Nader Lets Loose

HOUSTON -- Ralph Nader is clearly running for president on a completely different planet than the one inhabited by Al Gore and George W. Bush.

While the Democratic and Republican nominees squabble over how to invest the current bountiful government surplus and improve upon the United States' unprecedented economic prosperity, the Green Party candidate is battling grimly to counteract American voters' "total loss of control" of a country he says is actually worse than the nightmare envisioned in George Orwell's "1984."

"Orwell just didn't have a big enough imagination," Nader said in Austin, Texas Wednesday. A more accurate futuristic novel, he said, is Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World."

With his famous rumpled blue suit, droopy eyes, hunched back, Ichabod Crane fingers and a voice that sounds perpetually in need of a glass of water, Nader can come across so dour he makes Jimmy Carter look more bubbly than Richard Simmons. When he begins rallies by droning: "Welcome to the politics of joy," there is a great temptation to laugh.

Yet, despite first impressions - and after some shaky attempts earlier in the campaign to leaven his bleak worldview with jokes involving a rubber chicken -- Nader is actually running a campaign full of good humor and crowd-pleasing punchlines, especially in the last few days.

In Austin on Wednesday night, for example, Nader announced apropos of nothing in particular that he was launching an initiative to reduce the classical seven-second soundbite to a single second ... by transforming them into "soundbarks." Whereupon he answered a mythical question about Alan Greenspan raising interest rates by letting out a mangled-sounding canine scream.

This newfound looseness at least superficially softens Nader's depiction of a litany of problems completely off the radar of Gore and Bush. Of course, it is hardly surprising that a lifelong anti-corporate consumer advocate running a reformist campaign would have a darker view of the public condition than the dominant mainstream candidates. But some of Nader's policy prescriptions, while very popular with the thousands of supporters who pay to see him almost every day, seem almost willfully antithetical to the conventional wisdom on voter tendencies.

For instance, in San Antonio on Thursday, Nader actually called for an increase in Internal Revenue inspectors. "I don't like the idea of the majority of American people fairly paying their taxes, and a few millions of people not paying their taxes," he explained. "These are a lot of rich people, too."

Those taxes, too, would be increased in several areas under a Nader presidency, to help pay for his smorgasbord of aggressive policy iniatives.

"You apply a modest 3.5 percent payroll tax to cover universal health insurance, and if anything more is needed you have the biggest source of overdue taxpayer dollars in American history, and it's called the trillions of dollars in stock transactions every week that are not taxed one penny," he said. "One quarter of one percent of stock transaction tax will bring in over $100 billion a year. It also serves another purpose -- it dampens speculation. We should tax things we don't like first, like pollution, rather than things we do like, like honest labor."

Nader didn't elaborate on the differences between a "payroll tax" and taxing "honest labor."

While Bush sounds the popular alarm against the influence of the deeply unpopular "trial lawyers" over the Democratic Party and the country as a whole, one of Nader's biggest applause lines is about how he's "sued the federal government more than anyone else in history."

Bush "gleefully declares how he restricted the rights of Texans when they're wrongfully injured from having their full day in court before Texas judges and Texas juries, and he did this on behalf of corporate perpetrators who produce toxic chemicals that produce disease and who produce defective products," Nader charged Thursday.