Candidate out in the cold who is green with envy

A thin and handsome man of 66 was absent from the presidential debate on Tuesday evening. He is a candidate for the presidency, as he was in 1996, and his name will be on the ballot in 45 states. A poll by NBC showed that 64% of Americans want to hear him debate. Still, he was not invited to take part. His name is Ralph Nader and he is a great man. The rules of the Commission on Public Debates exclude him. That body was created by the two main parties, Democrat and Republican, with funding from the very corporations which Nader has spent his life resisting: Phillip Morris, for example, and Anheuser-Busch.

Nader is an embarrassment to those who believe that politics is the art of the possible. He speaks out unequivocally because he believes that to be a full-time citizen is the most important office in America. That belief made him a powerful man as Public Citizen Number One - a tag he would hate. Nader believes that justice is the great work of human beings on earth and he has pursued that belief against all odds and with astonishing success for over 40 years.

He is an extraordinarily intelligent man but his force derives neither from his IQ nor his law degrees; instead it comes from his relentless energy and his courage. He had the audacity to oppose the murderous carelessness and complacency of major car manufacturers in the 1960s and, through meticulous work, he forced significant change in the laws of the United States. He began in 1959 with an essay in The Nation. It was called The Safe Car You Can't Buy and cited five million road accidents each year in the US with 40,000 deaths and 110,000 crippling injuries as well as 1.5 million injuries requiring medical help. Seven years later, Congress passed a series of laws which made cars safer and with that victory was born the modern consumer movement. Nader had fought the battle and in victory he demonstrated the integrity and character which have marked his career. To finance his new consumer organisation which came to be called Public Citizen, he used the large cash settlement won in an invasion of privacy suit. The case had been simple: to undermine his safety campaign, the auto manufacturers had tried to discredit him personally - and failed.

He is the Green Party presidential candidate for the second time because he believes that there is a dangerous convergence of government and corporate power. Responsive government is his aim and to advance the cause, he uses the process of running rather than wait to lobby for the office itself. Hence his desire to enter the presidential debates. In 1996, he polled 1% of the votes; this time he aims for 10% - and the polls have him on 7% already.

Nader is the debater who is not afraid to deliver bad news yet when he speaks, the voters turn out and pay the entrance fee. He gains crowds numbering up to 12,000 when Gore and Bush average around 4000 at their free rallies. The problem of indifference in a political system where only half the country votes, is shown to be soluble when he arrives in town. At his acceptance speech he focused on the shame of inequality between rich and poor in the United States. This is for him a constitutional issue: you can have democracy or great concentration of wealth in few hands.

His statistics astonish his audiences. Bill Gates has more money than the poorest 120 million Americans; the riches of the top 1% of families is greater than the combined wealth of the bottom 95%; America ranks 37th in the world for health care. Those are the sort of embarrassing messages which make it wise for the main parties to exclude him from the presidential debates. If you acknowledge those things, then you have to take political action to deal with them. And for Nader, successive governments have mortgaged themselves to corporate America. The argument is over before it has begun for the main parties. But this is a Harvard and Princeton man and he knows where influence lies. He is appealing to those he calls "the contented classes" - the top 5% of earners. He is asking them, the people who get their phone calls returned, to help the growing underclass. He continues to be, not an idealist but a hard-working realist who is, above all, brave. That is what inspires others. His vice-presidential running mate is an Anishinaabeg Indian, Winona LaDuke, who lives on a reservation in Minnesota and nurses an eight month old child. She voted for the first time in 1996 when she first stood as vice president. Be clear, however: she too is Harvard educated, an economist and a woman who pursues her beliefs without personal regard. She was named by Time magazine as one of the 50 most promising leaders in the US. Last year her taxable income was $4800 dollars.

Some years ago a rich friend of mine from Nader's home state, Connecticut, asked what my eldest son was reading at university. When I told him it was law he rounded, "Just what the world needs, another lawyer." His is a world of business deals and costly divorce. A week later, still concerned by that fierce remark, I heard, on Radio Scotland, Alan Dershowitz explain why he and other lawyers were so prolific and active in the United States. "The law and lawyers are the way that the citizen challenges the state."