The (non-)confessions of St. Ralph

Parts of "Crashing the Party" remind you of what's best about Nader: the reach of his intellect and activism over the last 40 years, from auto safety to bank redlining in the inner city to pay equity for women. Even the most vicious attacks on Nader in 2000 had to begin by acknowledging the legislation he's inspired, the groups -- Public Citizen, the Public Interest Research Groups, Multinational Resource Center, Consumer Project on Technology -- he's helped found.

And for political junkies, the book is sometimes a surprisingly fun read, despite Nader's preternatural lack of playfulness. There's a hilarious section on the strange role of Warren Beatty, who flirted with a presidential run himself, then flirted with backing Nader, and then disappeared, but not before giving Nader some cash, some political advice and some cosmetic tips. He told the gaunt activist to insist on direct lighting for TV appearances, since lighting from above or below tended to make the lean, mean Green look like a character in a horror movie. Thanks, Warren.

He also revisits his crusade to get the corrupt Commission on Presidential Debates to give him a podium. Nader's level of outrage is in this case appropriate to the topic at hand: the way the two parties wrested control over the debates from the League of Women Voters, and subsequently rigged the rules to protect their lackluster candidates from serious questions and third-party challengers. The worst abuse was Nader's being denied entrance to the debates even as an audience member, even when he produced a ticket. It won the Green Party candidate some of the most sympathetic and high-profile media coverage of his campaign, although there's been no serious subsequent challenge by the media to the CPD's disgraceful reign over the debates, which will likely continue in 2004.

Complaints about the media dominate "Crashing the Party," and some are on target. The New York Times ran several vituperative lead editorials attacking Nader for his presidential bid, and they embarrassed the paper, making it seem at once like a house organ of the Democratic Party and profoundly anti-democratic. At the time even Nader-haters found the editorials remarkable and offensive, and Nader is on the money when he blasts the Times for its crude arrogance (it was the crudeness that was remarkable; the Times' arrogance is usually expressed much more subtly and seductively).

But much of his grousing about the media is unfair. He grows tiresome as he recites supposedly major events and pronunciamentos the Times and the Washington Post failed to cover. The fact is, with a few exceptions -- his campaign to join the debates; media wizard Bill Hillsman's great spoof of MasterCard's "Priceless" ads; the sold-out, inspiring Madison Square Garden rally in October 2000 -- Nader ran a lackluster campaign. And who'd have thunk it? Globalization was finally on the map as a political issue that year, there was a consumer product safety scandal in the news thanks to the Ford/Firestone tire tragedy -- an auto-safety scandal, for God's sake, tailor-made for the author of "Unsafe at Any Speed" -- plus a looming energy crisis. Meanwhile, Bush and Gore were more tweedledum and tweedledee than any pair to run for president in American history. Nader should have thrived, but his campaign never caught fire, and blaming the media misses the point.

In fact, I'd argue that Nader got more coverage than he deserved, given the Green Party's lack of national stature, his single-digit poll numbers throughout 2000 and his own lack of elective experience. A Lexis-Nexis search of "Ralph Nader" and "Green Party" for Jan. 1, 2000, through Election Day turns up almost 8,000 news and magazine stories; the supposedly neglectful New York Times alone ran 250 articles that at least mentioned Nader and his Green candidacy, as opposed to only 33 about Pat Buchanan's Reform Party bid. That's despite the fact that Buchanan made two earlier runs for the Republican presidential nomination, and his Reform Party predecessor, Ross Perot, had in 1996 drawn 8 percent of the vote plus federal matching funds, compared with Nader and the Greens' less than 1 percent that same year.

Though it would chagrin Nader to admit it, there's no doubt his celebrity, not his compelling political agenda, won him much of the national media attention he got -- that, plus the fact that as the race tightened closer to Election Day, the Gore campaign took off the gloves with a drive to convince lefties that a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush. Political reporters everywhere were suddenly trailing the possible spoiler, but he couldn't turn the new attention into votes. His poll standing started to fall and in the end, he won a disappointing 2.6 percent -- enough to tilt the election to Bush, but far less than his goal. Nader's failures in 2000 -- to run a compelling campaign, and to achieve what many said was his real aim, the 5 percent of the vote that would get the Greens matching funds from the Federal Election Commission -- has a lot to say about the sorry state of the left. But it says even more about Nader's own shortcomings as the limping left's would-be leader.

For 30 years the American left has mostly been a freak show of clashing grievances in search of a persuasive agenda and a dynamic leader, and inevitably finding neither. In some ways, of course, activist left-liberalism was a victim of its own success: Advocates for labor, consumers, minorities and the poor helped end child labor, win the eight-hour day, achieve voting rights, abolish legal segregation, extend new health and welfare programs to the needy, pass groundbreaking clean air and water legislation, mandate seat belts, airbags and highway mileage standards -- the list could go on and on. All those reforms took the edge off the misery of the poor, blunted capitalism's worst abuses, robbed muckrakers of vast acres of muck and made the nation safe for complacency.

Next Page: Nader supporters: In their hearts, they know they're better people than the rest of us

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