It's no secret that the national conventions are no longer dramatic arenas in which the parties decide their presidential nominees or, for that matter, anything else of much importance.

Research assistance was provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.

This presidential election--so far--is the tale of two establishments, one that held firm, one that started to crack and moved fast to hang tight.

Every presidential contest in the past two decades has produced something of a quasi populist--a mad-as-hell candidate of the left, right or center who runs against the establishment in Washingto

If politics got real, the debate on campaign finance reform would focus on how ordinary citizens can acquire a measure of power in America's money-drenched democracy.

As the first voting of the 2000 presidential election approaches, in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries, public disinterest is palpable.

These excerpts are from Jim Hightower's If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates (HarperCollins).

Some things may be true even if Pat Buchanan says them, and the inescapable fact is that the 2000 presidential election has so far been a rigged affair, bearing more resemblance to a plebiscite i

The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund provided research assistance.

Let 1999 go down in electoral history as the year the "wealth primary"--a term coined by Jamin Raskin and John Bonifaz in law review articles to describe the period of early fundraising before th