At first, I was amused by the massive jerking of knees which greeted Ralph Nader’s announcement that he would run for president in 2008. It was almost as if all the Hillary and Barack fans out there had been preprogrammed to start noisily “hating Nader” the moment he decided to get into the fray, and seeing all these human windup dolls simultaneously go into motion, acting out their identical episodes of righteous indignation, struck me as a comic case of much ado about nothing. Didn’t we just do this in ‘04, and wasn’t Nader a complete non-factor? I don’t care what Zogby and Nader’s campaign say, I don’t think he’ll get on the ballot in all 50 states, and I have a very difficult time believing his candidacy is going to have any impact on this election. And if anyone has earned the right to keep mounting quixotic bids for the White House every four years, it’s Ralph Nader—John McCain may be a war hero, but Nader has done more for you and me than anyone else running. Besides, he’s been tilting at windmills his entire career. What do you expect? It’s all he knows how to do.

After a few weeks went by though, I started to feel a little bit depressed. See, I voted for Nader in 2000, something I’ll never be ashamed of having done (though I do always take care to mention that I voted in a safe state, California, which Gore was sure to win). I did so for two reasons: 1) I went to a Nader rally at a high school gymnasium in San Francisco, and it was the one and only time I’ve ever heard an American presidential candidate outline a set of policy positions that actually represented how I think and what I believe is important; and 2) I really believed—and still do, regardless of the atrocities committed by the Bush administration—that the two-party system was bad for our democracy, and I wanted Nader to get that 5% so the Green Party could get federal matching funds. Thinking back on my enthusiasm then—spawned not by any illusion that Nader could win, or that he would even make a great President, but only that he might help change the way politics works in America—it’s disheartening to see him transformed into a political pariah. And this, I think, is where you actually can take issue with Nader’s choice to run again: he’s become the face of third-party candidacies in this country, and it’s a face of failure, of irrelevance. If there’s a reason to hate Nader, it isn’t for the impact he might have on Hillary or Barack—it’s for the threat he poses to our chances of ever seeing an election map not colored in exclusively with red and blue.