“Your torch has been lit!” read the email I got last summer. And now my torch has guttered out! Yours too, maybe.
The email came from a political organization called Unity08. “Organization” may not be the right word. I think Unity08 had a small office somewhere, but I was never certain that it had anything like a corporeal existence. Mostly it existed in the vast, virtual world of pure possibility that we call the Internet, where an ever-increasing number of people, I’ve noticed, spend an ever-increasing portion of their lives. Unity08 was a creature of cyberspace, made up of just such people.
“Our mission is difficult,” admitted Doug Bailey, the group’s co-founder, in that introductory email. But, he said, it was readily achievable: “We will determine the crucial issues that our country must face, we will attain ballot access in all fifty states, and we will elect the next president and vice president of the United States in 2008.”
I admired Bailey’s authoritative tone, which he had evidently acquired as a former aide to President Gerald Ford, a onetime Republican political consultant, and an impossible-to-shake Washington hanger-on. A number of journalists from the nonideological media were wowed too, and when he and his colleagues–including former Maine governor Angus King and Carter administration insiders Gerald Rafshoon and Hamilton Jordan–launched their movement at a press conference in May 2006, they were showered with positive reviews and heartfelt atta-boys. Yet it was not to last. Late last Thursday night another email went out, announcing that Unity08 was shutting down. (I almost wrote “shutting its doors,” but the Internet doesn’t have doors.)
In truth there was always reason to be skeptical about Unity08’s future as a new independent political party. The idea behind it was nearly as old as our democracy itself. For as long as we’ve had two parties, someone has been trying to invent a third. It never works. But in keeping with the doe-eyed utopianism that accompanies every nonpornographic Internet enterprise, Bailey and his colleagues were certain that this time the old idea would be made new, and plausible, by virtue of being placed on the Internet. They would enlist party members online, write the platform online, and then, at last, hold a convention online, with nominees for president and vice president chosen by people sitting at home in front of their Dells.
“You’ll vote, you’ll decide,” said the Unity08 spokesman, the actor Sam Waterston, in a TV ad. “Not the consultants and spin doctors. Not the special interests. Not the lobbyists.” Just you. At home in your PJs.
The Internet wasn’t the only innovation in Unity08’s approach, or even its most important one. Third-party movements are usually born in a mood of hyper-partisanship–the feeling that, in the words of the 1968 third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties.” Unity08, by contrast, would be a new partisan entity founded in a mood of nonpartisanship. A third party was necessary because there was too much difference between the two parties: Republican and Democratic politicians were so busy appealing to their ideological soul mates in their political “base” that they had ignored the voters who were neither conservative nor liberal, or who were liberal on some things and conservative on others, or vice versa, or wishy-washy on everything. Centrists, they were called. In moving so far to their respective extremes, the parties had abandoned the precious center and thereby corrupted democracy. In an ideal world, according to Unity08, there really wouldn’t be a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties.
Unlike other party manifestos, Unity08’s manifesto declined to take positions on political issues. That would be divisive. Instead it categorized issues. There were “crucial issues”–education, the national debt, terrorism, nuclear proliferation–and merely “important issues”: gay marriage, abortion, gun control. The manifesto’s central contention was that politicians should concentrate on the crucial issues and leave the merely important issues for later. Unity08 was another one of those “single-issue” parties, in other words. But its single issue was that politicians should deal with the issues.
You don’t have to be a political scientist to predict the problems built into Unity08’s approach. Even if the party had succeeded in its mission, transcended partisanship, overcome ideology, united the American public, and placed the new agenda of crucial issues before the voters, we would still face the knotty business of figuring out what to do about, say, the national debt or nuclear proliferation. And then what? Bickering might have ensued, divisions opened up, sides would be taken–and then: partisanship. We’d be right back where we started.
Lucky for them, Unity08 never got that far, and it’s just as well; the rancor might have spoiled the idealism of Unity08’s members, who are men and women of delicate sensibilities. There aren’t a lot of them, either. By the time it shut down, Unity08’s online mailing list numbered 124,000, acquired after 18 months of lavish press coverage and ubiquitous web presence. The figure was far below the 20 million that Rafshoon had once predicted.
“It’s absolutely discouraging,” Robert Bingham, Unity08’s last CEO, told me Friday. “You can build a movement around a person, around a big idea. But around a process? That’s pretty hard.” He put on a brave front, of course, mentioning how far the presidential campaign had moved in Unity08’s direction. “Our message is starting to resonate. You can definitely see people moving toward a unity option.” As for now, he said, “we’ll close down the website, go back to the P.O. box, stop answering the phone, and see what happens.”
I asked about Bailey and Rafshoon. “They’re moving on,” Bingham said. “They’re looking at a draft Bloomberg movement.”
The dream will never die.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
