ABSTRACT
Jesse Ventura's victory had an unsettling effect on conventional politics. By the summer of i9997 a year before the political conventions that would select the Democratic and Republican nominees for president, the mainstream media were busily speculating about the chances of a third-party candidate entering the race. Lowell Weicker, former independent governor of Connecticut and three-term Republican senator, appeared on CNN's Crossfire and talked about the possibility of seeking the Reform Party's nomination.1 Patrick Buchanan went on Inside Politics to deny rumors that he was thinking of the same option, but as fellow Republican George W. Bush outdistanced the rest of the GOP field in fund-raising, expectations continued to rise that Buchanan would run as a third-party candidate.2 Speculation about the third-party gambit was so intense, two hundred reporters traveled in mid-July to Dearborn, Michigan, to cover the Reform Party's midterm convention, a ratio of one journalist for every two delegates.
