`Doesn't matter.'' With those two words, would-be President Nader serves up the petard on which he can be definitively hoist. That it is Representative Barney Frank helping point this out only makes the exercise more fun.
In the infancy of his second presidential candidacy, Ralph Nader must contend with the impact of his Green Party candidacy's impact on the identity of the next president. Nader makes no effort to hide the obvious: that it is more likely to boost the fortunes of George W. Bush over those of Al Gore.
And since his candidacy could be a significant factor in making Bush the next president, Nader has to deal with that. He does so by arguing that it doesn't matter and that it would be better for his brand of progressive politics and for the Democratic Party if Bush won.
Nader masks this point in a typical torrent of invective aimed at the party and Gore (hypocrite, plastic person, corporate stooge), but the important point is not Nader's rhetoric but his argument that it doesn't matter if Bush wins.
Voila le petard. Listen to Barney Frank:
''The Nader argument is based on the assumption that there is no important difference between Al Gore and George Bush that justifies a decision to vote for Gore. Well, we know for an absolute fact that Gore and Bush differ completely on abortion rights, on gay rights, and on controlling gun violence, to pick just three examples. Well, if there are no important differences between Gore and Bush, it must follow that these are not important differences. And in fact, this is what Nader does believe. His entire public career supports that proposition. He has never, ever spoken out on these matters. The same goes for the poor, for people stuck on welfare, and for racial minorities.''
In the last month, the Massachusetts Democrat has discussed the nascent Nader candidacy from his own progressive perspective, particularly in a speech before the Americans for Democratic Action and in keynoting the Democratic convention in Wisconsin. Frank's credentials for this discussion are pristine - a veteran progressive as well as a pol, an activist as well as insider from City Hall to Beacon Hill to Capitol Hill. Frank is especially helpful because he doesn't make the mistake many of his friends make on Gore's behalf: namely, descending into the same invective Nader relies on to question the legitimacy of a candidacy or to speculate about and impugn motivation.
Frank's rapier in this case is his logic more than his famous wit. Last week he pointed out that he agrees with the consumer activist on many issues involving trade and environmental policy. And on many of these questions Frank has disagreed passionately with the Clinton administration and with Al Gore. The question for this fall, however, is whether there is some issue or agenda that is more important, from a progressive standpoint, than the consequences of Bush's election.
Just as it is much too early to assess even the potential of Nader's candidacy, it is also too early to assess the still-evolving candidacy's policy agenda. At the moment it doesn't even approach the kind of comprehensiveness we normally expect of the so-called major parties. But it is not too early to assess Nader's remarkable record as an activist - from the beginning 35 years ago on auto safety through scores of issues involving political, regulatory, and pro-consumer reform.
''Ralph Nader is basically before us, in his conception, as the champion of the middle-class, a kind of tribune of those people,'' says Frank. But it is precisely this focus on Economic Man or Consumer Man that Frank says provides ''confirmation of Nader's lifelong lack of interest in major social causes like civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, and poverty.''
When asked about some of these issues, Nader is not negative; that's not the point. Frank asserts that Nader has a tendency to be dismissive, however, as in a 1996 remark that he had not spend much time on ''gonadal politics,'' and he suggests that Nader's passion is more aroused in defending the privacy rights of Internet users than those of gay couples trying to form families. Fair comment.
Frank also undercuts a corollary of the ''doesn't matter'' Nader case - that a vote for him is justified in helping establish the Green Party as a political fixture on the national scene, in terms both of ballot position and access to federal campaign dollars. To Frank, this traditional argument of splinter groups flies in the face of the hard work progressives have done over the years at the grass roots fighting for their causes at all levels in Democratic primaries.
A much fuller discussion of movement candidacies and the major parties, with Frank's participation, can be found in the recent pages and on the Web site of Bob Kuttner's oracular American Prospect magazine (prospect.org). In our conversation he emphasized that the self-description of many of these groups as ''silenced majorities'' is on their best days highly argumentative.
I would make the additional point that third party movements at the presidential level need huge, overriding issues as fuel: the Cold War and race (both in 1948), race again (1968), and Washington gridlock and swollen debt (early Ross Perot in '92). I would also argue that Jesse Jackson and George McGovern did as much and probably more than those movements over time by taking their major causes to Democratic primary voters in 1972, '84 and '88.
In coming out with surprising vehemence last week for Gore, Bill Bradley said of the real choice this year, ''It isn't even close.'' Nader has gotten off on the wrong foot by arguing that the concerns of too many tens of millions of American don't matter - at least not to him.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
