"Your torch has been lit!" read the email I got last summer. And now my torch has guttered out! Yours too, maybe.

The email came from a political organization called Unity08. "Organization" may not be the right word. I think Unity08 had a small office somewhere, but I was never certain that it had anything like a corporeal existence. Mostly it existed in the vast, virtual world of pure possibility that we call the Internet, where an ever-increasing number of people, I've noticed, spend an ever-increasing portion of their lives. Unity08 was a creature of cyberspace, made up of just such people.

"Our mission is difficult," admitted Doug Bailey, the group's co-founder, in that introductory email. But, he said, it was readily achievable: "We will determine the crucial issues that our country must face, we will attain ballot access in all fifty states, and we will elect the next president and vice president of the United States in 2008."

I admired Bailey's authoritative tone, which he had evidently acquired as a former aide to President Gerald Ford, a onetime Republican political consultant, and an impossible-to-shake Washington hanger-on. A number of journalists from the nonideological media were wowed too, and when he and his colleagues--including former Maine governor Angus King and Carter administration insiders Gerald Rafshoon and Hamilton Jordan--launched their movement at a press conference in May 2006, they were showered with positive reviews and heartfelt atta-boys. Yet it was not to last. Late last Thursday night another email went out, announcing that Unity08 was

In truth there was always reason to be skeptical about Unity08's future as a new independent political party. The idea behind it was nearly as old as our democracy itself. For as long as we've had two parties, someone has been trying to invent a third. It never works. But in keeping with the doe-eyed utopianism that accompanies every nonpornographic Internet enterprise, Bailey and his colleagues were certain that this time the old idea would be made new, and plausible, by virtue of being placed on the Internet. They would enlist party members online, write the platform online, and then, at last, hold a convention online, with nominees for president and vice president chosen by people sitting at home in front of their Dells.

"You'll vote, you'll decide," said the Unity08 spokesman, the actor Sam Waterston, in a TV ad. "Not the consultants and spin doctors. Not the special interests. Not the lobbyists." Just you. At home in your PJs.

The Internet wasn't the only innovation in Unity08's approach, or even its most important one. Third-party movements are usually born in a mood of hyper-partisanship--the feeling that, in the words of the 1968 third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, "there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties." Unity08, by contrast, would be a new partisan entity founded in a mood of nonpartisanship. A third party was necessary because there was too much difference between the two parties: Republican and Democratic politicians were so busy appealing to their ideological soul mates in their political "base" that they had ignored the voters who were neither conservative nor liberal, or who were liberal on some things and conservative on others, or vice versa, or wishy-washy on everything. Centrists, they were called. In moving so far to their respective extremes, the parties had abandoned the precious center and thereby corrupted democracy. In an ideal world, according to Unity08, there really wouldn't be a dime's worth of difference between the two parties.