A Recipe For 3rd Party Victory

Dick Meyer's 5-Part Plan To Crash The Parties In 2008

(CBS)  The Academy would be a traditional think tank, but for the Independents, policy formation would be decentralized. The more important role would be the training of candidates and campaign workers for the fall of 2008 and conducting massive research and development about ways to communicate with citizens that are better than 30-second television ads, staged debates and creepy, farcical conventions.

At Stage 4, the Independents would announce a slate of very high profile Senate candidates. This would show the country that this is unlike any other third party movement in modern times. The Senate candidates would provide not just a network of surrogates and organization, but a true intellectual community. It would also demonstrate that when Bloomberg wins, he will be able to govern.

The basic slate is in good shape, though recruitment continues. (And if you don't find some of these names irritating, I won't have done this right.) In Arkansas, Wes Clark would take on Democrat Mark Pryor. Benjamin Franklin biographer Walter Isaacson, who was managing editor of Time magazine and CEO of CNN, would oust Mary Landrieu in his native Louisiana.

Tim Penny, a former congressman, articulate deficit hawk and published Washington-basher, lost an independent bid for governor but would succeed in dumping Minnesota's Norm Coleman in '08. The Other Michael Moore – the handsome former attorney general of Mississippi who led the legal charge against Big Tobacco – will take on Thad Cochran if he dares to run again, which he won't.

In New Jersey, Amy Gutmann, a well-known political philosopher who now runs the University of Pennsylvania (but has Harvard and Princeton roots) would run for what is certain to be an open seat.

In Rhode Island, Brown University's dynamic president Ruth Simmons could take the seat from Democrat Jack Reed. A former independent governor of Maine, Angus King, will take his expertise to the Senate.

John Warner will probably retire in Virginia; but if he doesn't, John Lehman, who showed some spunk investigating 9/11, will take his seat from under him.

And in Massachusetts, John Kerry's seat will go to the fabulously controversial Larry Summers, freshly dumped from Harvard. Even more feisty, Carly Fiorina will finally make her political splash with a run in the state she was born in - Texas.

After Bloomberg wins, Nebraska's Chuck Hagel will cross the stupid aisle and become an Independent, along with Joe Lieberman, Olympia Snowe and Jim Webb - who would defeat Virginia's George Allen this November.

The Independent Party's final step will be to recruit as wide and talented a crop of House candidates as possible. I am morally convinced there is a huge population of talented, community-oriented people in their 30s and 40s who have been successful in business, journalism, education, science and philanthropy and who would like to be in government — but who think, like you do, that the current process is repulsive. There's a good one in every district.

The Independent Party will have no platform to later ignore or make a mockery of. It will have something far more important: a recognizable political sensibility shared by a sensible, non-polarized majority of voters who actually have very good b.s. detectors.

The new party's pragmatism will be:

hostile to budget deficits and billing our debts to our children;

conservative when it comes to conserving and preserving the environment, safety, communities and social traditions;

intolerant of not solving solvable, manmade problems like the lack of health care insurance and pensions;

defensive, wary, not cocky, not very intellectual and sometimes humanitarian in its foreign policy;

belligerent toward the custom of making hot button side issues (gay marriage, flag-burning, partial birth abortion, arts funding, a Spanish national anthem) the main issues; and

intolerant of the practice of paying crooks with taxpayer dollars.


So the way I see it, as H. Ross Perot used to say, "Problem solved." Five steps, 1,200 words and we've got a party.

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Dick Meyer is the Editorial Director of CBSNews.com.

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Against the Grain. We will publish some of the interesting (and civil) ones, sometimes in edited form.

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