The Fifth Horseman

Perot or no, proponents of the lesser evil theory of politics will spend the next seven months attempting to rally the troops round Clinton, but there's no denying the element of poetic justice in the fate Cobble outlines. Then, too, there are scant grounds for claiming that Clinton is the lesser evil. He and Dole are as much ideological soul mates as any presidential combatants in memory. Despite what the Christian Coalition may want to believe about their new standard-bearer, Dole is as canny an accommodationist as the incumbent; he'll screw Ralph Reed before he'll stray from the middle of the road.

The lesser evil is an entirely fatuous notion at this point. Bring on Perot, I say. He'll enliven the debate and put a few more flesh wounds in the two-party corpus. The alternative is a Clinton/Dole race whose only drama would lie in seeing how many voters the two of them in tandem could drive from the ballot box altogether.