Third-party politicians battle reputation, mainstream

Martin Kuz

Tuesday, Oct. 6, 1998 | 11:09 a.m.

Around this time of year politicians like to reassure voters that casting a ballot for their opponent is still better than casting none at all. Oh, sure. Deep down they want your support worse than Bill Clinton wants a piece of Ken Starr. But as Election Day approaches, candidates set their jaw, swallow hard and utter the venerable refrain of American democracy: A vote is a terrible thing to waste.

Permit Jim Burns to differ.

"Look, if you believe everything is hunky-dory, then by all means, vote Republican or Democrat. Of course, I'll think you're wrong, stupid and foolish," he said. "If you're voting Republican or Democrat, no, I don't think you should vote. You're wasting your vote."

With that, Burns turned loose a belly laugh that filled the Garden Cafe inside Mahoney's Silver Nugget hotel-casino, then dove back into his poached eggs and hash browns. The Libertarian candidate in Nevada's 1st Congressional District race, Burns has lively blue eyes, a mostly bald pate and a neatly trimmed white goatee. He also has zeal to burn when it comes to third-party politics.

"One of the definitions of insanity is to keep doing the same behavior and expecting different results," Burns said between bites. "If we keep voting for Democrats and Republicans and expect reform, we're insane."

Judging from the number of third-party candidates running for office this year, Nevada has sought counseling. No fewer than 31 hopefuls from the Libertarian, Independent American and Natural Law parties speckle the ballot, along with five independents.

Conventional political wisdom suggests that folks who throw their support behind a third-party candidate in essence throw their vote away. If the only result that matters is winning, that theory will hold up across the state Nov. 3. The lone exception may emerge in Assembly District 2, where Independent American Lucille Lusk has a legitimate shot to knock off incumbent Republican Merle Berman and Democrat Lynette McDonald.

But for third parties and the candidates who bear their banner, it's not whether they win or lose, it's how they play the ideological game. They march on with a kind of practical idealism, concerned less with opponents than with offering something beyond politics as usual. For them, victory occurs well before Election Day, when Democrats and Republicans desperate to prevail finally break down and nail third-party issues onto their own platforms.

"I would rather have a Republican with Libertarian stripes win than me," said Burns, who is up against Republican Don Chairez, Democrat Shelley Berkley, Independent American Jess Howe and Steven Strehlow, an independent. "If I won, I would go because it would be an honor, and I love my country. But I don't want to go to Washington. I don't like the weather."

Still there exists at least one common ingredient among the Libertarian, Independent American and Natural Law parties. Namely a shared belief that government needs to go on a diet.

As Joel Hansen, an Independent American and Las Vegas attorney making his second bid for attorney general, put it: "The federal government has become so large and so powerful and so intrusive in every aspect of our daily lives that it is taking away the liberty that is our heritage and replacing it with slavery."

The Hansen name has become one with the IAP in Nevada. The party was founded in the early 1960s by Joel's brother, Dan, a Sparks resident who has run for governor, Congress and, this year, lieutenant governor. Another brother, Chris, is gunning for Assembly District 21, and the trio's sister, Janine, serves as state treasurer of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, the IAP's national organization.

The state's largest third party with more than 16,000 members, up from a mere 300 in 1992, the IAP packs a double-barreled agenda of Christianity and the Constitution. The party's contention that the nation has strayed too far from both faith and the Founding Fathers has resonated with ex-Republicans such as Lusk.

"The Constitution of the United States was written and based upon the beliefs of the founders, who relied on the Bible," Joel Hansen said. "Biblical principles need to be reinstated in this country."

In that spirit, the party takes staunchly pro-life and anti-IRS positions, and argues that power should rest in the hands of states -- and guns in the hands of citizens. As for the federal government, the IAP's approach is not unlike packing for a business trip: less is invariably more, Lusk said.

"The Independent American Party understands that the role of government is limited to preservation of our inalienable rights: life, liberty and property. That's it," she said.

One might expect a more incendiary critique of the political status quo from a Libertarian. Enter Burns. "Who the hell is the federal government to tell us, the sovereigns, what we can do? It's none of their damn business."

The Libertarian Party, which first appeared on the Nevada ballot in the mid-1970s, boasts a statewide membership of roughly 4,700. Burns, a past state party chairman and now head of the Clark County chapter, recalled how Nevada refused to list his party affiliation on the ballot when he ran for Congress in 1976. So he officially changed his middle name to Libertarian, the better to help voters identify him.

While some Libertarians advocate outright abolition of government, most generally agree on bolstering states' rights. They argue that federal agencies from the Department of Education to the Food and Drug Administration are unconstitutional and should be supplanted by state programs. Above all, they champion individual freedoms, a point they hammer home in condemning federal drug sentencing laws.

Lewis Roesberry, a Libertarian running for Assembly District 3, summed it up this way: "If you want to gargle Drano, go ahead. I might recommend you don't do it. I might call an ambulance for you. But I don't have a right to stop you."

And certainly, no Libertarian would try to keep someone from meditating.

