Miles to Go

"Ralph is really a charming guy," says Claybrook, who heads the advocacy group Public Citizen. "He has a great sense of humor. If the public knew him really well, they would be enthralled with him."

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Plenty of people think Ralph Nader -- consumer advocate, government reformer, rabble-rouser extraordinaire -- was one of the great Americans of the 20th century. But many of them have a hard time thinking the same thing about Ralph Nader, politician, in the 21st.

Since 2000, Nader has been shut out of places that used to welcome him. Once a familiar figure on the Hill, he is shunned by Democrats when he offers to testify at congressional hearings, even on matters such as auto safety. ("Joe Biden said, 'He better not come up to Capitol Hill,' " Nader says, a bit hurt.) He finds publishers reluctant to take his manuscripts. Trial lawyers have stopped contributing to one of Nader's long-cherished pet projects, a museum of tort law, which he wants to build in his home town, Winsted, Conn.

Even Public Citizen, which Nader co-founded in 1971, has distanced itself from him since 2000, because of a backlash from contributors. When Nader announced his latest presidential campaign, Public Citizen's Web site carried this posting: "Mr. Nader has no formal relationship with the organization and has not had any such relationship for years."

Nader remains so toxic in Democratic circles that Rep. Leonard Boswell, a six-term congressman from Iowa, defeated his primary opponent, Ed Fallon, this month by reminding voters that Fallon supported Nader in 2000. Fallon apologized for doing so, to no avail.

Todd Gitlin, a Columbia University professor and a liberal author, admits he becomes "splenetic" on the subject of Nader the candidate. "I regard him as a saboteur of the cause to which he purports to devote himself," Gitlin says. "Nobody I can think of in public life has so willfully repealed his contributions to American life with such intensity and conviction."

Eric Alterman, another liberal commentator and author, calls Nader "a megalomaniac" and "a Leninist," in the sense of Nader's belief that things must get much worse before reform can begin. "There was only one person in entire world on election eve who could have prevented Bush's election."

Nader doesn't feel a need to apologize. He doesn't worry that the first line of his obituary will describe him as the spoiler of the 2000 race. He often quips, "You can't spoil a system that's rotten to the core." To strangers who get in his face, he has another deflection: "Gore won. The election was stolen. Go after the thieves."

It wasn't his responsibility, he says, to persuade people to vote for Gore. If voters were attracted by his positions and issues, he says, then Democrats were free to take the same positions. Bottom line? "The Democrats couldn't beat a bumbling governor from Texas," Nader mocks.

Nader wasn't the only man who could have changed the election's outcome. His name was one of eight third-party candidates on the Florida ballot, all of whom attracted far more than the 538 votes Gore needed to change the outcome.

Nader thinks it's futile to keep arguing about it. He also thinks one man could stop the "scapegoating": Gore. "If he would stand up and say publicly, 'Ralph Nader wasn't responsible,' that would make a huge difference," Nader says.