alph Nader is running for president on popular issues that Democrat Al Gore has ducked. These include universal health insurance, tougher regulation of corporate abuses, reform of money and politics, fairer taxation, and regulation of global commerce in the interest of consumers, workers, and the environment.
In 1996, prodded by the Green Party, Nader ran a late and halfhearted campaign. This time he is campaigning on the ground in all 50 states. He will very likely qualify for federal matching money, which will increase his visibility in the fall.
Nader probably has the highest name recognition and general public approval of any third party candidate in nearly a century. But what can he hope to accomplish?
The history of third parties is not encouraging. The American system, with its absence of proportional representation, makes it almost impossible for third parties to succeed.
Exactly one third party, the Republican Party, has displaced one of the two major parties - the Whig Party in the period of 1856-60. Since then, third parties at best have had some success in forcing one of the major parties to take seriously a submerged public issue.
The Republican Party, of course, began as an antislavery party.
The Peoples Party, the populists of the 1880s and 1890s, threatened to displace the Democrats as champions of farmers who were being killed by tight credit. But with the nomination of William Jennings Bryan in 1896, the Democrats embraced much of the populist program. The populists influenced political and economic reform during the early 20th century.
In a few cases, third-party candidates have tipped the election to one of the two major parties. Former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt (1901-1909), running in 1912 as a Bull Moose progressive, placed second and threw the election to a progressive Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt's Republican successor, William Howard Taft, placed third.
Former vice president Henry Wallace, running in 1948 as a more left-wing alternative to Harry Truman, very nearly tipped the election to Republican Thomas Dewey. Truman also lost support to the breakaway States Rights Party under Strom Thurmond (who still sits in the Senate as a Republican). About 10,000 more Wallace votes would have given Dewey the presidency.
In 1968, many disgusted antiwar Democrats failed to vote for president or voted for a protest candidate. Their reward was Richard Nixon. In 1992 the Perot candidacy may have tipped the election to Bill Clinton, but Perot's Reform Party is less a genuine party than a disparate collection of disaffected voters with little in common.
Which brings us back to Nader. At the moment, Nader is outpolling this year's likely candidate of the Reform Party, Pat Buchanan.
According to Nader, his fondest hope is to establish the Greens as a permanent force to the Democrats' left. Nader insists that so many voters are disaffected with politics altogether that he will pull votes from Republicans as well as Democrats, not to mention voters inclined to just stay home.
Still, his campaign is a not very subtle challenge to Gore: He could run as a more progressive Democrat and put the Greens out of business - or lose a lot of votes and potentially lose the election.
Nader's candidacy poses an awful dilemma for liberal voters.
On the one hand, ever since Jimmy Carter, Democratic presidents and candidates have taken liberal and labor voters for granted. Each Democratic presidential campaign has been more corporate and more centrist than the previous one.
On the other hand, the practical alternative to Al Gore is not Ralph Nader - it's George W. Bush. The ghost of Hubert Humphrey hangs over every polling booth where some liberal voter contemplates pulling the lever for Nader.
Even the self-consciously left press, which surely agrees more with Nader than with Gore, is having second thoughts. In the Nation magazine, columnist Katha Pollitt warned that Nader could swing the election to Bush. In These Times, a socialist magazine, recently chided Nader for not having run in the Democratic primaries.
On balance, it's probably salutary that Nader is in the race, since he forces into debate a lot of very popular and submerged issues.
For liberals, it is infuriating that stalwarts like Senators Ted Kennedy and Paul Wellstone win going away by embracing issues of economic justice while the Democrats' national standard bearer puts voters to sleep by cowering in the political center.
One can only hope that for Gore, Nader's candidacy is a wake-up call and not a death knell.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe.
