Crusader Nader Plays Low-Key, Low-Budget Spoiler

For some reason, Northwest Airlines is not honoring Ralph Nader’s little book of senior discount coupons and his plane is leaving in 35 minutes.

“You didn’t book 14 days in advance,” the agent behind the ticket counter informs him sympathetically as he ponders the more expensive fare to Fargo, N.D., where he is scheduled to speak in three hours at the local university.

It is the 45th state he’s visited in 99 days in his quixotic quest for president on the Green Party ticket, the latest crusade in the 40-year career of America’s most tenacious crusader.

No one expects he will actually win--national polls show him in single digits. But all of a sudden--at age 66 and on a budget so spare he stays in guest rooms of Greenies all over America to save on hotels--he is proving to be a big headache for the Democratic nominee in waiting, Al Gore.

Nader is drawing enough notice in states such as California, Oregon and Washington to pester the vice president, forcing Democrats to work harder in places they should be able to count on. More significantly, in key Midwestern swing states, even a small percentage of Democrats who defect to Nader could tip the scales toward presumed Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush.

“The presidential race is shaping up to be a razor-thin margin, so anybody who drains votes is potentially a big problem,” said Washington-based political analyst Stuart Rothenberg. “If you’re a moderate-to-liberal Democrat and you can’t stomach the vice president on trade or personally, Nader becomes a vehicle for protest, and that’s the biggest challenge for Gore.”

We have watched Ralph Nader take on the auto industry, the airline industry, the meatpacking industry and the World Trade Organization. We have watched corporate giants respond with air bags, seat belts, food labeling and scrolls of consumer rights.

And now, gray at the temples and still putting in 18-hour days, Nader is taking on the Democratic Party, suffering no delusions he might actually occupy the White House but content to give the party he believes has all but abandoned progressive principles “a four-year cold shower.”

The notion that he might serve as spoiler and help hand the election to Texas Gov. Bush does not trouble him. The two parties are practically identical now, he says, the only difference being “the velocity with which their knees hit the floor when Big Business knocks on their door.”

It isn’t like when he ran in 1996, essentially lending the Green Party his name, never bothering to raise money and capturing a meager 700,000 votes. This time he’s serious: He is committed to raise and spend $5 million, to motivate apathetic young voters and give discontented Democrats an alternative.

The California Nurses Assn. endorsed Nader last week, praising him for his commitment to universal health care. Angered by Gore’s support for the China trade deal, the United Auto Workers recently threatened to endorse Nader. It may prove an idle threat, but the mere prospect of the UAW backing its old consumer nemesis was enough to generate headlines.

If he captures at least 5% of the popular vote in November, he’ll make the Green Party eligible for federal funds in 2004. Ultimately, he says, he wants to build a strong third party committed to wresting political power from Big Business and giving it to average citizens.

*

“Can I go standby?” Nader asks, hunched over the Northwest counter in his rumpled blue suit and rubber-soled walking shoes, his bulging accordion folder stashed under his left arm. After much tapping of keys, he winds up in first class, where he looks decidedly out of place.

He is a brilliant, Harvard-educated ascetic who has lived for years in the same studio apartment in Washington, typing missives about Wall Street’s alleged sins on the same old Underwood he’s been using since the ‘60s. He doesn’t own a car, a credit card or a television set.

He works all the time, sometimes getting up at 5 to start the day, sometimes staying up until 5 to stretch it out. To say that Baltimore Orioles games are his only entertainment would be misleading since his work is his entertainment.

The campaign recently took him to Hawaii, where, when asked if he got a chance to enjoy the tropical paradise, his face lit up at the memory of his visit to--ready?--an industrial hemp plot. (“It’s a 5,000-year-old plant that has been stigmatized. It has 50,000 uses. I’ll give you the catalog: textiles, paper, fuel, food . . .”)

His has been a life of self-sacrifice or self-indulgence, depending on how you look at it. He never married or had children because he didn’t want to be “an absentee father.” Then again, he gets to spend all of his waking hours doing what he loves best: writing books, dogging multinational corporations and nagging Congress.

A compulsive reader, he climbs into the passenger seat of whatever happens to be chauffeuring him around--on this day in Sioux Falls, a maroon Cadillac driven by a young man so in awe of his hero he has put on a suit. It’s only a 10-minute ride, but Nader riffles the accordion folder for a white paper on agriculture.

