The Best Show in Town: The Epic Battle for the 2000 Reform Party Presidential Nomination Paperback – October 26, 2021

The 2000 presidential campaign of the Reform Party seems an unlikely topic for a historical review. Many of us remember highlights of the Republican/Democrat opponent’s campaign that year. However Couturier has chosen to detail the rancorous and rowdy campaign of the third party. I started the short book (99 pages) with some misgivings. However, quite soon I was caught up in the machinations of the major parties and how they pretty much managed to dismember the Reform Party. Given some of the main actors such as Pat Buchanan, Donald Trump, Roger Stone, and cameos by Ross Perot, the destruction was inevitable.In his epilogue, Couturier goes into some detail on how the events of that 2000 battle set the stage for the 2016 campaign. I believe that those events sowed the seeds of much of the discord and attack politics we see in 2021. Perhaps if we study more details of past campaigns, we could learn how to better manage future ones. The book is well worth the time spent gaining better insight to how we actually choose presidential candidates.

M.D. Couturier's study of what many consider a footnote in American politics is illuminating. Especially valuable is the author's tracing of Donald Trump's early foray into American politics and his presidential ambitions. The story of a divided third party in the American presidential election in 2000 turns out not to be as inconsequential as most people think. My only caveat is that Couturier's harsh criticisms of Trump would have been better served if the author had also focused on the flaws of Pat Buchanan. All in all, a valuable work that deserves readers who want to understand the American third-party dynamic.