WASHINGTON, July 26 (UPI) -- The plot of the classic movie "The Manchurian Candidate," just remade in a vastly inferior version, describes a plot by communist revolutionaries to get their puppet elected as president of the United States by running on a platform of extreme anti-communism.
Ralph Nader, the lifelong scourge of U.S. big business making his third run for the White House seems determined to be President Bush's "Manchurian Candidate" for the second election in a row.
Four years ago, Nader, then the proud and heroic standard-bearer of the Green Party, ran such an effective race he kept the most enthusiastic environmentalist candidate of any major party in U.S. history, Vice President Al Gore, out of the Oval Office and ensured that victory instead to Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who had made no secret of his contempt for environmentalist policies. Sure enough, Bush has since proved the most avowedly anti-environmentalist president in history.
Nader is quick on his feet and has the gift of sounding most principled when his actions actually reveal he is least so -- always a useful trait in any ambitious politician. Up against the haplessly wooden Gore and the shrewd but far from facile Bush, he chalked up more than 2 million votes, the vast majority of which would almost certainly have gone to Gore otherwise.
Several marginal battleground states may have tipped into the Republican camp because of Nader's intervention. His candidacy was certainly decisive in Florida, where he pulled 97,000 votes, and where Bush only scraped home by the now legendary or notorious -- depending on which side of America's blue-red divide you are on -- margin of 537 ballots.
So far, all polls show he may very well play the same crucial swing role in Bush's favor, just as H. Ross Perot, that example of red-blooded Texas entrepreneurial enterprise, did in ensuring Bill Clinton's easy election victories in 1992 and 1996.
But there is a crucial difference between Perot and Nader. Perot, for all his self-indulgent U-turns and theatrics, remained consistent to his core principles. And by running as strongly as he did in the political climate of the day, he achieved his primary national goal: He put the horrendous mushrooming national budget deficit so squarely in the center of the political agenda that neither a Democratic president nor a Republican-controlled Congress dared to ignore it.
Under the unlikely partnership of Clinton and Speaker of the House Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., the federal deficit was totally eliminated. Clinton left office with the federal government seeing an annual budget surplus of more than $150 billion. Under the pork-barrel policies of Bush and his own very different Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., those surpluses have long since been converted into unprecedented annual deficits of more than half a trillion dollars a year.
In his day, however, Perot got what he wanted: an unprecedented national achievement for any third party independent candidate.
Nader's heritage to the nation from his 2000 run could not have been more different. And this time, he is running on entirely different principles that look likely to guarantee exactly the same kind of result, but with infinitely graver consequences.
For Nader has been dropped by the Green Party, virtually all of whose supporters now bitterly regret they heeded his siren call and Pied Piper rhetoric to put Bush in the White House over Gore. They have dropped him like a hot potato and want nothing to do with his current presidential run.
What then is a principled idealist to do except fund some new principled ideals to hang his hat on? For Nader, one shines out above all others. In striking contrast to Kerry, he has come out loud and clear in his determination to pull out all U.S. troops from Iraq as fast as possible should he win the presidency.
In practice, however, what this means is that Nader as in 2000 is playing the James Gregory role of Sen. Johnny Iselin in "The Manchurian Candidate." By running, he is ensuring that the opposite of what he advocates will actually happen.
Polls show Nader is holding on to a core 4 percent of the electorate. That could give him as many or more as the 2-million-plus votes he took in 2000. And now, as then, they appear to be coming largely at the Democrats' expense.
Once again, Nader is making a point of running well to the left, or at least the apparent left of the Democratic presidential nominee and draining off enough of his support to ensure a second George W. Bush victory.
The shadow of Nader turned into Johnny Iselin hangs heavy over the Democrats gathering for their anointing of Kerry in Boston. But there are a number of reasons why Nader may well not do remotely as well this time around.
Third-party or insurgent candidates almost always lose up to half their support on their second runs; Just ask Perot or the far less impressive Pat Buchanan who failed to do to Bush in 2000 what he had done within the Republican Party to the president's father, President George Herbert Walker Bush, in 1992.
Also, Kerry is not Gore: that waffling Hamlet of U.S. presidential politics. Unlike the dithering former vice president, Kerry really wants to be president, and unlike Gore, he is not ignoring Nader and failing to mount any effective drive against him. Just turn to TheNaderFactor.com, and the sustained campaign that mainstream Democrats are waging against Nader becomes clear.
Finally, for all his grandstanding on Iraq, Nader sorely lacks the organized national base the Greens gave him in 2000.
Still, polls show Nader holding the balance in a neck-and-neck race. Republican money and support are flocking to Nader to keep him in the race. Democratic supporters are working overtime to highlight this development to erode Nader's old idealistic liberal support.
Two things however appear certain: First, if Nader's ploy of advocating immediate withdrawal from Iraq succeeds and gathers him renewed support, he will ensure Bush's re-election. And second, if that happens, Bush remains far more dedicated to staying the course in Iraq than Kerry. Therefore once again, Nader will succeed in achieving precisely the opposite of what he so strongly advocated.
Why is he doing this? Is he so stupid that he cannot see? But Nader has never been a stupid man.
Is Nader therefore secretly Bush's pawn or Manchurian Candidate? Will he be invited to the White House to privately gloat with the president over the colossal political scam they have pulled off between them after the November election?
If Richard Condon, the cynical, subversive genius who wrote the original novel of "The Manchurian Candidate" were telling this tale that is surely the conclusion he would have chosen. But in reality there is another, far more likely explanation:
It is that presidential ambition has corroded Nader's soul as it has done for so many woeful dreamers from Harold Stassen to Dennis Kucinich. Being center of the stage and the pivot of the world, at least in one's own imagination, is exhilarating beyond compare: It is the ultimate rush. Ensuring the destruction of everything you have claimed to live for over the past half century is a small price to pay for that.
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