Through the decades, his image has flickered across the national vista as he moved in and out of vogue, but rarely out of sight: hero, weirdo, icon, national nag, “St. Ralph,” citizen scold, curmudgeon, champion and lately “retro-cool.”

His consumer-rights army was born when his 1965 book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” spotlighted the dangers of U.S.-made cars, particularly General Motors’ Corvair. But corporations have since improved the art of defense with generous political contributions and the corollary political access they bring. Citizen crusaders don’t win as easily as they used to, which is precisely why Nader entered the political system he has spent four decades fighting.

“We are a government of the Exxons, by the General Motors and for the DuPonts,” he booms to reporters in the back seat while driving past a strip of fast-food chains in a fruitless search for a family-run restaurant. “The civil society is being closed down by the corporate state. So you either retire from active citizen involvement or move into the political arena, as Jefferson saw was necessary.”

He is stuck in a permanent state of exasperation, punctuated by an endearingly nerdish chivalry and deadpan wit. His monastic lifestyle is the perfect antidote to years of Clinton scandal.

He accepts no political action committee, is beholden to no special interest and appears to associate only with his devoted battalion of Ivy League lawyers and volunteers.

“Nader, to my knowledge, has never been on a date,” quips Republican strategist James P. Pinkerton. “He’s about as far away from Clinton socially as you can get.”

Nader’s possible appeal to certain types of voters is not lost on the Gore campaign.

“We don’t take for granted the votes of people who care about the environment and consumer rights. At the same time, we’re not quaking in our boots about Ralph Nader’s campaign,” Gore spokesman Douglas Hattaway said.

“People will see quite clearly that Al Gore has the best experience on these issues and the right ideas for the future.”

And lurking on the right is Patrick J. Buchanan, the likely Reform Party nominee who could siphon votes from Bush and help mitigate whatever damage Nader might inflict on Gore.

Hard-core Nader supporters--who tend to be youthful idealists or disgruntled liberals--are unquestionably committed to his candidacy. But the electorate at large is proving to be a harder sell.

*

There are no Nader banners, no Nader bunting and no Nader balloons. Just a plastic bag of green buttons that trumpet “People over profit” and a stack of bumper stickers. The metal folding chairs at the local labor hall in Sioux Falls are nearly full, and some of the women have set out banana cake and brownies.

Nader, all 6 feet, 4 inches of him, is alone, eyeing the sweets. He is not comfortable with this campaigning stuff. He hates talking about himself, reverting to “we” whenever he refers to his consumer triumphs, if he refers to them at all.

He takes the podium, slouching, thumbs in his pockets. He’s operating on four hours of sleep but it doesn’t show. Without notes, he begins reciting a litany of workplace tragedy and inequity: More coal miners have lost their lives to black lung disease and industrial accidents than all of the Americans killed in World War II. One hundred thousand workers a year die from toxic exposure. Bill Gates has the wealth of 120 million Americans combined.

Heads nod. Yet this hardly constitutes a groundswell of support. Indeed, on this daylong swing through the Dakotas--where Green Party members are as scarce as skyscrapers--he will directly address a total of 119 live bodies, boosted by local media coverage. At the end of a long day, 11 faithful souls will sprinkle the seats of a vast auditorium at North Dakota State University. He will speak to them as though the place is packed to the rafters.

Although few who come to hear him disagree with a word he says, many are dubious of his political prospects; they fear a vote for Nader amounts to a vote for Bush. That sums up Nader’s dilemma, and the dilemma of many alternative presidential candidates for that matter: The more support they draw, the more likely they are to help the party they abhor.

Which is why Jim Larson, a former meatpacker and United Food and Commercial Workers Union official, is standing in the back of the labor hall enthusiastically listening to Nader’s screed, while wearing a Gore-for-president T-shirt.

“To me, if Bush is elected, we’re gone,” Larson says. “It’s bad enough now. But that’s worse.”

As for Nader, he seems prepared to wait. Insurgencies take time. And winning enough votes to position his fledgling party for next time would be victory enough.

“There are all sorts of definitions of success,” he says, heading off to a $56-a-night room at the Hampton Inn in Fargo, where he will give Newsweek an 11 p.m. interview, and the Democratic Party establishment a little something to worry about.

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Profile:

Ralph Nader

* Age: 66

* Residence: Washington, D.C.

* Education: Bachelor’s degree with honors in politics from Princeton University, 1955. Law degree, Harvard University, 1958.

* Career highlights: Consumer advocate, lawyer, lecturer on history and government, author or editor of 14 books.

* Military service: Army, 1959.