John Anderson Breaks Away

He makes it a three-way race by saying he will run on his own

For months he had been presenting himself as the lonely independent, the thinking man's candidate, voicing unorthodox ideas that defy easy liberal-conservative classification. Last week John Bayard Anderson, 58, pushed his political heresy to the extreme by taking on the two-party system itself. His thick shock of white hair glistening under TV lights, the Congressman from Rockford, Ill., announced that he was abandoning the race for the Republican nomination and would run for the White House as an independent. His mellifluous orator's voice slowing for emphasis, he asserted: "I am confident the legal obstacles can be overcome and that indeed I will remain as an independent candidate through Election Day."

By breaking away, Anderson turned the 1980 campaign into an exercise of total unpredictability. As he well knows, he has only the slimmest chance of winning the presidency. Just getting on the ballot will require him to wage a long guerrilla campaign through a swamp of bewilderingly complex state election laws, and he will get no federal cash because he is not running as a party man. Historically, voters regard an independent candidacy as hopeless and make their choice between the major-party nominees.

Still, Anderson's candidacy has more potential for disrupting the established order of politics than any event since 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt bolted the Republicans and ran as a Bull Moose. For good reason, leaders of both parties genuinely fear Anderson. He is running in what he has called a "crazy" year, one in which the Democrats and Republicans seem about to nominate candidates so unpopular that more than half the potential voters have been telling pollsters they wish there were another choice. In his announcement press conference, Anderson neatly capsulized their dilemma by calling Jimmy Carter a President who "has demonstrated a total inability to chart a clear, common-sense policy," and Ronald Reagan a candidate who seems "largely wedded to the past."

At present, polls show only some 20% of the voters choosing Anderson in a three-way race, but he has the potential to draw more. About 35% of the nation's voters now consider themselves independents. What is more, 65% of the people queried for TIME by Yankelovich, Skelly & White Inc. rated Anderson "acceptable" as a potential President, vs. 69% for Carter and 63% for Reagan. But even if Anderson's support slips, a figure much lower than 20% could tip the balance in many states. In 1976 Eugene McCarthy, running as an independent, won only .9% of the vote nationally, but nonetheless took enough votes away from Jimmy Carter to cost him four closely contested states. Carter strategists figure that if McCarthy had got on the ballot in New York, he would have tipped the whole election to Gerald Ford.

The big question is which of the two party candidates Anderson will hurt the most. The standard assumption has been that Anderson would injure Carter more grievously than Reagan by providing a rallying point for the disgruntled liberals who are now backing Ted Kennedy. In the campaign, Carter Democrats will hammer endlessly on the theme that "a vote for Anderson is a vote for Reagan."

Anderson points out that polls now show him drawing votes about equally from both candidates. Indeed, some Republicans fear that Anderson will damage their candidate more, splitting a potentially huge anti-Carter vote. Richard Wirthlin, a Reagan pollster, says that figuring the odds with Anderson in the race "is like playing chess and having the board disrupted, with all the pieces coming down differently."

If Anderson could actually win a few states, he could throw the election into the House of Representatives, which must choose a President if no candidate receives a majority of electoral votes. Each state delegation has one vote, and the election would be conducted not by the present House, in which Democrats outnumber Republicans in most delegations, but by the new House to be elected Nov. 4.

The U.S. has rarely seen a presidential candidate like John Anderson, who seems more interested in ideas than in power. His speeches, delivered with the moralistic fervor that led one congressional colleague to dub him "St. John the Righteous," are closely reasoned talks devoid of applause lines; audiences usually listen to them in deep, attentive silence.

His ideas are an eclectic, provocative mix of right and left. On economics, Anderson is, in his own word, "orthodox": he is for a balanced budget and severe restrictions on federal spending. Among other things, he would save $3.5 billion by slowing the growth of Social Security benefits, a step that many economists think necessary to curb inflation but that makes the beneficiaries apoplectic. On energy, Anderson decries U.S. dependence on foreign oil as a "vile and ruthless enemy" that must be slain by slapping a 50-c--per-gal. tax on gasoline to discourage unnecessary driving; he would use the proceeds to cut Social Security taxes in half.

On foreign policy, Anderson sarcastically accuses Reagan of "hunkering down for a long, twilight struggle against 'atheistic, godless Communism.' ' The Congressman takes stands that are anathema to sturdy Republicans, e.g., he favors SALT II and supported the Panama Canal treaties. On social issues, Anderson leans left, speaking up for the Equal Rights Amendment, federal financing of abortions for poor women and gay rights.

All that makes a strange platform. But Anderson thinks the public is hungry for unconventional leadership. With characteristic confidence he declares: "I am strongly led to believe that this may be an optimum climate in which a new voice sounding these themes would be listened to, and there would be a response."

