Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Books

by Ralph Nader St. Martin's Press. 383 pages. $24.95.

Finally, after the weirdest Presidential election in history and the endless aftermath, during which Ralph Nader took a long drubbing from former friends and colleagues, the Green Party candidate speaks out. Is he sorry about the results of his campaign? Is he repentant for running in a year when there was such a close call between Bush and Gore? Does he now acknowledge that there are deep and serious differences between Republican and Democratic Presidents?

No way! In 318 pages plus appendices, Nader does acknowledge a single lasting regret: not enough photo ops. Instead of blowing off the baby-kissing style of more mainstream pols, he should have let reporters snap pictures of him with coal miners and other beleaguered citizens. Well, there's always 2004.

Democrats who blame Nader for Bush II will want to turn to the index and find out what the Green man has to say in response to Jesse Jackson, Gloria Steinem, Anthony Lewis, The New York Times editorial board, Barney Frank, and the many other liberals who mounted a national counter-attack on his insurgent campaign, sounding the alarms that a vote for Nader could help elect Bush. Nader names names and swings back. It must have been thrilling, he notes dryly, for so many progressives to get so much attention from the Democratic Party leadership--being dispatched across the country to denounce him--after being shut out by Clinton-Gore for the preceding eight years. If they'd devoted more energy to attacking the Republicans, instead of attacking Nader, and to courting instead of bashing leftists and Greens, Gore might have won.

His reply to the Times is the strongest, demonstrating how columnist Anthony Lewis changed Nader's assertion that there were "few major differences" between the two parties to "no major differences," setting up a straw man who would be endlessly flogged for the rest of the campaign and beyond. He juxtaposes the Times's editorials supporting John Anderson's effort to get into the Presidential debates in 1980, which said his presence would help broaden political discussion, with its increasingly angry attacks on Nader for muddying "a clear up-or-down vote between Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore." He eviscerates a callow Dana Milbank of The Washingrton Post, who set out to do a hit piece on Nader and couldn't be bothered to stick around to watch him campaign. (Milbank cut out early to have beers with some college buddies, Nader...