Two party system - 5 June 1992

Well, not in my time and not so far as I can gather from the history books and the memoir, not for a 135 years has this country found itself facing the collapse or the by-passing of the two-party system. This is a turn in the idea of American government and politics, which had honestly not occurred to anybody five, six months ago. Suppose at some point in the last British election, halfway through the campaigning there appeared a man who not only boasted that he wasn't a Conservative, wasn't a Labour man, had no intention of being either because he believed they'd had their day and Britain needed something very grand and very vague like a little man on a white horse who was ready to ignore Mr Major and Mr Kinnock in the legions of their colleagues and supporters and lead Britain on to new ground.

And suppose you discovered before the election – while the two political parties were joking about this upstart – the national polls came out and you found that just under a third of the voters would vote Conservative and just under a third would vote Labour, but everywhere a little more than a third for the same independent little guy on the white horse and his popularity and voter support went on surging. The only way he could win would be to woo large numbers of Conservatives and Labourites away from their own party. So that every veteran politician, every expert would simply not believe his eyes and ears when a distinguished former Labour cabinet minister and then a distinguished former Conservative cabinet minister defected from their parties and went to work for the third man. And at that moment, both the prime minister and the opposition leader agreed that the third man was no joke – that the traditional parliamentary system was being challenged as at no time since Cromwell and they'd better do something to give themselves a new face and a new character and recover the defecting millions.

Something very like that has happened in the past three months in America. Mr Perot has just taken on Jimmy Carter's successful campaign manager in 1976 and the successful deviser of Mr Reagan's 1984 landslide and we're all dazed and puzzled in the smoke and fire of it. I suspect my use of that image – smoke and fire – was an unconscious recognition that one recent event more than any happening on the political calendar marked the decisive turning point, the day when many millions of restless voters dissatisfied with their parties leader unhappy about Governor Clinton, disillusioned in President Bush, upped and said "no more, the heck with it" and declared themselves for the new the third man and that event was 30 April, the night of fire and smoke and brutality and looting, what has more correctly been called not the Los Angeles riot, but the Los Angeles rebellion.

One political writer has gone so far as to say that the last of the primaries the Californian primary took place not last Tuesday but on that dreadful night of 30 April. I don't know if that's going too far, but one little statistics has come creeping out from Orange County, California and is an astonishment to anybody who knows California politics.

Orange Country just south of Los Angeles County is, year in and year out, just about the most conservative county in the west. The surprising word from Orange County is that after the 30 April, many old Republicans came out to demand that the plight of the inner cities must be met with new and radical policies and last Tuesday many of them deserted President Bush, for the first time in their lives not voting Republican, and came out for Mr Perot.

Now without California, President Bush had already got from the other primaries more than enough delegates pledged to vote for him at the Republican Convention, so only some totally unforeseen revolt on the floor of the convention can deny him his parties nomination, the same with Governor Clinton who last Tuesday morning fell short of the number 2,145 delegates he needed to be sure of the Democrats nomination, but by Tuesday evening the primary results from New Jersey, Ohio and Alabama clinched it for him. Even before California was announced Mr Clinton had more than 2,200. Hooray, time for rejoicing and the singing of birds, right. Not at all. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Wednesday morning's headlines was not Clinton Triumphant or It's Bush Versus Clinton In November, but Perot Maintains Surge and Perot On His Way.

But wait a minute, I can hear knowledgeable people say the man that time calls little, wiry, jug-eared Ross Perot was not on the ballot in California or anywhere else for that matter, on the primary ballots that is. He has said he will run for president in November if enough petitions come from everyone of the 50 states to put him on the election ballot in November and there looks like every chance of he's doing it, but again how could he surge ahead if he was not on the ballot to be voted for? Let's take California. In the Republican primary, Mr Bush got 66% of his party's vote, a handsome endorsement you might say, but these days – for many years in fact – we've had another gauge of popular feeling in the so-called exit poll, people tapped as they left the polling booth. Take a statistical sample of them, feed it into a computer, project it for the entire voting population and you get surprising results.

Bush then, the Republicans gave him 66% of the vote, but now in the exit poll, people were asked to say how they would have voted if they'd had a choice between President Bush and Mr Ross Perot. Result, 42% for Bush, 46% for Perot.

Democratic primary California, Clinton took only 42% against an anonymous field and write-ins, but how do you vote if Mr Perot had been on the Democratic ballot. Result, Clinton 31%, Perot 33%. Now those are the results of the final last Tuesday's primaries, but the posters and head-counters have been busy since the incredible emergence of Mr Perot testing the whole country on the supposition that in November there would be three big names on the ballots, Bush, Clinton and Perot and the results so far give Mr Perot the edge over the two regular nominees.

So after the California exit polls had been published, even Mr Bush went on the tube to say that Mr Perot was a serious contender and he, George Bush, was going to roll up his sleeves and fight his way back to the White House in every voting precinct in the United States, are so!

On Wednesday, Mr Bush announced he would do something he hasn't done for quite a time, hold a formal – I mean ceremonial – press conference on Thursday evening in the East Room of the White House, which used to be the scarlet and gold theatre for Mr Reagan. When the president of the United States decides to hold a press conference in the evening, he routinely just normally asks the three big television networks to set aside a half-hour, automatically they respond "Yes sir, of course, Mr President". Not this time. The three networks turned him down agreeing that his conference in prime time would represent more of a political appearance than a presidential news event. I don't remember a president ever being slighted in that way. That the networks would dare to do this, it's just another symptom of the popular dissatisfaction with the chosen candidates, but more than that, the general disillusion with the whole process, the exhausting rhetorical mechanical primary system and more than anything a new disenchantment with the two ancient parties the Republicans and the Democrats.

You know they haven't been there for ever and it doesn't take a long slow heaving revolution to change a political system once for all. The present Republican Party grew in something like six months in 1854; it was a growing coalition of people from other parties who were shocked by an act of Congress that opened up the new western states to slavery. The anti-slavery people in the north and west joined and two years later put up their own candidate for president and called him a Republican. He lost, but four years after that, Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican president.

What seems to be happening now is an equally powerful and nationwide – what's the word? – disillusion, impatience, deep weariness with both of the traditional parties and a general spontaneous turning to something, somebody new who promises bold new leadership and nothing much else so far. True in the past, third party or independent candidates have at this stage been a threat and made a great stir, but starting with the La Follette in Wisconsin at the turn of the century and going on through Upton Sinclair in the 1920s, Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party in the late '40s, George Wallace the little bantam cock from Alabama. In the late '60s, the ernest, decent John Anderson only eight years ago, their candidacies made a great stir in the cradle but by the November election their percentage of the vote was never more than seven, eight, I believe 10% was the most.

The disturbing difference about Ross Perot is that in every state where there's been a poll imagining a three-way race in November, Perot either runs neck-and-neck with Bush and Clinton or edges them both out. This rings an alarm bell in both parties. The Democrats have never recovered from the break-up by Eisenhower and then Nixon of Roosevelt's New Deal coalition, labour, immigrants, the cities, the rural South and now perhaps Perot could once and for all break up the Reagan/Bush coailtion, the reformed Republican South, the born again Christians, the conservative oldsters, new young conservatives and the split labour vote. Perot might just do that, it's something quite new and for the two ancient parties rather dreadful to contemplate.

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