Third-Party Threat To Two-Party System

Now there have been two Waco standoffs.

One between federal agents and Branch Davidians in the spring of 1993.

One between House Democrats and Republicans in the summer of 1995.

Neither produced what you could call a winner. And if the second generated less outright public disdain than the first, it is only because the public was too disinterested, or disgusted, to pay attention.

If anything, the 10 predictable days of Waco hearings that ended Wednesday showed precisely why, as leading pollsters from both parties had reported two days earlier, Americans distrust their government more today than at any other time since such attitudes have been measured.

In a bipartisan survey conducted for Americans Talk Issues, Democrat Stanley Greenberg and Republican Fred Steeper found that three out of four Americans rarely or never trust the government to do what’s right, regardless of the party in charge.

And why should they? If they’re not offended by the excesses at Ruby Ridge and Waco, maybe they remember FBI infiltration of civil rights and anti-war groups, the CIA mining of Central American harbors, the Iran-Contra exploits of Oliver North.

And maybe they’ve noticed that when federal agencies do go overboard, the Congress that should be reining them in shows more interest in exploiting such episodes.

For two weeks House members wrangled for political advantage over the errors at Waco - Republicans to implicate the Clinton administration, Democrats to parry Republicans’ thrusts. They weren’t there to find facts; they were there to fortify the positions they’d already taken.

Yet if Greenberg and Steeper read their data correctly, the congressional players were performing to an empty house.

As Steeper put it: “This kind of discontent is a major opening for a third party.”

If so, that’s cause for worry, and not just for Democrat and Republican faithful. Third-party movements in the United States have always been a symptom of political despair. Voters who seek political responsiveness outside the mainstream are like spouses who flee troubled marriages for fulfillment in singles bars.

If the two-party system is in trouble, the threat comes not from any third party but from the two major parties themselves.

And if the opening is to be closed, if their relationship with the voters is to be salvaged, it is up to them. They could start by mastering the difference between campaigning and governing.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Doug Floyd/For the editorial board