The 66-year-old iconoclast elicits a different response on the posh, humid patios of Washington's Yellow Dog Democrats -- those souls who'd rather be "yaller dawgs" than get behind a non-Democrat. Among the party faithful, the mention of the name Nader produces brays of disgust. "Oh, really! You're not serious!" To Washington's permanent establishment this scraggly bum who gets on TV saying dreadful things about poor Clinton is just disgraceful. As for his declared intent to inject a different approach into the race, offering independent voters the option of supporting a third party -- what nonsense!

Nader's ambition is nothing less than to persuade people that third-party politics are not hopelessly divisive. Gore supporters argue that Nader can hurt the Democratic candidate and give the White House to Bush. Nader says, "It's up to Gore to grab away whatever votes we get. It's not up to us to worry about Gore." But what about the Supreme Court? "Gore has given up half that leverage," Nader said in an interview with FEED. "He and Clinton allowed the right wing to control Congress. Anyway, the key thing is [conservative Utah Republican Judiciary Committee chair Orrin] Hatch in the Senate has a veto." In any event, Nader doesn't think it makes any difference whether Gore or Bush is elected because the two-party system is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. "It's imploding into a mutual corporate bear-hug embrace so we have one corporate party with two heads wearing different makeup."

NADER FIRST APPEARED in Washington during the early sixties, when he got a job in the Labor Department thanks to Pat Moynihan, who was serving as assistant secretary under John F. Kennedy. Moynihan hired Nader to survey public transport and autos, and it was in this capacity that the young lawyer carried on his campaign for car safety. The campaign became most famously focused around GM's spiffy little Corvair, which Nader insisted was a time bomb.

Throughout the sixties, Nader stayed annoyingly focused on the consumer. The Vietnam War, campus rebellion, black power, and Earth Day were subjects he scrupulously avoided. While Tom Hayden was talking revolution, Nader was deep into the technical intricacies of the modern economy: how to apply the lessons learned in the National Bureau of Standards to the manufacture of safer cars; how to use the purchasing power of the federal government to actually effect change in the market. The closest he got to Marx was support for cooperatives, which Marx had viewed as a precursor to collectives in the class struggle. As a by-then-famous outsider, Nader was courted by Jimmy Carter and briefly flirted with insider politics.

With the near meltdown at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in 1979, things changed. Nader lent his name and staff to helping to organize one of Washington's largest political demonstrations demanding an end to nuclear power. Following Three Mile Island, Washington politicians basically halted the advocacy of nuclear power and so far have dared not resume the business in any meaningful way. Nader's own take on the environment is much harder-nosed than those of the big eco groups that have taken a united front behind Clinton. He not only has challenged nuclear power, but was among the earliest fighters for coal-mine safety and environmental regulations over the coal industry. Nader has always argued that energy policy is basic to any sort of environmental control, and has pushed for alternative energy as well as energy conservation.

ALTHOUGH HE FIRST became known for his auto-safety crusade, Nader's interests and organization now populate virtually every cranny of American political life. In fact, Nader stands out as a singularly modern political figure, not only informed about the chief dilemmas facing politics of the future -- technology, globalized corporatism, education, third party politics, health care, and, yes, family values -- but actively involved in them. Behind all of Nader's thinking is a reliance on education. All of the organizations he has started or influenced -- from Public Citizen to Public Interest Research Groups -- function like schools, with young, under- or unpaid workers scrabbling for facts, writing reports and arguing their findings.

During the post-Cold War era, the Nader forces have been at the forefront in constructing an odd political alliance against the mainstream drive for free trade led by Clinton. Nader's coalition seeks to preserve American jobs, set labor standards for workplace health and safety as well as livable wages as part of trade. With the onset of the Clinton administration, Lori Wallach, a young lawyer working for Nader, threw together a coalition of citizen groups called the Fair Trade Campaign to fight NAFTA, GATT and other free-trade measures. This coalition came to include a range of liberal groups, including the civil rights movement; the family-farm coalitions of the Midwest; religious groups led by the Methodists; and, later, conservative Republicans like California's Duncan Hunter and Dana Rohrbacher. Ross Perot's operatives joined up, and, on the House floor, the anti-fast-track forces were led by pro-labor Buffalo Republican Jack Quinn.

The hub of the Republican anti-fast-track coalition was the U.S. Business and Industrial Council -- 1500 small-to-midsize manufacturing companies in 44 states with a "protectionist" history running back to the bitter trade debates during Roosevelt's first term in the 1930s. One of the Council members is Roger Milliken, the 84-year-old South Carolina textile manufacturer and probably the most effective behind-the-scenes player against free trade. The emergence of this left-right coalition more than anything else presages the shape and direction of Nader's presidential campaign, which can yet take an entirely novel road to the White House.

NADER HAS BEEN nothing if not consistent. Through the years he has been absolutely constant in pushing for a civil society dominated by main-street and, preferably, small- business interests at play within the competitive, albeit regulated, market. The enemy is monopoly capital, its corporate executives, and the mind-numbing culture of the corporation. To him, family-values culture is the antidote to homogeneous corporate glop. When asked what he would call himself -- Socialist? Anarchist? What? -- the candidate looked dumbstruck, then said, "A progressive fighter for justice against a concentration of power in business and government."