The Natural Law Party initially climbed aboard the Nevada ballot in 1992, the same year Transcendental Meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi founded the organization nationwide. Counting 604 members across the state, the Natural Law Party is slightly smaller than the Green Party and twice as big as the Reform Party, neither of which fielded candidates in Nevada this year.

Health-care reform props up the Natural Law Party's platform. Supporters insist the government spends too much money on treating diseases instead of pumping resources into meditation and other proven alternative-medicine programs.

Hitting the problem on the front end would reduce Medicare and other federal spending programs, thereby helping to balance the budget and shrink government, said Lois Avery, the party's chairwoman in Nevada and its candidate for secretary of state.

"With the Democrats and Republicans, it's always the same solutions, and look at the national debt they've gotten us into," she said. "We have to talk about the issues and start to look at solving things in a different way.

"Now."

Such are the respective stereotypes branded on the Independent American, Libertarian and Natural Law parties. Their collective reaction? Shrug.

"When people don't understand something they think you're a cult," said Avery, 51, who helps run her husband's consulting business in Sparks and meditates twice a day. "They think if you say 'meditation' it means religion. Transcendental Meditation is a technique, not a religion... It's just a misunderstanding, so you can't really worry about it."

There's little reason to fret in part because more voters are giving third-party candidates a listen. Fed up with the sex, lies and videotape of Clinton, disenchanted with Newt Gingrich's failed Republican revolution, people thirst for a rhetorical chaser.

"They are quite ready for something different now," said Lusk, who in 1989 helped form Nevada Concerned Citizens, a conservative advocacy group. "People are showing that they're less concerned with party labels than with principles."

A former Clark County School Board member, Lusk ran for the District 2 congressional seat in 1988 as a Republican. She defeated self-styled patriot Bo Gritz in the primary before falling to Democrat Jim Bilbray in the general election, but not long after found herself drifting away from the party. Or, rather, found the party drifting away from her.

So six years ago Lusk, 50, switched to the IAP, drawn to its dual message of less government, more faith. In her first campaign as an Independent American, Lusk has been pleasantly surprised by voters' reactions, especially among avowed Democrats and Republicans.

"I think being with another party opens doors. People are willing to listen because they don't see you as the enemy," she said.

Lusk, who favors putting proposed tax increases up to a public vote, said it also helps that third parties operating on a shoestring budget don't get tied up by special interests.

"Voters are looking for someone who resembles them," she said. "They're looking for real representation, someone who knows what it's like to live on a working man's income or a fixed income, someone who won't just be part of the old boy's club."

True, there exist a few drawbacks to ambling in from the purported political fringe. Contributions and media coverage remain as rare as a full county commission vote, and candidate forums tend to mistake third-party candidates for custodial help. Yet Hansen prefers the outsider's role to working within the two-party system, which he said has ossified into irrelevance.

"The fight between Democrats and Republicans is over the federal budget, not over ideas," said Hansen, 54, who would create a taxpayers' advocate in the attorney general's office to defend Nevada citizens against IRS abuses. "The Democrats are openly socialist, the Republicans masquerade as conservatives. There's no chance of changing them. We need a new political party to give people a choice."

And if the price of getting there means absorbing a few potshots over misperceptions, bring it on, Burns said.

"I did smoke marijuana, and I did inhale," he said, displaying the sort of candor Democrats and Republicans might dare show only to the mirror. "At least I knew how to do it."

Republicans have racked up 367,395 registered voters in Nevada compared to 363,332 Democrats. Those can be sobering figures for a third party whose monthly meetings draw smaller crowds than a couple of blackjack tables at the Las Vegas Club.

"We have the same six or 10 people show up. That's discouraging," said Roesberry, 34, who ran for Assembly two years ago and garnered barely 4 percent of the vote. "If that continues, why should I bother? It's wasting my time."

Roesberry, who would seek to shackle government's eminent domain authority, said his Republican friends have encouraged him to run on the GOP ticket next time around. The Las Vegas computer programmer even checked into switching parties earlier this year, only to find the deadline for filing the paperwork had passed.

"If people don't care, if they're not interested in the platform of the Libertarian Party, then my job's done here," Roesberry said.

Yet for the less politically ambitious, moral victories still carry far more weight than the 2 percent of the vote they may capture at the polls. Which may be a prudent mind-set considering no Nevada officeholder currently in a partisan post flashes a third-party badge.

Michael Williams has no expectations -- or desire -- to defeat his opponents in the race for U.S. Senate. The Natural Law Party candidate realizes Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, Republican challenger John Ensign and even, perhaps, Libertarian Michael Cloud will finish in front of him. He doesn't mind.

"Even if no one from the Natural Law Party ever wins a seat, at least our issues are being heard," said Williams, 49, a special education teacher at Green Valley High School. "We wouldn't be heard if we were with one of the major parties."

A graybeard of third-party struggles, Burns, 52, noted that no political entity has blossomed overnight. So he intends to keep running for office "as long as I can get up," and may even make a charge at the presidency. In the end, he figures it's better to fight and lose than compromise in silence.

"It's certainly true that the odds are long that I'll win this particular race," he said. "But there's an old saying: 'Do you light a candle or do you curse the darkness?' You do the best you can."

After all, a vote is a terrible thing to waste.

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