In a television interview in 1992, former President Richard Nixon dismissed the pyrrhic campaign of his former speech writer and attack dog Patrick J. Buchanan, who at the time was winning a fair number of votes in Republican primaries by defining George H. W. Bush as a failed chief executive. "He'd rather be right than President," Nixon said.

Nixon, the staunch anticommunist who went to China and was the architect of the Détente policy of accommodation with the Soviet Union, the free market Republican who imposed wage and price controls and created the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, was always willing to rise above any ideological principle for political gain. Buchanan's insistence on dogmatic "paleo-conservative" purity struck Nixon not so much as futile, but as something alien to his understanding of politics.

He might well have said the same thing about consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who has announced his intention to run as an independent candidate for President.

Citing the dependence of both parties on contributions from corporate interests, Nader declared that, as he had in 2000, he would once again seek the White House. Democratic partisans, who believe that the consumer advocate's candidacy cost Vice President Al Gore the 2000 election by siphoning off votes in states where the margin of victory was razor thin, cringed at the prospect of another run by Nader.

No candidate can mount a run for the White House unless he gets his name on state ballots, an expensive proposition even for the two major parties. Nader has found some unlikely benefactors for his 2004 campaign: Republicans. The Center previously reported that Republican donors funneled thousands of dollars to the Nader campaign, and the Republican Party has even helped to collect signatures on Nader's behalf in New Hampshire, Oregon, Nevada, Michigan and Iowa—all important battleground states that will have a significant impact on the presidential race.

Many Democrats believe that Republican contributions and support for his efforts to get on the ballot in crucial swing states like Oregon are intended to draw votes from the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.

Nader, of course, disagrees. Responding during his February campaign announcement on Meet The Press to criticisms that he tipped the balance towards George W. Bush in the closest presidential contest in history, Nader said, "This is a fight for all third parties." The third party under whose standard he ran in 2000, the Greens, rejected him as their candidate in June. Undeterred, Nader had another rationale for his candidacy: He was representing the approximately 100 million eligible non-voting Americans in 2000, an assumption of leadership he has to date not abandoned.

Ralph Nader was born on February 27, 1934, and grew up in a 10-room house in Winsted, Connecticut, a small factory town just west of Hartford. The youngest of four children born to Lebanese restaurateurs Nathra and Rose, Nader grew up reading muckrakers Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair and won a scholarship to Princeton University, attending during the same period as the current Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. There he led one of his first activist campaigns, against the university's use of DDT, after witnessing dead flocks of sprayed birds on the same lawns that students routinely traversed. Nader graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1955 and in 1958 received his degree from Harvard Law School.

Arriving in Washington, D.C., in 1963, Nader worked as an assistant to the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then the Assistant Secretary of Labor. Two years later, Nader published his first book, Unsafe at Any Speed, a highly critical look at General Motors' Chevrolet Corvair and the safety of the automobile industry. The book led to congressional hearings, a public apology from GM for hiring detectives to shadow Nader in an attempt to discredit him and, ultimately, the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, and the creation of the National Transportation Highway and Safety Administration.

Nader settled with GM over privacy violations for almost a half million dollars and used the money to launch several investigations and nonprofit groups. By 1974, Nader and his various organizations, including the Center for Study of Responsive Law, Public Citizen, and the Center for Auto Safety and the Public Interest Research Groups had produced more than 20 books and reports. He and his groups were instrumental in the creation of governmental bodies and legislation, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Clean Water Act, and the Freedom of Information Act. Such actions added to Nader's reputation as a never-resting crusader for justice. The New Republic, in a comment on his devotion, nicknamed him "Saint Ralph."

By the late 1980's, Nader's star had fallen considerably in Washington. Some of his former supporters were put off by Nader's overactive and critical management style. Another reason for Nader's wane was the increased prominence of business, represented both by the new guard under Ronald Reagan in Washington, for whom business was one of the prime constituencies, and the increased power of new business groups modeled after the very citizen organizations Nader championed. But Nader was also criticized for a lack of transparency in some of his organizations. For example, a 1990 Forbes magazine investigation alleged that Nader's organizations were running afoul of the very transparency laws and principles he had espoused, that they were supported by plaintiff's attorneys and that Nader himself, contrary to his public persona, lived in a $1.5 million mansion with the deed under his sister's name. Though a co-author's former work for Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch made some readers question its objectivity, some of the article's allegations were true. Some Nader-founded groups did have inscrutable financing, and Nader's reported annual income, including from speaking fees, was roughly $300,000 a year, though he claimed to spend less than $15,000 a year.

Nader's return to the national spotlight in the late 1980s was also the beginning of his foray into electoral politics. In 1988, the consumer advocate stumped for Voter Revolt, a Californian activist group behind Proposition 103, which sought a reduction in insurance payments. After a massive campaign in which the insurance industry spent $70 million on television and other ads to defeat the measure, Nader and the activists carried the issue.

His appetite whetted, Nader made limited moves into politics following the success of the ballot initiative. In 1990, he returned to California, opposing three more initiatives and providing support in the Democratic primary for gubernatorial candidate John van De Kamp over Dianne Feinstein. In the 1992 and 1996 elections, Nader cast himself as a low-key independent presidential candidate, spending less than $5,000 each time, according to reports he filed with the FEC, beating both Sens. Bob Kerrey and Tom Harkin in the 1992 Massachusetts Democratic primary. Other campaigns during that period included contesting a congressional pay raise and defending the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit, leading him to admonish former President Bill Clinton for a repeal that Nader said would increase highway fatalities.

In the 2000 election, Nader received almost 3 million votes in the closest election in United States history, amounting to 2.7 percent of the vote. That year, George Bush won the Electoral College and the presidency, carrying Florida, where many Democrats argue that Nader siphoned off roughly 40,000 votes from Al Gore, who would have needed less than 600 of them to win Florida and the election.

The 2004 election already shows signs of a highly polarized electorate where a few thousand votes one way or the other may decide the election's outcome. Nader's message, that corporate power has subverted our democracy, is consistent with his 2000 campaign, and he has devoted much of his rhetoric to corporate meltdowns of key Bush supporter Enron and other companies, and founded new groups like Citizen Works, a nonprofit that seeks to "advance justice by strengthening citizen participation in power."

Nader has had limited success so far in gaining entry onto state ballots. His sole endorsement, from a branch of the declining Reform Party, put his name on the ballots of six states, two of which most analysts regard as swing states. Arizona and Illinois Democrats have reportedly recently filed suits to keep Nader off the ballot in their states, and groups have petitioned the Federal Election Commission, charging that Citizen Works and Nader's presidential campaign have improperly mingled resources.

In states where he gets on the ballot, Nader's vote total will likely depend on whether his supporters view him as either their standard bearer for a progressive third-party movement or as George Bush's best guarantee to serve four more years—whether they'd rather go with what they believe is right, or what they believe will elect a President.