Dry Quixote

In a fourth-floor room of the Bucks County Sheraton in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, perennial Prohibition Party presidential candidate Earl Dodge serenades me, in church-choir baritone, with his party's theme song:

I'd rather be right than president

I want my conscience clear

I'll firmly stand for truth and right

I have a God to fear

I'll work and vote the way I pray

No matter what the scoffers say

I'd rather be right than president

I want my conscience clear

If the great third parties and their tribunes-the Socialists of Eugene Debs, Bob La Follette's Progressives, George Wallace and the American Independence Party-are gone but not forgotten, the Prohibition Party is forgotten but not gone. Yet despite the party's present obscurity, its 67-year-old embodiment, Earl Dodge, is running once more. "I could be called the moral Harold Stassen," he jokes.