Third-Party Candidates Choose Clown Makeup Over Pig Lipstick

Ron Paul, Cynthia McKinney, Chuck Baldwin and Ralph Nader -- the picture of unity. (By J. Scott Applewhite -- Associated Press)

At the same time Stevens's lawyers were in court, Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.), the jolly chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, was a few blocks away in the Capitol admitting that he owes money to the IRS because he failed to report years of rental income on his beach villa in the Dominican Republic.

The two parties' presidential candidates, meanwhile, were debating the great issues of the day. John McCain's campaign was trying to suggest, without basis, that Obama had been trying to demean McCain running mate Sarah Palin when he voiced the old cliche on Tuesday that "you can put lipstick on a pig -- it's still a pig." The Obama campaign, for its part, was distributing an ABC News report that Palin had tried to fire the town librarian when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.

It was more evidence, as The Post's Dan Balz put it Wednesday in his Web column, that, "rather than finding ways to bring about real reconciliation, the campaign is fostering the further polarization of the country." That would seem to present an opening for the third parties -- if they could stop squabbling among themselves.

"The more, the merrier," Paul said of his band of candidates, many of whom had already been rejected by the two major parties. McKinney had lost her House seat after she struck a Capitol Police officer with her cellphone. Nader has already made two unsuccessful runs for the presidency. Barr lost his House seat in a Republican primary before becoming a dupe in the "Borat" movie. And Paul, serving as a convener rather than a candidate, has failed as both a Republican and Libertarian presidential candidate.

Paul, who refused a last-minute plea from former senator Phil Gramm to endorse McCain, got the independent candidates to agree to a four-point policy statement. In exchange, he said voters should support any one of them as a way to strengthen the clout of third parties -- though he himself remains a Republican candidate for reelection to Congress. "I want to thank the candidates for showing," he said in the ballroom. "We'll have to wait and see when Bob shows up."

It turned out to be a long wait. Nader assured the audience that Barr "has established absolute support" for the four-point statement. But Barr never appeared.

An hour later, he staged his own event at the press club. "We understand that there was some degree of being upset that we weren't at the news conference this morning," he said. "But the fact is that we have an agenda that transcends any one person, any small group of people."

Instead of promoting all four candidates, Barr said, Paul should have supported him. Instead, he said, Paul showed "amorphous" leadership. In a bit of divine comedy, Barr compared the moment to 13th-century Italy. "This is not a time, as Dante Alighieri said many years ago, to remain neutral. . . . To paraphrase him, woe be unto those who remain neutral."

And woe be unto those who try to put lipstick on the pigheaded.