SEWARD, Alaska, May 10 (UPI) -- If you haven't been exclusively watching Seinfeld, Drew Carey, and Third Rock re-runs, it might have come to your attention that last week there was an election for President of France.
This election had been big news in Europe. How big? The European media have covered this story like Americans have covered the arrest for murder of actor Robert Blake. That big.
To review the bidding, the French have been governed for the past five years by a coalition of Chirac on the right and Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. Jospin was on the ballot in the first round, but came in a close third to Le Pen. Under French rules only the top two candidates make it into the run-off yesterday so Jospin was out.
Chirac got slightly less than 20 percent of the vote in the first round on April 21. Le Pen got about 17 percent in that round. The total left wing vote was about 44 percent but, because it was so splintered they could not put Jospin or any other of their candidates into the run off. Jospin's Socialist Party got only 16.18 percent of the vote with the rest split among the hard left parties including the Communists, the Socialists, the Trotskyists, and the Greens (who are never, it seems, described in terms reserved for the "Ultra-Right-Wing" Le Pen by the European press).
This splintering of the French vote on April 21 contains important lessons for the U.S. political process.
There is a tide of thought running through the American liberal intelligentsia that weakening both the Republican and Democratic parties will prove beneficial to U.S. democracy. In the modern American style of politics the two major parties each contain members representing the political continuum ranging from moderate to far left in the Democratic Party, and from moderate to far right in the Republican Party.
When I came back to Washington after my hiatus from politics, I met with an associate of former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, D-Mass. I asked him how O'Neill spent his day. His answer surprised me: "Managing the coalition," he said. The Democrats had an enormous advantage in numbers but it included very conservative Southern Democrats and very liberal Northeastern Democrats.
If your political party has a membership of 12 people, then it is pretty easy to get everyone to sing the same words almost all of the time. But if your party wakes up one day and finds itself as the majority party then it is likely it will contain members who don't agree with each other all the time -- or very often.
The current French model of politics calls for anyone disagreeing with someone else within a political party to split off an form a new party; one which will welcome only members who swear allegiance to every semi-colon of its manifesto. But on April 21, this resulted in the multi-party left seeing their votes fragmented into useless splinters.
In the United States, this happens only occasionally. Reform Party candidate H. Ross Perot siphoned off votes on the right from Republican George Herbert Walker Bush in the election of 1992. Ralph Nader drained off votes from Democrat Al Gore in 2000.
In U.S. politics, the trick has always been to "manage the coalition." Sometimes the left carped at Clinton's policies -- notably on the issue of welfare reform. But they voted for the Democratic ticket on Election Day.
The right makes news now and again complaining about current President George W. Bush's policies -- immigration and education come to mind -- but most of them vote for the Republican ticket.
President Chirac won the run-off with 82 percent of the vote. Le Pen, who was counting on a 30 percent showing, did not get it. He could not even reach the 20 percent benchmark.
The European media is heaving a huge sigh of relief that Le Pen was stopped. There has been, however, nothing in the US press which indicates that the key lesson was learned: "Managing the coalition" may be difficult, but it is essential. Great countries are best led by those who can articulate great themes.
(Rich Galen, a former congressional communications staffer, is the editor and publisher of the MULLINGS.com cyber-newsletter from which this column is taken.)
