EW HAVEN - It was as close to a photo-op as Ralph Nader was going to get.
On a recent sunny afternoon, the famed consumer advocate, surrounded by a moving scrum of supporters and reporters, was walking down busy Church Street on his way to speak at the Yale University Co-op.
Some passersby stopped to see what the fuss was about, and, spotting the gangly, professorial man, some let out exclamations of recognition: ''Woo! Ralph Nader! Yeah!'' Others looked puzzled.
Did Nader, who is running for president on the Green Party ticket, stop to wave to his fans or to shake a few potential converts' hands? Did he explain himself to the uninitiated? Did he squeeze a shoulder or two and urge supporters to ''Remember me in November''?
No, no, and absolutely not. Head down, stoop-shouldered, clutching his trademark stuffed brown folder, Nader appeared oblivious to it all. His people - a crowd of more than 200, mostly elderly residents and young followers - were waiting for him in the bookstore nearby. Nader, remarkably devoid of charisma despite nearly 40 years in the public eye, wasn't interested in introducing himself to the others.
''We don't parade in front of people,'' Nader said.
This is, of course, no way to win the White House. But this is also a candidate who doesn't talk much of victory in November - not of victory in the usual sense. Nader has other goals: Building up a new progressive party and making mainstream Democrats squirm. He wanted the same things when he stood for election four years ago, also on the Green Party ticket, with little effort and apparently even less success (he drew less than 1 percent of the vote).
But this time, Nader has a good deal more money in the bank, some of it from activist celebrities like Paul Newman and Susan Sarandon. And the contest between the two major party candidates is so close that, if current poll numbers persist, Nader could prove quite a headache for Vice President Al Gore.
A recent Zogby International poll showed Nader drawing 4.4 percent of voters nationally. Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, the higher-profile third party alternative, attracted 2.1 percent. The margin by which Republican Governor George W. Bush led Gore was only 3.6 percentage points. And two of every three votes that Nader attracts, said pollster John Zogby, come from Gore.
Nader's showing is even stronger on the West Coast, where Gore is counting on strong support. In California, where Nader has been involved in tort and HMO reform initiatives in recent years, he attracts 9 percent. In Oregon, he drew 7 percent. Though only 4 percent of Ohio voters said they would vote for Nader, a recent Ohio poll found he had the highest net favorability rating of all the candidates (Bush had the highest outright positive rating, but the Texas governor's negative rating was also high).
Gore finished third in that survey, which is fine with Nader, who lost faith in Democrats years ago.
''I'm not concerned with Al Gore,'' he told an audience in Worcester last week. ''He refuses to compete with me over the issues. Is there anything keeping Al Gore from coming out strong on labor laws? Every four years [the parties] get more and more alike. The only language they understand is to deny them your vote.''
Nader derides Gore, and President Bill Clinton, for their campaign fund-raising practices, for not fighting hard enough for universal health care, and on other issues. Nader calls Bush the ''corporate welfare king,'' for making huge profits from his share of the Texas Rangers after government money helped build a new stadium for the baseball team. He scoffs at Bush for staging photo opportunities with children when Texas has the second-highest hunger rate in the country.
The plague-on-both-your-houses rhetoric played very well with audiences on Nader's recent swing through New England.
Then again, most people hardly seemed to need convincing. Nader's crowds were jammed with citizens already hostile to big business and to politicians they view as selling out to corporate interests. In Boston, Nader joined a rally on the Common against the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, decrying the standardized exam as a way for test-framers to encroach on public education. In New Haven, he spoke before residents fighting a new multimillion-dollar, government-subsidized mall.
As he has all over the country, Nader had full command of the minute details of each cause, using local issues as a preface to his major themes.
In Hartford, he visited picketing workers at the Avery Heights retirement community, rattling off details of the dispute, decrying the disparity between their lower salaries and those in other nearby nursing homes and the generous government subsidies used to build the private, 43-acre community. From there, he launched into an indictment of ''greedy'' corporations, their grip on government, and the weakness of organized labor.
''We've got to light a fire under the AFL-CIO,'' Nader told the picketers, ''so that if they endorse someone like Al Gore, they get thumped in return.''
At the podium, Nader is a good deal more humorous and self-assured than he is on the street. He packs his addresses with rhetoric designed to elicit outrage in even the most complacent liberal: less than 10 percent of private employees belong to labor unions, the lowest rate in 60 years; 47 million workers make less than $10 an hour; Bill Gates has as much money as the poorest 120 million Americans' combined. And on it goes.
His pitch draws gasps from his audiences, composed of older voters who remember his days as a high-profile consumer advocate and young leftists disillusioned with mainstream politics.
Nader burst into public view with his 1965 book, ''Unsafe at Any Speed'' which exposed General Motors' and other auto makers' scant attention to car safety. Nader also played a prominent role in the creation of auto safety laws, the Freedom of Information Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others.
