A Maverick Gets His Moment

Ralph Nader would have given his rumpled gray suit to be included in last week's debate in Winston-Salem, N.C. Instead, the Green Party candidate gnawed pizza and scribbled on a legal pad as he watched the debate in the cluttered old Victorian house that serves as his Washington headquarters. "This has got to be turning off television sets by the thousands, don't you think?" he asked. "Jeez, these guys are such cowards." Later, Nader paced the room and imagined himself onstage. "They've now had three hours to debate, and they've not talked about the working poor, about the pervasive poverty, about the lack of affordable housing," he sputtered. "I would have said, 'Look, the people want decisions on the following issues: boom, boom, boom...' I would have provoked the atmosphere of the whole debate."

No wonder he wasn't invited. But by shutting him out, the debate commission may have turned a harmless gadfly into a martyr. After Nader was tossed from the Boston site like some bum who'd wandered into the Harvard Club, David Letterman declared him the winner. After watching the uninspiring debate, a lot of viewers apparently agreed; Nader jumped to 7 percent in some national polls. Last week, with celebrities like Phil Donahue and Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, an energized Nader packed 10,000 supporters into a Chicago arena and filled Madison Square Garden at $20 a head. Yet all the electricity and good will may not translate into votes. No one knows how many of the reform-minded voters who are threatening to vote for Nader now will actually pull the Green lever. And even most liberals who worship Nader are afraid to vote for him because it might cost Gore the election. "I'm a big admirer," a professor tells Nader after meeting him in an airport. "But do me a favor. A few days before the election, get out and swing your 2 percent for Gore. You'll be my hero."

Nader's having none of it. Both candidates are "corporate supremacists," he says, and it doesn't matter which one of them wins. In truth, most of Nader's votes will probably come from Democratic strongholds like California, where Gore seems safe anyway, or from Republican states where he's all but conceded the race. But Gore advisers worry that in a few close states, like Oregon and Michigan, Nader could swing the vote to Bush.

Nader insists that's not his intention, but he wouldn't exactly mind either. He displays a contempt for Gore that he can't quite summon for Bush, whom he dismisses as "a corporation in a suit." At a luncheon with Detroit execs, Nader spends 45 minutes tearing into the auto companies, while forks clink nervously. Then he gets to the point. "I say to you, the next time you see a presidential candidate here who panders to you, you should feel insulted," he says. "As Al Gore did when he came in here and said, 'I'm with you'--after he had written a book against the internal-combustion engine." When he's finished, there is time for only one question from the audience: if he had to choose between Gore and Bush, whom would he pick? His answer: "None of the above."

Nader's hoping a lot of voters will see him as just that kind of choice--a way to send the two parties a message. His main goal is to score 5 percent of the vote, qualifying the Greens for federal matching funds. But Nader has already gotten something else he craves: a way to be heard. Overlooked by the media in recent years, he now has reporters waiting at every campaign stop, recording his rants on everything from strip mining to the inanity of local weather forecasts. He's just published "The Nader Reader," a compilation of speeches and articles. And he now has a new generation of college-age fans demanding that he be allowed to debate. Nader says he's hunting down a ticket for this week's final face-off in St. Louis. The folks at the commission won't let him debate, of course. But if they've learned anything lately, they'll at least let him watch.

© 2000