Nader's run for redemption

STEP FOR A moment into the well-worn shoes and the seemingly muddled head of Ralph Nader in search of the answer to this week's political puzzle: How, after what happened in 2000, can Ralph be running again?

You spent much of 2000 insisting that there was no real difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Perhaps you truly thought so. Regardless, for much of the year it looked as though Gore would lose by a large enough margin that your candidacy wouldn't matter.

Then came the Bush drunken driving story, the late Gore surge, and an election decided by the Supreme Court. And for three years, you've seen how wrong you were in saying Gore and Bush were the same.

Despite your decades of good work, you've gone from saint to sinner. The main thing most people will remember about you is that your candidacy handed the White House to a man you yourself describe as a corporation masquerading as a human being.

Some of your old allies treated you as a pariah. Your calls went unreturned. You were deeply hurt but also secretly chagrined. This year you want to see Bush beaten, but most of all, you want to erase 2000 -- that is, to prove your enemies wrong. What do you do?

You could urge your supporters to vote for the Democrat. But then all the stories would read this way: Ralph Nader, who in 2000 said there was no meaningful difference between the major party nominees, as much as admitted he was wrong yesterday by urging his followers to rally round the Democratic nominee.

No, that just wouldn't do. But there's another course open to you. You could run again, but not under the banner of the Green Party whose organization helped you make the ballot in 43 states last time. Instead, you'll wage a lonely independent's campaign.

You hint at your intent, and suddenly all your erstwhile allies, the folks who have been so scathing, are forced to come on bended knee to remonstrate with you not to do it again. That lets you show them just how little you care about their opinion. They think they've wounded you over the last three years? Why, now they'll understand you've scarcely noticed their criticism.

Yes, it involves some exceedingly strange and awkward arguments. You are, for example, forced to tell Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" that there would have been no difference in foreign policy if Al Gore were president.

Still, that's infinitely preferable to admitting you were wrong.

But, having used the runup to your announcement to signal your disdain for your old allies, to sneer at "the liberal intelligentsia," to heap contempt on the very notion that an election should be reduced to a two-party choice by citing the multiparty pluralism of European democracies -- take that, Nation readers! -- you'll use your candidacy quite differently.

Although you'll rail against the "duopoly" of power, you'll really focus on the Bush administration. You'll become a one-man crusader against the Republican incumbent, making the case against him in a way that the uncertain, equivocal Kerry or the callow Edwards can't or won't do on their own.

In the end, with Democrats united and the nation polarized, your candidacy won't attract much support. You'll do worse than Pat Buchanan did in 2000 as the Reform Party champion. And that's exactly what you want. If the Democrats win, you'll be able to say: See, any halfway decent candidate could have beaten Bush. That just shows I wasn't what cost the Democrats the 2000 election. The problem was that Al Gore's campaign defined pathetic.

But what if Bush wins? Well, with your vote totals tiny, it should be clear to everyone that you played no role, that even a united Democratic Party couldn't win.

Besides, if the race is really close, perhaps then you'll make a dramatic withdrawal in favor of the Democrat. True, that's tricky in that it would reinforce the feeling that you should have folded your tent in 2000. But at least it would show that, given a decent idea of what might happen, you did -- and would have done -- the right thing.

Really, then, this year's candidacy isn't a repeat of your 2000 effort at all. Not as you see it.

You're not running in spite of 2000, you're running because of it. You're Ralph Nader, a fallen saint seeking redemption -- but without doing any public penance.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.