hey've been written off by the national news media and shut out of last night's televised debate. So today we bring you postcards from the edge of the presidential campaign: from Brattleboro, Vt., the Green Party's Ralph Nader; from Sanford, Maine, Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party.
If you're unhappy choosing a favorite in the scrum between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush, Nader and Buchanan are your best, if demonstrably more radical, vehicles to send 'em a message on Nov. 7.
From the left (Nader) and right (Buchanan), they are populist alternatives to the Bush and Gore policy calibrations that seem as if they were cooked up in their pollsters' laboratories.
Both longshots have credentials: Nader, a consumer champion, has for 37 years scolded and shamed government bureaucracies and regulators; Buchanan, twice a GOP presidential candidate, wounded President George H.W. Bush in 1992 and won the New Hampshire primary in 1996, his high-water mark.
Yet, they are denied the essential political oxygen of mass-media exposure. Would it be too confusing for the great unwashed to choose from among more than two candidates? We doubt it.
Nader, nonetheless, draws big crowds, mostly in urban centers with large student populations. In Boston Sunday, he drew 12,000 to the FleetCenter. The same night, 1,500 turned out at Portland (Maine) High School. We caught up with him Monday afternoon in southern Vermont, at the School for International Training, preaching to 750 choir members on a hillside, with a verdant vista of the Connecticut River Valley as a magnificent backdrop.
''We spend too much time in a virtual reality, in front of screens - televisions and computers,'' Nader said. ''We want this generation to look at this kind of reality,'' he gestured to the scenery behind him, ''and preserve it and restore it.''
Speaking for nearly an hour, Nader ignored hot-button issues that register in polling data and are the bludgeons used by Gore and Bush. He barely touched education, though he called Harvard Law School, his alma mater, a ''high-priced tool factory.'' He never stressed his opposition to the death penalty and support for gay marriage, issues that appeal to many Vermont lefties.
Instead, he unloaded a jeremiad of boat-rocking riffs: create a ''civil society'' to rise up against the corporatization of American culture, which has become an orgy of mass marketing; end corporate welfare and public subsidies for dirty fossil fuels; cancel trade agreements that exploit cheap labor and environments in poor countries and harm American workers; squeeze interested money out of politics and unseat ''the permanent government in Washington that transcends whatever piddling differences there are between Bush and Gore.''
It's a powerful indictment of the status quo, beyond the mainstream, certainly, but one that resonates with the idealistic and the alienated.
Buchanan's ''lock-and-load'' rhetoric of '96 is muted today, but he too roars against the state of American culture, from a conservative, moralizing perch. The arcs of Buchanan and Nader intersect on the issue of free trade, however.
Earlier Monday, at the Lavalley Lumber Co. and saw mill in Sanford, Buchanan said the North American Free Trade Agreement has allowed cheap Canadian imports to hurt US timber interests.
Sidetracked by gall bladder surgery and a Reform Party split with Ross Perot's Perotistas (he won the $12.5 million in federal election funds), Buchanan seems to have lost a foot on his rhetorical fastball. His criticism Monday of his debate exclusion was tepid; he called it ''a minor conspiracy.''
That's not the fire-breathing Pat who once dubbed his supporters ''peasants with pitchforks.'' Buchanan remains, however, a media-wise master, able to live off the land, appearing on radio talk shows and attracting local coverage.
And he still has a following. Perhaps a dozen faithful supporters greeted him at the remote lumber company. Across the road, one had hand-marked a Chevy Blazer's rear window. ''Christians can only vote morally ... Pat Buchanan,'' the message said. A bumper sticker below read, ''Impeach Hillary.''
In certain respects, Buchanan's supporters are as disaffected as Nader's. Bob Mullet, a 62-year-old retired machinist from Dayton, Maine, said Democrats should back Nader and Republicans should vote for Buchanan as a protest. ''The others are too much the same,'' he asserted. ''They're rigging it by not letting Buchanan and Nader debate.''
Enjoy the postcards from the edge. For the Green and Reform parties, the revolution will not be televised.
