Ralph Nader, the prophet of the consumer and citizen movements, wants to be president of the United States. I expect he will throw his flame-tested hat in the ring very soon and the various Green parties across the country will back him, as they did in 1996, when he won 682,000 votes though he spent only the astounding total of $5,000 and was kept off the ballot in most states.
It is safe to predict that the big party machines will affect not to take him seriously. The Republican party bosses, in particular, are transfixed by the humiliating prospect that the maverick John McCain will beat their golden boy, George W Bush. But there is a very real connection that both big parties should note between Nader and McCain. It is in their appeal to the independent voter disgusted by money's pollution of the democratic process.
McCain likes to invoke comparisons with President Theodore Roosevelt, who bucked the official machine in 1912, but his modern debt is less to Teddy and more to Ralph. The main plank in his platform, an attack on the corrupting "soft" money, is pure Nader. It is Nader, unfashionable year in year out, who put campaign finance on the reform agenda and saw it taken up by hundreds of citizen pressure groups. Nader personifies the independent voter. He has been one of the principal forces keeping the idea alive, and with it the notion that alternative parties will invigorate the American system. The sensation in New Hampshire was McCain's interruption of the Bush coronation, but the deeper significance was how he did it by winning 61% of the independent vote. That was 41% of the total of all votes cast. McCain took independent voters from Bill Bradley - independents can vote in either primary - but Bush was the main loser. He attracted only 19% of the independents.
The Bush managers thought they were smart in proclaiming how far ahead he was in raising money, supposedly an object of veneration by all Americans. But the modern voter, it seems, dislikes being told his vote has been paid for in advance. Something is stirring in the American political soul. In the 60s, only 1% of voters described themselves as independent. Now 15% do, and they are more inclined to bother to vote. Third parties are burgeoning. The internet is alive with rebellion.
Arianna Huffington, the former president of the Cambridge Union, but more recently a loyal Republican wife and campaigner, epitomises the mood. Her Republican friends will wake up one day this week to discover she has deserted the party with a fighting book entitled How to Overthrow the Government. It is a denunciation of both party machines, but also a bomb-makers' handbook for civil disobedience.
The strength of the tide can be gauged by how vigorously the parties, in all regions, are blocking reforms that would enable more third parties to get on ballot papers and the televised debates. In addition to the Greens and Jesse Ventura's Reform party, there is the Natural Law party, the Libertarians, the Constitution party, and the Workers' World party.
The US is the only nation in the world in which the rules for ballot access in national elections - for Congress as well as president - are not written by the national government but by the states. They demand high numbers of endorsement signatures, from which the main parties are exempt, then fix ridiculously short periods for their collection; and the rules may be different for presidential, gubernatorial and congressional races. The Reform party, for instance, is on the ballot in 21 states, but will need another 360,000 to get on the ballot in all 50 states this year. Georgia and Texas are currently making sure nobody can vote for Nader.
The mainstream media has been paying no attention to this scandal of the states, but McCain's victory propelled the issue to the front pages last week. The pro-Bush governor of New York State, George Pataki, has had to retreat from his moves to keep McCain off the ballot in the state presidential primary on March 7.
It is a warning to the apparatchiks in the rest of the country. At their back, they should hear the electronic chariots hurrying near. Soon enough under-funded candidates will be able to dispense with buying TV time, the curse of US elections, by getting their message out through continuous video on the internet. Emailers are raising money and hell. MoveOn.org was founded by two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs convinced the public was frustrated by the way congress was distracted by the Lewinsky scandal. They were soon able to mobilise 450,000 supporters committed to spend at least $25 to unseat any congressman who voted for impeachment.
Smart opinion in the Beltway and media still looks down its nose at the third party phenomenon, just as it did in 1860 when a third party candidate won the White House. Name of Abraham Lincoln.