Nader's good like this, breezing through a crowd. He sympathetically chats with a young man in a wheelchair who has come to talk about Gulf War Syndrome, and then jokes with a 30-year-old Republican stockbroker who came at the prodding of his lefty 22-year-old brother.

"So why should I vote for you?" Andrew Kiernan, the bespectacled Paine Webber vice president, asks gamely.

"Well, because a vote for me is a vote for Bush," Nader says without a beat. Kiernan smiles appreciatively. It's a clever use of the Democratic machine's chief spin on the Nader candidacy. Joking aside, the specter of what a Nader vote will mean follows him around these days like a big, white Republican elephant.

Just ask Carla Kjellberg, an attorney who is active, she says, in the local "progressive community" and first in line to shake hands with the legendary agitator this evening, introducing him to her 8-year-old daughter, Jean. Fifteen minutes later, Kjellberg still glows. Standing by a modest food tray (lacking the maple-covered hemp seeds of a similar Nader fundraiser two days before), she talks warmly of how Nader's public advocacy helped shape her own career and activism.

"Nader has my politics. He has my politics," she says, repeating it much louder the second time, giggling as though she can't quite believe it.

So, she's planning to vote for Nader in November? Her voice suddenly stiffens. "I still don't know who I'm going to vote for," she says, speaking softly. Nader stands about 15 feet away, and she seems afraid he'll hear her.

"There's not much of a difference between Bush and Gore, I know. But Bush is evil," she says. "I mean, we could lose the Earth." And with that, and without warning, her eyes well up and she begins to cry.

The Carol Kjellbergs of the world torment Ralph Nader these days.

Gathering below this antiseptic office suite, in the Target Center's main concourse, is an audience of 12,000 who have shown up to hear Nader and a lineup that includes recent campaign fixtures Phil Donahue and Michael Moore in what will be the election's largest paid political rally for any candidate -- a feat matched a week later at a Nader rally in Boston.

The huge crowds have yet to translate into poll numbers. He's improved some in the past week -- moving up to 4 percent from the dismal 1 percent showing among likely voters he had following Gore's fleeting post-convention bounce. It's still short of the heady 6 or 7 percent he had in July, though it's close to the 5 percent of the vote needed on Election Day for the Green Party to be eligible for federal funding in 2004 and, judged practically, for his third-party race to seem a success.

It'll be especially tough for Nader to gain much momentum now that he's been excluded from the presidential debates -- though getting tossed out of Tuesday night's matchup, even though he had a ticket to attend, might give him a mini sympathy bounce in the polls. But considering the current political climate -- unparalleled protests over globalization in the last year, Republican and Democratic nominees who have more in common than most siblings, even a consumer safety scandal (the Firestone/Ford debacle) in the headlines -- shouldn't consumer crusader and national conscience Ralph Nader be bringing in numbers closer to, say, Ross Perot's 19 percent in 1992? Why hasn't he caught on with a larger share of the liberal left?

Afterward, sitting in the bowels of the Target Center, exhausted, his eyelids at half-mast and a crusty layer of spittle coating the edges of his mouth after his hour-plus speech, Nader says he must now urge people to vote their conscience, to "vote for what we really believe in instead of what we fear."

Liberals do seem terrified of Bush. But Nader also seems to miss a crucial reason why people vote: out of hope, not protest, wanting to vote for something. He hasn't quite figured out how to run for president, rather than national scold. So there are probably a lot of people out there like Kjellberg. Nader has made them plenty guilty about their ambivalence, but hasn't convinced them he deserves their vote -- yet.

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