His profile is much lower nationally these days, but Nader insists people are still as concerned about corporate corruption, labor issues, and equality now as they were in the 1960s. Instead, he said, those issues - along with his own consumer movement - have been edged to the margin by news media obsessed with such spectacles as the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the trial of O.J. Simpson. ''It is the Roman Circus,'' he said.
Younger supporters admire Nader because of his combativeness and disrespect for mainstream politics. He is ''retro-cool'' said pollster Zogby. His savaging of Bush (''He was born on third base, and he thought he hit a triple,'' Nader says, borrowing a zinger former governor Ann Richards of Texas once aimed at President George H. Bush) and Gore (''He is, shall we say, wooden?'') prove big hits with college students.
Get corporations out of politicians' ears, Nader said, and such miracles as prison reform, solutions to poverty, and decent education for all children will follow. As president, he said, he would introduce public financing of elections, provide universal health care, repeal laws that he says hinder trade unions, and crack down on what he called corporate welfare.
Of course, Ralph Nader knows he won't be president. But he hopes that mounting this campaign will move the public agenda closer to his priorities. He wants his candidacy to build up the Green Party, so it will be able to field more candidates for state and local office. If he wins the nomination at the party convention in Denver on June 24, as expected, and garners 5 percent of the vote in November, the Greens will be eligible for federal election funds in 2004.
He hasn't joined the party himself, however. In some states, rival factions roil the Greens, and Nader doesn't want to get involved in any of that: ''I want to look outward,'' he said.
Nader grew up in Winsted, Conn., the son of Lebanese immigrants who fed him a steady diet ofinstructive aphorisms and civic values. They often took him to town meetings to teach him the importance of political involvement.
When he was 10, the 66-year-old Nader said, he came home from school and his father, a restaurant owner, demanded of him, ''Well, Ralph, what did you learn today? Did you learn how to think? Or did you learn how to believe?''
Nader brought a religious devotion to his causes. When General Motors hired a private detective to investigate him in the mid-1960s, there was nothing to find. He sued the company for invasion of privacy, and used the settlement to start his first watchdog group. He still lives an ascetic life, donating much of his speaking and writing fees to his causes. He doesn't bother with such trifles as natty suits and fancy restaurants.
''He doesn't make money, and when you go out to eat with him, it's usually a cafeteria,'' said his Harvard Law School classmate Richard Goodwin. ''He has total monastic dedication.''
On the campaign trail, Nader usually stays overnight with friends and relatives, and has his assistant drive him long distances in a rental car. But this time around, such frugality is more a matter of habit than necessity. Nader said the campaign had raised about $600,000 so far, and it expected to raise about $5 million, including matching funds. Goodwin, a longtime Democratic stalwart, hosted a fund-raiser for Nader on May 15 at his home in Concord, Mass. He is just the kind of voter Nader hopes to attract in November.
''Democrats can't just decide that the progressive elements in their own party don't have to be paid attention to,'' Goodwin said.
Two days later, actor Paul Newman held a fundraiser for Nader in his Manhattan apartment that is expected to net between $30,000 and $40,000. Others have followed, including Phil Donahue, Susan Sarandon, singers Bonnie Raitt and Willie Nelson, and even actor Warren Beatty, who until recently harbored presidential ambitions of his own. Nader is especially proud of Beatty's support, declaring in New Haven: ''Let the defections expand and thrive!''
But those who would teach Democrats a lesson today might not be willing to actually pull the lever for Nader come November, particularly if the contest between Bush and Gore remains close.
''The question is, who do you pull a vote away from?'' asked Kelly Hanna, a registered Green Party member who heard Nader speak in New Haven and admires him. ''I agree with making the Democrats know where they came from, but where do you make your impact?''
Even Sean Corvino, a young voter in a T-shirt with a picture of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski on it (he says he admires Kaczynski's writings, not his bombings), said he was worried about the same thing after Nader's speech in the bookstore.
''If Bush looks like he'll win, I'll support Gore, and if it looks like Gore is good to go, I'll lean more to the left,'' Corvino said.
And Goodwin, angry as he is at the Democrats for what he sees as the abandonment of progressives and young voters, said he will probably vote for Gore after all, because the election looks close.
Gore spokesman Chris Lehane said it was far too early to worry about Nader's impact on the Democratic vote. He said he was confident liberal voters would rally behind the vice president.
''This is not a `paper or plastic' choice when it comes down to Gore and Bush,'' Lehane said.
Nader would probably attract more voters if he were able to participate in the debates, he said. To be included, he must poll 15 percent, which seems unlikely. But he has vowed to fight Bush and Gore in any way he can. In any case, he is philosophical about his run.
''Most people look at third party starts as if the first election is a final test,'' he told one audience. ''I don't think about that. I'm very incremental. I'm a patient person.''
