11 debris in a spot that had once been an al Qaeda camp. Bush spoke about the prayer the commander had said during the burial ceremony and noted he had this photograph hanging in his private study.
So what's wrong with this picture? Bush was somber about the sacrifice being made by U.S. troops overseas. But he obviously considered it fine to make fun of the reason he cited for sending Americans to war and to death. What an act of audacious spin. One poll recently showed that most Americans believe he either lied about Iraq's WMDs or deliberately exaggerated the case to justify the war. And it is undeniable that in seeking public support for the war he made many false assertions that went beyond quoting intelligence that turned out to be wrong. (I've written about this in many other places. If you still don't believe Bush mugged the truth, check out this short guide.) As the crowd was digesting the delicious surf-and-turf meal, Bush was transforming serious scandal into rim-shot comedy.
Few seemed to mind. His WMD gags did not prompt a how-can-you silence from the gathering. At the after-parties, I heard no complaints. Was I being too sensitive? I wondered what the spouse, child or parent of a soldier killed in Iraq would have felt if they had been watching C-SPAN and saw the commander-in-chief mocking the supposed justification for the war that claimed their loved ones. Bush told the nation that lives had to be sacrificed because Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that could be used (by terrorists) against the United States. That was not true. (And as Kay pointed out, the evidence so far shows these weapons were not there in the first place, not that they were hidden, destroyed or spirited away.) But rather than acknowledge he misinformed the public, Bush jokes about the absence of such weapons.
Even if Bush does not believe he lied to or misled the public, how can he make fun of the rationale for a war that has killed and maimed thousands? Imagine if Lyndon Johnson had joked about the trumped-up Gulf of Tonkin incident that he deceitfully used as a rationale for U.S. military action in Vietnam: "Who knew that fish had torpedoes?" Or if Ronald Reagan appeared at a correspondents event following the truck-bombing at the Marines barracks in Beirut--which killed over 200 American servicemen--and said, "Guess we forgot to put in a stop light." Or if Clinton had come out after the bombing of Serbia--during which U.S. bombs errantly destroyed the Chinese embassy and killed several people there--and said, "The problem is, those embassies--they all look alike."
Yet there was Bush--apparently having a laugh at his own expense, but actually doing so on the graves of thousands. This was a callous and arrogant display. For Bush, the misinformation--or disinformation--he peddled before the war was no more than material for yucks. As the audience laughed along, he smiled. The false statements (or lies) that had launched a war had become merely another punchline in the nation's capital.
People who think Stephen Colbert was somehow inappropriate disgust me. They remind me of happy Germans who didn't want to be told what was in those cattle cars rattling through their cities at night.
May 02, 2006
Third Party Time, Again?
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has a new column out, building on one that he wrote about a week ago, arguing that America is ripe for a new political party. Since he quotes me in this one, I thought maybe I should add a few comments. (Here's the link to his Times column, but they haven't made it easy to do so by sticking all their columnists behind their paywall.)
Number one, I think it would be good for American politics if we had more major party competition. In too many places, we live in one-party districts that are gerrymandered with the collusion of both major parties. And thus 98% of the House of Representatives gets re-elected year after year. Real competition in elections would create more accountability and responsiveness, I believe. So, for starters, let's have a real competitive two-party system, not a duopoly.
But on top of that, with half the electorate not bothering to vote in most elections, it's clear that there's room for more parties and more voices--if the system wasn't rigged against them. Ballot access laws discriminate against new parties, campaign finance laws hinder their development, and the media marginalizes them. All of this is unhealthy for democracy. I'm for opening up the process with things like fusion (cross-endorsement) and proportional representation.
However, even with the odds stacked against them, third parties in American politics can still play a vital role. Especially when the two major parties are failing to address a major issue or neglected constituency, a third party can force a new issue onto the table and break up entrenched political logjams. Such was the effect of Ross Perot in 1992.
Could it happen again?
Well, here are some harbingers. The latest USA Today/Gallup Poll shows that disatisfaction with the direction of the country is today at levels that echo the 1994 election that swung the House from Democratic into Republican hands. This November, that may mean big gains for the Democrats, but by 2007, if the country is experiencing more partisan gridlock, conditions might be ripe for an independent or third-party bid for president.
And, as Friedman writes, the two major parties are hardly demonstrating much leadership on the critical issues facing America, like our dependence of carbon-based fuels and the global warming crisis.
And while the tinder may be dry, new technology guarantees that a third-party fire would spread quickly. In 1991-92, remember, people sneered when maverick candidates like Jerry Brown and Ross Perot used 800-numbers to go around the mainstream media and connect directly with grass-roots volunteers. Not so today, in the Age of Connectedness.
As Jesse Ventura showed in Minnesota in 1998, under the right conditions--a relatively open media system that included him in debates, relatively generous public financing for third party candidates, and same day voter registration--a maverick third-party candidate with a strong message CAN drive a truck right up the middle of American politics and pull enough votes from both major parties to win an election.
I'd have to say the odds of that happening in a national election in America are far lower. But that said, even a 10% showing by a serious independent or third-party effort that focused on American renewal would undoubtedly shake things up in a very good way.