It's Saturday Night Nader!

NEW YORK -- A few weeks ago, students wearing aerodynamic hiking boots and glazed expressions packed an auditorium at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor for a political rally. They applauded Phil Donahue and hooted for filmmaker Michael Moore. One of the loudest cheers of the day, however, came when Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader came out on stage and squinted into the glaring spotlight. "Could we turn the light down a little?" he asked an offstage tech crew. "This is politics, after all, not show business." The kids went bananas.

Of course, we all know that politics is>is show business, which is why George was so chicken-and-biscuits charming on Oprah and Al tried tucking away his inner android for MTV. Politics is what comes on some time between Buffy and Letterman, and it's all the candidates can do to compete with "Malcolm in the Middle" for the psychological equivalent of Nielsen ratings in viewer's minds.

Ralph Nader, at once the begrudging Luddite who handles his assistant's cellphone like a hot potato, and the scathing cultural critic who blames television for everything from childhood obesity to strip-mall culture, knows well the power of the tube. That's why last weekend he became the first presidential candidate in the 2000 election to go on Saturday Night Live.

"Look, this place is in tumult," Ralph says while sauntering into studio 8H of NBC in Rockefeller Plaza, gesturing at the plywood sets piled in the hallway lined with photographs of people like Rick Moranis and Jimmy Smits and Glenn Close, celebrities who get attention simply for existing outside their celluloid and televised images. "Have you ever been here before?" he asks, as if it's a popular local watering hole.

In fact, not only have I never been to the set of SNL, but I haven't even seen the show in about ten years and I'm seriously disappointed to find out comic Dana Carvey is no longer on it. Ralph, on the other hand, hosted the show in the '70s and has made cameo appearances a couple of times since then. He is ushered into a dressing room, leaving us journos to snoop around.

The set is an extraordinary scaffolding of dollies, wires, cables and a shallow pool of tomato sauce, apparently for use in a sketch later on. A couple of NBC lackeys studiously scrawl cue cards inside a vast maze of paint cans. Frenetic directors storm through the cruise-ship-narrow corridors and political humorist Will Durst flaunts a pair of lace-tushied green panties in the costume room.

In the studio, Rob Lowe is rehearsing a sketch in which he plays a flamboyant, squealing quasi-drag queen named Mango, shooting a porn flick with a gaggle of bikinied girls. Immediately, I think of Ralph Nader sequestered in his dressing room, a man so squeaky clean and civic-minded that he's almost priest-like, and I'm embarrassed he should be in such close proximity to jokes about "Ben Assflex" and sperm disinfectant.

As the rehearsal for Ralph's sketch approaches, a few cast members bolt past his dressing room, one of them proclaiming, "That's Ralph Nader, he's running for president." Just the fact that this actor, Tracy Morgan, has correctly identified Nader as a presidential candidate impresses me, so I ask how he feels about having Ralph on the show. "Well, I think he's good for TV and I think he's good for politics," he says, indicating some intrinsic order of importance.

Ralph is escorted to his sketch, where he listens to the director with the same stolid patience and attention with which he listens to loopy, wild-eyed Greens ask rambling questions about Tibet. Standing next to Lorne Michaels, in his crisp, gray, single-breasted suit that surely cost the equivalent of Malawi's annual average per capita income, Ralph looks like a schlepper. Almost every journalist covering his campaign has made snide gibes at Ralph's rumpled old-fashioned blue suit, and I always resisted the temptation -- "It's a classic suit," he told me once, "very durable" -- but now I see what they mean.