remain sympathetic but unmoved by the plaints of Green Party supporters that Ralph Nader belongs in the debates.
Yo, Ralph: If you wanted TV face time to confront establishment politics, you should have run in the primaries. Senator John McCain had the guts to do it with his signature issue of campaign finance reform. McCain took his case into the teeth of the gale and wound up losing the Republican nomination. But he made the fight where the fight had to be made: in the mainstream. And like Alan Keyes, Gary Bauer, Senator Orrin Hatch, and other GOP also-rans, Nader could have had his 15 minutes of TV time if he'd gone the primary route.
Instead of staking his claim in the Democratic Party, which is far friendlier to his causes than the GOP, Nader took the third-party route. Fair enough. It's a free country. But when he made that choice he forfeited the right to bellyache about being unfairly excluded from the gold medal round. It's like the Olympics or the World Series: If you don't go through the qualifying or the playoffs, you don't get the shot at the gold.
The Man Who Is Not There in tonight's second presidential debate might have livened up the Gore-Bush conversation and made things more interesting.
But Nader does not belong in the ring tonight despite the howls of outrage from the consumer crusader's supporters.
The bipartisan commission that settled ground rules for the three presidential and one vice presidential debates set a 15 percent polling threshold for including third-party candidates. The threshold for qualifying for federal election funding is only 5 percent. And when Nader was rudely turned away at the door from the Boston debate last week, it didn't look right.
In the AP poll roundup, Nader was favored in single digits thus: 4 percent (CNN-USA Today-Gallup), 7 (ICR), 4 (Voter.com Battleground), 5 in Colorado, 4 in Florida, 4 in California. In most states Nader's numbers mirror the poll's margin of error, typically 4 percent. Pat Buchanan, who successfully heisted the $12 million in taxpayer boodle earmarked for the old Ross Perot Reform Party, trails Nader everywhere.
Ralph can be no more than a spoiler in the presidential contest, though he could help the Green Party win ballot position in some states for the future and corral some federal funding in the bargain. That's legitimate, but it could hurt Gore and help Bush.
In the latest Field Poll in California, Gore leads Bush by 13 points. It's highly unlikely Nader's 4 percent will cost Gore the state's 54 electoral votes. But in Florida, where Gore leads Bush by only 3 points, Nader's 4 percent could well tip the balance to Bush. I think Bush will win Florida. But New York, like California, is beyond Bush's grasp. The Republican also trails in key states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Illinois. But in states like Wisconsin and Ohio, Nader's handful of votes could spell the difference.
The Nader claim that there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two major parties is simply not believable. No difference? On abortion? Tax cuts? Succoring the Great Unwashed? Giving help to working families? What's he smoking? Ralph has to say that to win over greenish liberals who'd otherwise glumly vote Democratic on the ''lesser of two evils'' rationale. There is no shortage of self-righteous ''I have a right to vote my conscience'' reasoning from Green partisans. But with the third-party option comes the obligation not to whine on Nov. 8 if pulling the lever for Nader hands electoral votes to the GOP ticket from Big Oil Country.
In the biblical parable Matthew 20, the laborers who ''have borne the burden and the heat of the day'' complained when the steward gave the same pay to those who worked only from the 11th hour. ''So the last shall be first and the the first last, for many be called but few are chosen,'' says the Good Book. Ralph came late to the party; he's getting his ink. But he could have debated all winter and into the spring, like McCain. You can run, Ralph, but you can't hide from the winnowing process that squeezed you out of the debates. That was your call.
David Nyhan's e-mail address is nyhan@globe.com.
