Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President.

• Author: Marshall, Joshua Micah
• Position: Political booknotes: later Nader

Crashing the Party, Ralph Nader's memoir of his 2000 presidential campaign, is one part travelogue and one part free-ranging jeremiad against anything and everything connected to contemporary American politics. This book is not about public policy; and it moves much more briskly than one might expect given the author's fact-dense style of public speaking. But like his campaign, the book is a thoroughly insider affair with good times and positive reinforcement to those who buy into Nader's message, contempt for those who don't, and little effort to bridge the ground between the two.

Nader kicks off the narrative describing his decision to mount a second presidential run, picks up speed as his effort gets underway and old friends pledge support. Then he pulls us through the manic narrative of a year-and-a-half-long, shoestring national campaign, thick with asides about this or that local polluting power plant and morality tales about sellout, straw-man Democrats. The mood of the book is unmistakably "onward and upward with activism." And, for those inclined to be thus inspired, that mood will likely prove inspiring. For others not under the spell, however, the mix of cliche, nostalgia, and reunion will likely have a quite different effect. For them, much of the book, particularly the first half, will have the feel and cadence of one of those early '80s TV movies where the cast of some '60s-era sitcom reassembles for one last adventure. Picture a graying Gilligan flying from city to city pitching the professor, Mary Ann, and other worthies on some quixotic quest to save the Island.

Beneath the book's color, it is impossible not to recall the depth of bitterness and mutual incomprehension that separated Nader's supporters from those on the left who opposed him. So great was this gulf that a number of Nader's arguments, however powerful to his supporters, will likely read to his opponents like he is making their own case.

Consider the following passage in which Nader ridicules the mainstream media:

"Reporters described the assemblage as a motley crowd with a grab bag of causes having no seeming connection to one another. What, pray tell, were they protesting that the media found so difficult to describe? Here's what: poverty in an era of great concentrated wealth; corporate welfare; globalization through the WTO, NAFTA, and the World Bank, corrupt money in politics; bloated military budgets; global warming and other ecological degradations...