Scapegoating is a long and honored political tradition. A candidate gets in trouble and you find somebody on the team -- of course, never the candidate -- to take the hit: Every pollster or campaign manager worth hiring is also worth firing.

But with Gore's once-comfortable presidential prospects growing ever more desperate, the usual rules of scapegoating have taken a new spin: Fingers are pointing to political activist Ralph Nader. New York Times editorial page editor Howell Raines decries Nader for "mischief," and compares Nader supporters like Phil Donahue to children in need of a "reprimand" and a "civics lesson." Liberal Gore supporters like Eric Alterman and Todd Gitlin attack Nader and anyone who votes for him as self-destructive "left fundamentalists" who will be responsible for a victory by George W. Bush. Democratic attack ads make the same point.

I am a skeptic about Nader's presidential run, largely because of the stakes of the federal courts, and I doubt I will vote for him.

But in a campaign between two such midgets of history as Gore and Bish, the venom of attacks on Nader -- an American hero, someone who has made a career of speaking truth to power -- is nothing but a symptom of everything wrong with the Democrats, and why Gore's campaign seems locked in a downward spiral to disaster.

I went to hear Nader when he came a couple of weeks ago to New Haven, Conn., the old industrial city where I live. As everywhere else in the country, Nader packed one of the largest venues in town, Yale's Battell Chapel, while hundreds more were turned away. Raised not far away in the northwestern Connecticut town of Winsted, Nader spoke quietly, movingly, about the poison of growing up in a corporate culture, about the way privatization of public resources is eroding democracy, about the need to forge alternatives to corporate globalization.

Afterward, I spoke to many of the people in that crowd -- some students, some activists, some people who came simply because they were curious. What startled me was that half the people who leapt to their feet to cheer Nader told me they had no intention of voting for him.

So why were they there? "This isn't really about the election, about Gore vs. Nader or Democrats vs. Greens," said one young woman. "I may vote for Gore, but Nader speaks for me anyway."

"Nader speaks for me anyway." Can you honestly imagine any Democrat anywhere feeling such an affinity for Gore -- or, for that matter, any Republican for Bush? That woman's remark suggests that there is something far more essential going on with Nader's campaign than can be understood by the number of votes he pulls on Tuesday.

Nader's Green partisans and the Democratic Nader-bashers have both got it wrong. Whether Nader ends up drawing Gore's margin of defeat, as Democrats fear, and whether he can get 5 percent of the vote and so qualify for federal matching funds, as Greens hope, are both utterly irrelevant to his campaign's genuine achievement -- and to Gore's prospects.

What Nader has done -- and he has done this already, regardless of whether a single voter pulls the lever for him -- is give voters permission to articulate two words never uttered during the three televised presidential debates: corporate globalization.

Globalization is the elephant in the room of American politics, the unavoidable subject everyone turns away from in embarrassed silence. This elephant in the room is why Nader's campaign has been the only source of energy and wild-card unpredictability in an election otherwise marked by fatalism on all sides.

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