After the Rollercoaster Ride.

The mood at Republican headquarters was somber at 9:00 on election night. "I thought by 8:30 it would be a big sweep: It's morning in America and all that," one man in a pinstriped suit told a group of anxious staffers. "We're actually worried about the Senate now!" a colleague muttered. Over at the Democratic National Committee party at the Mayflower Hotel, there was jubilation. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton of Washington, D.C., was dancing behind the podium, jumping up and down and raising her glass, as giant TV screens announced that Gore had won the trifecta--Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. In that jubilant moment--before the whole election was turned upside down, with Florida bouncing in and out of the undecided column--the Democrats sounded almost conciliatory toward Ralph Nader.

"Ralph Nader is a hero to the social justice movement," said Joel Segal, legislative assistant to Representative John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, who campaigned strenuously against the Nader vote. "But what he did was very dangerous. He was right on the issues, but wrong on the politics." Martin Luther King never ran for President, Segal pointed out. "He worked with LBJ." Nader ought to have worked with the Democratic Party instead of running against it, he said.

Delegate Norton called the Nader phenomenon "a natural reaction after eight years of centrist Democrats." But now it's time for the Greens to "grow up." And "the first thing Al Gore should do is reach out to the Nader folks--not to the Republicans, who we've got to beat, but to the Nader folks," she said.

Norton had been doing some reaching out herself, talking to Nader voters all night at D.C. polling places. "They're almost all young, white kids, and I got together with my black constituents, and we pounded `em hard," she said, smiling. "I say to the Nader folks, we feel betrayed, but we'll forgive you, as long as you don't give the election to Bush."

Moments later, the news changed. Florida was no longer officially in the Gore column, and the party at the Mayflower died.

Only two blocks away, at the Capitol Hilton, meanwhile, the Republican party was beginning to swing. Under crystal chandeliers, with a more lavish spread than the Democrats and a live band blasting "Sweet Home Alabama," the Republicans were cheering wildly as Florida was declared for Bush on the big screens. "These guys are flipping out! They hate the Republicans--just look at [CNN anchor] Judy Woodruff!" yelled a blond woman wearing a "Yo Quiero Bush" pin with a picture of the Taco Bell dog. "They all say they'll leave the country. I want Bush to win so Rosie O'Donnell will go to Argentina."

While emotions rose and fell at the Democratic and Republican victory celebrations along with the vote tallies on CNN, over at the National Press Club the Nader rally was much calmer. Instead of focusing on the minute-by-minute results from the polls, the crowd was raptly listening as Nader gave the kind of speech he had been giving at rallies around the country. Standing next to him was a former Secret Service man with a wire in his ear. The bodyguard was added to the campaign because of the surge in attention and the anger Nader has generated among Democrats.

"The Green Party is now the third largest party in the United States after only eight months of campaigning," Nader said. "It's the fastest growing party, and it's the most spirited party--even up against the enormous odds of an entrenched two-party system and a media obsessed with the horse-race aspects, instead of the issue aspects, of the Presidential campaign."

The essence of Nader's pitch was never more at odds with the tenor of political discussion in the media than it was on election night. As the country became more and more intensely focused on the minutia of the tight Presidential race, Nader talked in broad terms about restoring democracy, about motivating people to run for office who had been turned off because "they didn't want to grovel, cheapen themselves, or surrender to craven interests." In 2002, he predicted, "We will see tens of thousands of new candidates, some of whom may be watching us on TV right now."

If the Nader crowd was not that focused on this year's election results, the networks were keenly aware of Nader's effect on the tight national race. He gave live interviews to Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Larry King, while a crowd of about 200 supporters watched and cheered. This prompted another speech by Nader: "Watching these election results, our efforts are now quite clearly affecting the outcome," he said. "This is the message we want to send to the two major parties--that you can no longer ignore us." Off the record, some of his staff said they wished Gore would win, because with a Republican victory and less than 5 percent for Nader, the Democrats are sure to lionize Gore and dismiss the Greens.

Nader did not say anything about the disappointment of falling far short of the 5 percent vote that would have earned federal matching funds for the Greens. Instead, he talked about the "young generation" that will transform politics.

"I call on young people to put an arm to the wheel of justice," he said. Young people "are not going to be squeamish about building a new, victorious progressive party," he said. "They understand that lesser-of-two-evilism erodes the moral basis of our democracy. Voting for the least worst only legitimizes a process where both parties get worse every year."

