The party’s not over

One of the advantages President Bush had as a candidate for president in 2000 was the formidable third-party candidacy of Ralph Nader as the Green Party candidate to the left of Al Gore. Nader attracted nearly 3 percent of the vote and almost certainly affected the outcome of the election. Will the Green Party run a serious candidate for president again in 2000, or endorse the Democratic nominee? Today’s Washington Post carries an interesting story on the deliberations underway on this issue: “Greens consider standing behind Democratic nominee in ’04.”
In the spring issue of my favorite magazine — the Claremont Review of Books — Professor Andrew Busch of the University of Denver has an excellent review of Nader’s account of his 2000 candidacy, Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run For President. Professor Busch’s review is “Going south.”
For an upcoming issue the Review sent me a book to review that I would never have looked at otherwise, Micah Sifry’s Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America, which has just been published in paperback. Here I want to consider the book briefly.
The resilience of America