Here we come to the soft underbelly of Nader's argument: In his view, the lawyer can play a constructive and necessary role as an intermediary between the ordinary citizen and rampaging big business. It is the sort of argument that ends up making him seem like both a technocrat and an elitist. As he said during the Greens acceptance speech in Denver: "Dominant institutions should be democratic." The corporation is created through a state-sanctioned "charter," which "should be conditioned on good behavior," and can be removed if need be. "Corporations can't be allowed to have equal power with real people." What this means is that instead of penalizing crooked corporations by fining them, or in rare occasions, sending their executives to jail, Nader would have the courts or the government take them over and supervise them until they straightened out. For example, if GM kept on selling cars that were unsafe or if Donald Trump built skyscrapers that collapsed, Nader would have the government step in and run these enterprises.

MICROSOFT IS A CLEAR EXAMPLE of how this philosophy plays out in the new economy. In 1997 Nader went nuts on Microsoft. The giant software firm had by that time announced that its browser would come free with the rest of its package, meaning, in Nader's view, a death knell for Netscape and other companies. And when Microsoft bought a piece of Apple, the only possible alternative still in the market, it looked like curtains for any sort of software competition. Nader got on the phone with friendly CEOs around the country, and Jamie Love, his consumer technology expert, drafted an e-mail letter asking the Justice Department to bring an antitrust suit. Next, Nader and Love went to the Justice Department for a high-level meeting in the antitrust division, where Justice Department aides around the country batted the issue back and forth over speaker phones.

Not satisfied with Justice's response, Nader and Love laid plans for a two-day conference on Microsoft and then carefully leaked word of it to The New York Times. Things quickly began to happen. Within a day or two, Sun Microsystems filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft. Next, the media began to carry reports of states preparing to take action against Microsoft. Suddenly, the Justice Department was back in court asking for fines against Microsoft for violating agreements on the browser.

Currently, Nader and Love are trying to bust what they think is a monopoly on domain names by ICANN, the nonprofit firm set up by the Clinton administration to organize the basic functions of the Internet. The way Love and Nader see it, ICANN is just another monopoly waiting to happen, packed with people from the telecom and economics world who are, as Love puts it, "riddled with conflicts of interest." Because of their growing interest in the net, Love now runs a special Web site, the Consumer Project on Technology, setting forth Nader's views and collecting other ideas for the future.

THIS YEAR, WITH TWO weak candidates, Nader is running full out. (He tested the political waters in New Hampshire in 1992, then ran a feeble campaign as the Green Party candidate four years later.) Finally, his long-standing defense of labor against Clinton's free-trade policies might very well pay off among rank-and-file unionists who, by and large, have not enjoyed the stock market boom and who see their jobs continuing to float off to other parts of the world. Nader also appeals to another popular political trait: He is an independent. Like millions of Americans, he won't join either the Democratic or the Republican Party. He's now running as the candidate on the Green Party ticket, but he's the first to admit he's not a member of the Green Party. It's far too early to tell how deep the political current runs. Nader now stands at about five percent in the national polls, a couple of points higher in hotly contested Michigan and slackerville Oregon, and close to ten percent in California, where he is well-known and has waged political campaigns before.

Nader aims to get on ballots in as many states as possible (he's now officially sanctioned in forty), and to win enough votes to qualify the Green Party for future government funds, thereby establishing it as an institution. Secondarily, he hopes to draw voters out and thus help to elect enough Democratic members to take back the House of Representatives. His number one issue is to "deal with the democracy gap," as he puts it. "We can have a democratic society, as Louis Brandeis said, or we can have the country's wealth concentrated in the hands of the few," Nader said recently.

But Nader is no saint. His organizations are run like boot camps and have always been known for low pay and long hours. Like the other public interest groups in Washington, he has fought off attempts by his staffs to form unions. Also, for someone who is constantly arguing that public officials disclose their business dealings, Nader has been most circumspect about his own long-rumored business activities.

Now, because he is running for President, these details have been made known. Nader says he spends $25,000 a year on living expenses, doesn't own a car and gives away fifty percent of his earnings to groups that advance his anticorporate agenda. The consumer champion has also revealed a net worth of $3.9 million with heavy investments in technology stocks, especially Cisco, in which he now holds $1.2 million in stock. Not incidentally, Cisco is benefiting from trade with China and its entrance into the World Trade Organization.

THERE MAY NOT BE anything all that novel in what Nader wants to do: a "Marshall Plan for our nation's poor children"; a dose of negative income taxation; a broader, more extensive medical insurance system vigorously supervised by government; expanding foreign trade with nations that will provide their own workers with higher wages and decent working conditions. Nothing very extraordinary, just a sensible, more equitable re-allocation of the nation's resources.

In the end, Nader's more radical goal is to build an institutional base for independent politics that has the strength to challenge the precepts of the two main parties in the United States. That's what his race is about, and it could be the most important legacy he leaves at the beginning of the 21st century.

James Ridgeway is a longtime columnist for The Village Voice and the author of sixteen books. He lives in Washington, D.C.