Brent Colton is a retired CIA operations officer now in the employ of the Creighton Corporation, a privately owned think tank that advocates various opinions on world issues, but it’s his clandestine job to solve the dirty problems for their private clients for a million dollar fee with no questions asked. When recovering stolen technology from a Vietnamese industrialist, Colton obtains evidence that he secretly partnered with a U.S. Senatorto rig the recent presidential election and elect him to the nation’s highest office.

THE LEGACY OF MILLARD FILLMORE
by Terry Heath, 2005

Poor Millard Fillmore. He has to be the Rodney Dangerfield of U.S. Presidents because he gets no respect from historians on his legacy as one of our nation’s leaders as the so-called political experts always rate him at or near the bottom of successful chief executives. That is an unfair remembrance of the man because he showed that is was possible to run for high office as a third party candidate and affect the outcome of an election, even if it actually does not go the way you want it. So if the citizens of this country ever want to take back the destiny of the government from the hack politicians and the two political parties who currently monopolize Washington then we need to learn about the contributions of our nation’s thirteenth president and where we could improve on what he attempted and other third party candidates such as Theodore Roosevelt, Ross Perot and Ralph Nader have tried in the decades since.

The problem with most Americans is that they know so little about American history and how you can learn from it. Ask any ten American adults who Millard Fillmore was and at best you might get a hesitant response from maybe one of them that you would speaking of the comic strip character ‘Mallard Fillmore’ that is syndicated in newspapers across the country.

Millard Fillmore was this country’s thirteenth chief executive and our nation’s second ‘accidental president.’ He assumed the office upon the death of Zachary Taylor in July, 1850 who had been elected as the Whig Party’s presidential nominee in 1848. What? You’ve never heard the political cries of ‘let’s vote for the Whigs!’

The Whig Party was started in 1834 by Henry Clay in opposition to Andrew Jackson’s reign as president and was a political force until the mid-1850’s. They only managed to get two presidents elected, William Harrison and Zachary Taylor, both popular former military generals and ironically, the first two men to die in office, allowing their vice-presidents to assume high office. The Whigs were an alternative to the newly created Andrew Jackson backed Democratic Party but it’s a stretch at best to say they were the forerunners of today’s Republican Party, which replaced them as the other main American political party in 1856.

Fillmore’s three years as chief executive upon taking office were considered controversial as he tried to govern while dealing with numerous extremist political factions, all seeking to ensure their positions become the law of the land, with his approval of the 1850 Compromise that prevented the south from embarking on a civil war a decade earlier than it really did as his most famous, or infamous, legacy.

He was not nominated for re-election by the Whig Party in 1852 and left office in March of 1853 in obscurity. But his thoughts of returning to the White House in triumph had not ended and in 1856 became the presidential nominee on the American (Know-Nothing) Party. Who were the Know-Nothings?

Although today’s voters would describe Know-Nothings as the politicians we are stuck with at present, they were an offshoot of the Whig Party that had become fragmented in the mid-1850’s following the death of party leaders Henry Clay and Daniel Webster and had split into several factions, including one group who were calling themselves Republicans and would nominate a former Illinois Whig congressman named Abraham Lincoln as their candidate for presidency in 1860.

But the members of the Know-Nothing Party in 1856 were campaigning on a pro-American, pro-unity platform that was trying to keep the union of states together at all costs and willing to let those states in the south to continue the practice of slavery as long as they remained in the union. For this, Fillmore and those in his party get ostracized by historians even though they were trying to delay a civil war between the north and south for as long as possible.

Admittedly, many members of the movement were anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, and were also politically corrupt but so was much of the population of America at that time as they were fearful of the massive amount of immigrants arriving from Ireland, Germany and other European countries during the 1840’s and ‘50’s.

Fillmore ran a credible campaign and ended up with 21 percent of the vote but only won one state, Maryland, and eight electoral college votes. Yet one could argue that he took enough votes from Republican anti-slavery candidate John Fremont and allowed Democrat James Buchanan to win, enabling Buchanan to rule as president and delayed the Civil War during his single term of four years that ended in March, 1861, some five weeks before war finally did break out.

How does all of this history correspond to events taking place today? We have a large segment of the voting populace who feel disenfranchised by the two major political parties and believe a third, truly independent party is the only way to ensure their voices can be heard. Unfortunately, in our current political structure, the odds of a credible third political party winning is a long shot at best and has never happened in the fifty-five presidential elections held since 1788 although it has had some effect in the races of 1844, 1856, 1912, 1924, 1948, 1968, 1992 and 1996 and modified how the winning candidate of that race ruled as our leader.

Let’s flash forward to 1992 where a disgruntled segment of the voting population who are irritated with the antics of Washington, and of the elite of both the Republican and Democratic Parties, start their own political movement with billionaire computer software maker Ross Perot as their presidential nominee.

The forming of the Reform Party gave hope to millions dissatisfied with the current political structure but Perot’s personal actions of welcoming the support, then quitting and re-entering the race that year, seemed to indicate he had no desire of winning, just hoping that George H.W. Bush would not get a second term. But his eventual return ensured that Bush lost and put Democrat Bill Clinton in the White House. Perot pulled in 19 percent of the vote, the best tally for a third party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt got 27 percent of the vote on his Progressive Party ticket in 1912.

Perot ran again in 1996 for the Reform Party and this time only got eight percent of the vote, which meant that the eleven million voters abandoned him and returned to chose between either of the main party candidates. Then conservative talk show host Pat Buchanan bolted from the Republican Party in 2000 and obtained the Reform Party nomination but he only received 400,000 votes nationwide, even less than what Green Party candidate Ralph Nader obtained, effectively killing off the Reform Party movement.

Where does this leave voters who are unhappy with the present political positions of the Republicans and Democrats? Not much of an alternative unless a true third party with a unique vision of America can get mainstream media and financial support which, at this time, seems unlikely. It will take a serious group of citizens intent on truly solving the problems of the nation and not being lackeys for big-business interests willing to give campaign contributions to a particular side for political considerations if a third party will ever be truly successful as a voice for those who feel left out of the two-party system and make a difference in 21st Century America.

Terry Heath California E-Mail readermail@terryheathbooks.com