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"You don't need that bagel," Gravel says.

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A woman approaches, introducing herself as a local television reporter and requesting an interview. Gravel says he'd be honored.

The reporter directs Gravel to a chair while two cameramen take up positions and Jacobson finds a seat against a wall. He closes his eyes and falls asleep.

The cameras roll. The TV reporter delivers an enthusiastic greeting. "Thank you for being with us, Senator Gravel," she says, mispronouncing her guest's last name, calling him GRAV-el, like the little stones you might find in a pit, like what you get called when you have a name ID and poll numbers so low as to be subterranean. Midway through the interview, one of the cameramen, hearing a strange sound coming from behind, wheels around.

Jacobson is snoring, loudly.

Gravel forges ahead, oblivious to all distractions. As the interview ends, Jacobson awakens. "Sleepy," he says.

On the way out of the hotel, Gravel says, "Believe me, none of this -- the money, the big entourages -- will matter when people understand my message: that people need to empower themselves and that I have the idea to change the paradigm of human governance as we know it with the National Initiative. I just need mainstream media to give me a chance. You know what the truth is? It's not that my ideas are a joke. What's truly troubling is that I'm treated as a joke, just like anyone else who doesn't have big money. How is that good for democracy?"

He lets the question hang there, then almost spits the next phrase. "Second-tier candidate. What the hell does that mean? I'll tell you what it means when the media says it. It means that they think they can justify treating you as a joke . . . It means a few people decide who gets anointed as a serious candidate and who doesn't."

SECOND-TIER CANDIDACIES ARE A RELATIVELY RECENT PHENOMENON IN AMERICAN PARTY POLITICS. They first appeared in the '70s, born of the rapid expansion of presidential primaries, when long-shot hopefuls suddenly had nothing to lose in testing whether they might be able to excite voters and circumvent the skepticism of party bigwigs.

Before then, with relatively few primaries in a campaign season, the bigwigs held sway over the nominating process. Even in the turbulent '60s, political bosses and the state conventions of both major parties selected most delegates to their national conventions, generally channeling support to well-known contenders (some of whom had fared well in the few primaries) while dismissing obvious dark horses. "Second-tier" was not even part of the political parlance. The closest breed to the second-tier was the "favorite son" candidacy,

generally a reference to a long-standing senator or governor of a state who, while not actively seeking his party's nomination, held the pledges of his state's delegates. While not a serious threat to win, a favorite son was at least a serious player, with chips to barter if he wished to strike a deal with a real contender. A player such as Gravel, without chips from the beginning but participating in debates nonetheless, simply did not exist then.

Even with the proliferation of primaries since then, the only second-tier candidate to go all the way was Jimmy Carter, an obscure, one-term Georgia governor who descended on Iowa a full year ahead of the 1976 Democratic caucus there, an unprecedentedly early start to a presidential campaign in the state. "Carter won Iowa and acquired momentum that took him all the way to the nomination," recalls Larry Sabato, a professor of political science at the University of Virginia. "After Carter, nobody will allow a second-tier candidate to get a jump on the field ever again."