Nader says he will set up a citizen's debate commission to open the debates to serious third party candidates. His nineteen local field offices around the country will become storefront operations working on environmental and civic issues, nurturing a grassroots movement, he said, adding that eventually citizens will recapture their democracy from corporate influence. But while the Greens point out that they have a list of 150,000 volunteers nationwide and 900 Students for Nader groups across the country, there is only the bare beginning of a party infrastructure left behind by the campaign.

In the context of the election, Nader's goals sounded outrageously optimistic and long-term. Democrats who sympathize with his message, even some of his own inner circle, could be forgiven for worrying about the ire of their more pragmatic liberal friends. Some were already rehearsing their answers.

"I think the Democrats need to go into exile to figure out who they are," said Greg Kafoury, a lawyer in Portland, Oregon, who helped persuade Nader to run this year. "I don't relish the idea of the Democrats going into exile at the Presidential level, without the House and Senate in Democratic hands.... But Gore didn't carry his home state! Are they seriously going to blame us for this? They sold people out, and they're paying for it."

"The only person who could lose this election for Gore was Gore," Nader said.

Indeed, the candidates ran a race designed to produce no clear mandate. Aiming at the Homer Simpson swing vote, Gore and Bush bombarded the populace with ads, tried to confuse people about their differences, and turned off a lot of prospective voters. As the election drew near, both candidates campaigned maniacally, while doing their best not to say much of anything.

It was in this ideological vacuum that Nader's candidacy naturally arose. As the two parties break all records for fundraising and soft-money spending on advertising, it is inevitable, Robert Reich has argued, that we will have more and more close elections while at the same time people will care about them less and less, feeling increasingly estranged in their own democracy. Nader offers a quixotic alternative vision, in which voters don't tune out but take charge.

Worrying about the election results and trying to figure out Nader's effect, I asked one Nader supporter, David Gaines, campaign coordinator for Loudoun County, Virginia, if the Democrats he knows will be mad at him. His answer reminded me of the gulf in perspective between what might as well be two different countries, one of vote-counters and one of people who think in terms of major social change.

"I've never voted for anyone who got more than 5 percent," said Gaines, a Libertarian until recently. "I got very concerned about the unbelievable pervasiveness of commercialism and corporate power." Gaines's example is football. "Does anybody care that the Orange Bowl is now the Office Depot Bowl?" He agrees with Nader that the issues the Green candidate ran on are not extremist. Selling pornographic and violent entertainment to children, deregulating big business monopolies, dismantling the safety net, and destroying the environment are all part of the rampant corporatization of American life, he points out. "Everybody--liberal, conservative, whatever--recognizes it. But the only Presidential candidate talking about it is Ralph Nader."

Living in South Florida, with its commercialism and sprawl, changed Gaines from a Libertarian to a Naderite. "Libertarianism has an admirable, consistent philosophy. You live your life the way you want to, as long as you don't hurt anyone else. But the practical consequences of it became absurd."

This strikes me as a quintessentially American political viewpoint, not at all out of the mainstream. But Gaines was unperturbed by the radicalism of Nader's effort. "We have to decide when are we going to do this? When the pollsters tell us it's safe to form a third party?" Gaines said. He compared Nader's effort to that of Eugene Debs, who was shot at, arrested, and dismissed as a crackpot for demanding the forty-hour week and women's right to vote. "Radical socialists risked their lives! Who risks their lives today?" Gaines said. "People who are vicious in their attacks on Nader's candidacy demonstrate a lack of understanding of radical political history. No one handed the industrial workers trade unions. This country was born in revolution."

I asked Eleanor Holmes Norton before the election turned sour if she believes, as Nader does, that progressive Democrats would have more pull within the party. "Yes," she said, "but we need to remember twelve years in the wilderness. We on the left have to be as brilliant as the Roosevelt Democrats were in putting together their coalitions. We have to bring together people who are against abortion, people who are against affirmative action--it's real tough--but who are with us on the bottom line issues."

I suspect Norton is right. But so is Gaines, when he says, "We're around to enjoy a lot of freedoms we enjoy today because of wacko, pinko radicals 100 years ago."

Ralph Nader is one of them. More power to him.

Ruth Conniff is Washington Editor of The Progressive.