Anderson's outspoken stands have won the admiration of voters turned off by traditional politicians. Indeed, aided by affectionate raillery in the Doonesbury comic strip and his own appearances on Saturday Night Live, he has become a cult figure on campuses and with show-biz liberals. That is the strangest irony of all, because Anderson is just about the reverse of a trendy personality.

He is, in fact, a man of formal, though gracious, manners and of considerable reserve. He is, for example, a born-again Christian, but many of his followers do not know it; he is exceedingly reluctant to discuss his faith. His humor runs to self-deprecating remarks delivered in a deliberately overblown, ornate style. Told last week that he seemed a bit tense on returning from a brief Florida holiday, he harrumphed: "I have not for a few days imbibed the excitement of the campaign trail, where the cheering multitudes tend to enhance your self-esteem."

Anderson really only unbends with his family, Wife Keke and five children ages eight to 26. Keke cheerfully admits that she conned Anderson into marrying her. Anderson, then a young lawyer with the Foreign Service in West Berlin, had met her when, as a State Department photographer, she took his picture before he went overseas. He began writing regularly but said nothing about marriage. Keke eventually wrote that she was about to marry someone else, which was not true. Says she now: "It was a little innocent blackmail." Anderson cabled, KEKE WOULD YOU STILL COME TO ME? Shewired back, DARLING INTERPRET WORDS AS PROPOSAL, and asked him to sendmoney. He did. Keke today is an ebullient woman of 48 who pinches and flirts with Anderson, advises him on everything from how to comb his hair to political strategy--she really persuaded him to run --and works crowds on her own. "I'm the humanizing element in this campaign," she says.

Once thoroughly married to Keke, Anderson followed a standard route into politics: law practice, state's attorney in Illinois, Congressman from the state's 16th District centered in his home town of Rockford. He started as a hard-line conservative; in 1966 he got a rating of zero from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. He started to change in 1968, after the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. shocked him into a realization of the depth of social turmoil in the U.S. He won votes for an open-housing bill with a ringing oration that veteran colleagues still remember with awe.

Thereafter Anderson moved to the left as his party--and the country --moved right. Though he rose to become chairman of the House Republican Conference, he became increasingly isolated, obliged to fight off conservative attempts to dislodge him from his leadership position and to defeat him in primaries in his home district. Concluding that there was no future for him in the House, he decided to see if there was still room for him in the party by running for the presidential nomination. He rocketed to public attention by taking provocative positions in a TV debate with his rivals in Iowa in January, and almost won the primaries in Massachusetts and Vermont. But shattering losses in Illinois and Wisconsin convinced him he had no hope of getting the G.O.P. nomination, and brought him last week to his independent candidacy and his intimidating challenges.

Getting on the ballot is the first. Anderson must meet widely differing but generally forbidding signature requirements under state laws that are stacked against candidates from outside the Democratic-Republican establishment. With hard work, Anderson has some chance of getting on the ballots in 44 states and the District of Columbia and is thinking of suing to get on the ballots in at least two of the six states where the filing deadlines have passed. His legal argument presumably would be that the filing requirements are arbitrary.

The Democratic and Republican nominees will each receive $29.4 million for the fall campaigns; Anderson will not get a cent. However, he may not need any help. Anderson has demonstrated a remarkable ability to collect money in direct-mail appeals to cause-oriented donors, and figures he can raise $10 million to $12 million. That would finance a respectable but limited campaign.

Perhaps the biggest problem is strategy. Anderson has won a core of devoted followers, but it is limited, consisting largely of white-collar workers and well-educated suburbanites who worry about whales, pollution and consumerism. He will be heavily tempted to turn to left-liberal groups who supply eager donors and doorbell ringers, but that could stamp his campaign with an elitist label that could be fatal. Anderson knows he must broaden his appeal to blacks, blue-collar workers, white ethnic groups, but is only now mulling over how to do so. His national unity theme, seeking to win votes from Democrats, Republicans and independents, has landed him in a chicken-and-egg situation. To broaden his appeal, he needs a respected Democrat or centrist Republican as a vice-presidential running mate, but to attract one he probably must demonstrate a broad appeal.

The gravest question that Anderson has raised is about the future of the two-party system. Millions of voters feel disfranchised under that system, and Anderson, as a forceful and intelligent candidate who could not find a voice in it despite 20 years of faithful party service, will deepen that disillusionment. His race will probably draw the ferocious antagonism of politicians who depend on identification as Democrats or Republicans for success. Anderson has raised an implicit threat to their survival as he challenges the system in this singular campaign. -

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