Of Independent Mind : The established parties seem to be increasingly irrelevant to the political process. From Ross Perot to Bill Bradley, people are saying the system is broken. Can it be fixed?

LONDON —  In 1992, Democrats made a breakthrough. They broke the Republican lock on the electoral college and won the White House for the first time in 16 years.

In 1994, Republicans made a break through. They stormed the Democrats’ power base in the House of Representatives and took control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

Will 1996 be the year Independents make a breakthrough? Events this month suggest the growing irrelevance of political parties. Political developments outside the parties were far more interesting than anything happening in them.

U.S. politics is filled with meaningless events. Campaigns agonize over them. The press chews them over--including how meaningless they are. A week later, they’re forgotten.

Case in point: straw polls.

One expert has looked at all the presidential straw polls for the last 20 years where at least a thousand people participated. Did they predict anything?

Nope. Only half the straw polls were won by the candidate who ultimately won the nomination. Straw polls weren’t even that good at predicting the eventual primary winner in the same state.

What does it take to do well in straw polls? Money helps. Many of these events, like the recent Iowa straw poll, are fund-raisers. The easiest way to win is to buy lots of tickets.

Organization helps, too. If you’ve got labor unions or teachers or churches working for you, as Democrat Walter F. Mondale did in 1984 and as a Republican Pat Robertson did in 1988, you can just bus ‘em in.

It also helps if you’re a candidate who attracts true believers. You know--the sort of people who stay till the end of meetings. In 1984, anti-nuclear liberal activists supported Democrat Alan Cranston. They helped him win a lot of straw polls. Anyone hear of President Cranston?

This year, conservative activists are helping Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) pursue a straw poll strategy. Gramm has won straw polls in South Carolina, California, Michigan, Louisiana and Arizona. And last weekend, he held front-runner Bob Dole to an embarrassing tie in the Iowa straw poll.

Straw polls create the perception of momentum. Stories in the press. Gossip among political activists. Losing candidates like to say the only poll that counts is the one on election day. All well and good, except nobody’s going to cast a real vote in a GOP primary or caucus for another six months.

So who’s got the real momentum? The only way to tell now is to look at the public-opinion polls. And what they show is, nothing has happened. The race is where it was six months ago: Dole and a bunch of other guys.

While the GOP was immersed in meaningless events, the country witnessed two serious challenges to the political process this month. First, from Ross Perot. Then from Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.). In those cases, unlike the Iowa straw poll, something meaningful was going on: a revolt of the moderates against the polarization of American politics.

Perot and Bradley have a lot in common. They share the view that politics isn’t working. In his closing remarks to the United We Stand America conference in Dallas, Perot demanded a wholesale reform of the U.S. political process--election reforms, campaign finance reforms, lobbying reforms. Bradley explained his impending retirement from the Senate with the observation, “We live in a time when, on a basic level, politics is broken.”

Perot and Bradley are known for their determination to tackle big issues--the deficit in Perot’s case, tax reform in Bradley’s. And for their willingness to take on big targets, like the President and both major parties. “Republicans are infatuated with the magic of the private sector and reflexively criticize government as the enemy of freedom,” Bradley said in his statement. “Democrats distrust the market, preach government as the answer to our problems and prefer the bureaucrats they know to the consumer they can’t control.”

Bradley immediately turned himself into the thinking man’s Perot when he added, “I am leaving the Senate but I am not leaving public life . . . . I have not ruled out an Independent route.”

There’s a big constituency in American politics for a responsible, nonpartisan political leader. Right now, a majority of voters say they would be dissatisfied with a choice between Bill Clinton and Dole. Next year’s political calendar gives that constituency a chance to take the stage.

With the 1996 primaries so front-loaded, we’ll probably know who the nominees are before the end of March. Then begins the season of our discontent--the five-month period between primaries and conventions when the voters get restless.

Clinton won the Democratic nomination on April 7, 1992, in New York. That day, the choice became clear--Clinton or Bush. “That’s the choice?” voters said. “Bring on more candidates.” So a third candidate, Perot, started moving up in the polls. By June, he was the front-runner.

Perot and Bradley may have similar messages, but the two differ enormously in style. Perot is the billionaire populist who goes out of his way to simplify issues (“It’s just that simple, see?”). Bradley is the sports star-Rhodes scholar whose approach is serious, cerebral and anything but populist.

Asked to explain the ailments affecting U.S. politics, Bradley said, “Think of American civilization as a three-legged stool. One leg is government, one leg is the market and one leg is what I call civil society.” It’s not easy to follow a statement like that with a balloon drop.

Bradley is an upscale Perot. Same complaint, but more complex and subtle answers. Can anyone put the two constituencies together?

Both parties have moderates who, like Bradley, feel increasingly shut out. Interestingly, most come from the Northeast.

Former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas was the thinking man’s candidate in 1992. He spoke for upscale, moderate Democrats who didn’t like Clinton’s crude populism (“I am not running for Santa Claus”).

A former Republican senator, Lowell P. Weicker Jr. of Connecticut, left the GOP because it moved too far to the right. He got elected governor as an Independent. And he may have bigger plans.

Two other so-called “Volvo Republicans”--Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld and New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman--have acquired a following within the GOP. But their national aspirations may be blocked by the party’s ascendant conservatives. Their views on the social issues are not politically correct.

Weld, Whitman, Weicker and Tsongas all speak for affluent suburban voters who are looking for fiscal responsibility and tolerant social policies. They hate partisanship. They hate pandering. They want thoughtful, substantive leadership.

Bradley’s got the words. He’s looking for the music. As he put it at his news conference, “I’m very much now in a jazz combo, and you don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

How about Perot and Bradley as a combo? Doesn’t sound too harmonious.

But Colin L. Powell and Bradley might make beautiful music together. Powell brings excitement. Bradley brings substance. Powell brings world stature. Bradley brings domestic policy expertise. Two men with a record of service to both parties. Two vivid biographies. And two races.

Could Powell and Bradley be the American dream ticket? Could they finish what Perot started in 1992 and break the mold of U.S. politics? It’s a tantalizing prospect.

The British have had experience with a revolt of the moderates. In 1981, a group of thoughtful, moderate politicians quit the Labor Party, saying it had moved too far left. They formed a new political party, now called the Liberal Democrats.

Did they have any impact? Yes and no.

They never won a majority. In fact, they split the anti-Conservative vote and helped keep Margaret Thatcher and John Major in power for 16 years now.

In the 1983 general election, the third party got almost as many votes as the Labor Party: Conservatives 42%, Labor 28%, third party 25%. But look at what’s happened since. In the 1987 election, the Conservative vote stayed the same (42%). But as the Labor Party started to move to the center, its vote started to go up (32%) and the third party vote went down (23%). The process continued in 1992. Conservatives constant, 42%. Labor up, 35%. Third party down, 18%.

Right now, a new young leader, Tony Blair, is moving Labor farther and farther from the left. And Labor’s now leading the Conservatives by 30 points.

Britain’s third party never succeeded in winning. But it did succeed in turning the Labor Party into a more moderate--and more electable--opposition. It helped pull politics back to the center.

That’s not nothing. In the United States right now, where millions of Americans are weary of incessant partisan warfare, it could be a great deal.

Watch what happens next month, when there could be two big news stories. One: the so-called “train wreck” in Washington, as the Democratic President and the Republican Congress reach an impasse over the budget and force the federal government into a temporary shut down. Two: Powell’s book tour. The former general’s celebrity peaks in the national media, as millions of Americans cry out for someone to save them from the political wreckage in Washington.