I have not even mentioned the limited (but scarcely unimportant) issues the candidates talk about: the Social Security hoax Bush wants to perpetrate; the Bush tax cut that Puts Billionaires First; affirmative action, which Bush wants to end, not mend; campaign corruption (sorry, "finance"), the auctioning off of access and bias at which W. is so spectacular that he did not even need the Lincoln Bedroom -- he could offer an entire government.

And none of this is to mention the person whom Nader stands poised to tip into power -- the lazy, intellectually slovenly Bush, the Bush who sneers at the "Buddhist temple" (would he denounce a church fundraiser with quite that curl of the lip?), the fumbling, evasive, thickheaded Bush, the disingenuous Bush, the deceiving, dynastic Bush who aims to ratify stupidity as a qualification for high office.

We come to the claim that a Nader vote is costless because his candidacy creates its own constituency, bringing masses hitherto demobilized (and rationally so) out of the woodwork. Turnout is surely important, especially for the unregistered blue-collar voters, but waiting for a rescue mission from suddenly lefty voters is the political equivalent of the beam-me-up wishfulness practiced by millennial cults -- and it has the same function. The trouble is, there's no persuasive evidence that large numbers of voters have been staying home because they've lacked a left-wing alternative. That's not the country we're living in.

We have some recent and relevant experience to consider. Liberals supported (rightly) the motor voter bill to make registration easier, a bill that George H.W. Bush vetoed twice and President Clinton signed, not just on principle, but in the hope that the poor would register and vote to the left. That hope was more vain than not. It didn't happen. Most scholars who've studied the subject believe that people who don't vote have the same views as people who do. In the real world, Nader is plainly picking up support from Gore (not least because of Gore's lummox debate performances). Minnesota is one state where, last week, Bush had, surprisingly, crept ahead of Gore in a statewide poll, and, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, "Nader has eroded Gore's base of support by attracting one-fifth of liberals, young voters and independents -- and one in 10 Democrats." Maybe it's not true in other states. Maybe it is. Maybe it's true enough in the right (or wrong) states to throw the election to Bush.

In limited and belated recognition that there are real costs to a Green vote, some now propose "strategic voting" and urge people who live in states where Gore-Bush poll margins are great to cast their ballots for Nader believing that they will not thereby be spoiling Gore's electoral vote. This is supposed to be a free vote, but there is no such thing as a free vote. That calculated vote is both morally problematic and politically short-sighted. Letting the polls make up your mind for you conditions a moral choice on the presupposition that polls are reliable (when in fact they are swinging all over the place), and amounts, moreover, to a sudden burst of pragmatism from people who ordinarily despise the pragmatism of Gore support.

Then, on practical grounds, we hear that a Nader vote builds up popular support for the Greens so they can get to 5 percent and therefore receive federal funds in 2004. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Nader does get 5 percent, and the Greens get federal funds in future elections. Then what? On the off-chance that the Greens can avoid breaking into warring camps, à la the Reform Party, what they can realistically look forward to is someday becoming, say, an 8 percent party. And then? After at least one term of Republican rule, with its unambiguous passion for big oil, against a nuclear test ban, for Star Wars, against labor organizing, for HMO's, for kindness toward the Pinochets of the world, etc., maybe eight years on we get to -- 9 percent? 11 percent? The odds are for shrinkage, not increase, in a third party. This is a doomed enterprise. The Constitution is decisively tilted against it. In parliamentary systems, a single-digit party can win seats, enter governments, make policy -- as witness the Greens in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. But in the American winner-take-all presidential system -- which is not going away -- the payoff for a third-party effort is the chance to be a spoiler again.

There's worse. The so-called strategic vote, by lowering Gore's popular vote, helps undermine his popular mandate if he does win, thus dashing the prospects for progressive hopes -- as Clinton's 43 percent victory in 1992 weakened his own popular base for egalitarian policies like "don't ask, don't tell." Like Bush, Nader supporters choose to forget that many of Clinton's stronger initiatives -- even his small, earnest "stimulus package" of 1993 -- banged up against a Republican wall in Congress. Had Clinton been bolstered by an electoral majority -- not to mention a better Congress, many of whose Democrats were barely that -- he could have made better use of the bully pulpit. (He should have tried anyway.)