It’s pretty much impossible.

Last Wednesday, a group called Free and Equal Elections (www.freeandequal.org) announced that it would be hosting a debate the following Sunday at Columbia University, to be moderated by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! and broadcast live on CSPAN. A Times blog post said that Ralph Nader, the Green Party’s Cynthia McKinney, and Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party had all committed to participate. Student tickets for the event vanished within a day of becoming available.

But on Friday, the Columbia Political Union e-mailed would-be attendees that the debate was off: Several candidates had balked.

“Unfortunately, the nature of planning large-scale events with multiple participants, who at times have competing interests, is that nothing is ever set in stone until the very last moment,” the e-mail read.

Since then, third-party blogs and the campaigns themselves have buzzed with allegations about who screwed up when, in a parable of the problems with organizing people who, almost by definition, avoid organization.

The McKinney campaign says they never planned to participate—the Times article may have been confusing the Columbia event with an online debate coordinated weeks earlier by www.breakthematrix.com, a group that also promotes third-party access. Trevor Lyman, the man behind Break the Matrix as well as last November’s $4.2 million “money bomb” fund-raiser for Ron Paul, said that his group had decided to coordinate with Free and Equal when they proposed an in-person debate but backed out when it became clear that none of the candidates had really signed on.

Rosa Clemente, McKinney’s vice presidential nominee, had doubts about Free and Equal, given that leader Christina Tobin is also the national ballot access and get-out-the-vote coordinator for the Nader campaign. Tobin, who according to a colleague comes from a “staunch Libertarian family,” says that she has worked for four different minor parties over 12 years, and claimed to be nonpartisan.

But Clemente had other problems with the Columbia plan, saying it would have been “inappropriate” for McKinney to debate at a university that “is expanding and evicting black and Latino people literally every day.” And she alleged more nefarious motives behind the inability of candidates to get down to debate.

“There’s an element of sexism and racism. All those candidates are white men that are running,” Clemente said. “Cynthia will debate anyone anywhere as long as people will respect her.”

As for the Libertarians—a campaign spokesman said that the invitation was sent out too late for candidate Bob Barr, who is campaigning in Virginia and Ohio, to make it up north. Meanwhile, Barr has been doing his own virtual debates by TIVO-ing the Democrat-Republican debates and pausing them to present his rebuttals. But getting on a stage with other minor parties?

"It's always been a campaign position to debate anyone anywhere as long as the debate would have an impact on national politics," said spokesman Andrew Davis.

Trevor Lyman doesn’t think Barr’s debate-in-a-vacuum model is the way to go--“It accepts the exclusion,” he said. Instead, third parties should create an “alternate league,” like baseball and football.

“You don’t’ have to go through their channel or try to include you, you just bypass them,” he explained.

Meanwhile, Tobin has rescheduled the debate for next Thursday in Washington, D.C., and plans to announce the participating candidates on Tuesday. All candidates who “qualified for enough state ballot lines to be eligible to win the presidency” are invited. As before, the Nader campaign is on board—and this time is challenging John McCain to show up.

“It would be a gamble, but he’s already proven on a couple of occasions that he’s not averse to taking gambles,” said Toby Heaps, a Nader spokesman. “With less than two weeks to go, the chips are definitely down in the McCain campaign, and this might not be a bad time to roll the dice.”

It looks maybe a little more dramatic and meaningful than it actually was.

After I spent a while watching the conflict unfold -- young people taunt cops and make a display of forceful disorderliness, cops make arrests, eventually -- and conducted interviews with participants, I still didn't know what it was about.

The real victims, of course, were the delegates who couldn't get into the locked-down hotel for Tom DiNapoli's ice cream party.

The aging consumer advocate, in case you’ve forgotten or didn’t know in the first place, announced his candidacy on Meet the Press over the winter and, besides scoring some headlines in June when an indicted referee lent some (but not much) credence to his NBA conspiracy theories, hasn’t been heard from much since – until this week, when NBC News and The Wall Street Journal included his name in their latest poll. The result: Nader is scoring 5 percent (and, for that matter, Libertarian Bob Barr is nabbing 2 percent).

And so now we’re hearing, yet again, all about the Nader Effect. (Did you know that he might have cost Al Gore the election in 2000?) This time, though, there’s a catch. The poll found Nader (and Barr) hurting the Republican candidate, and not the Democrat. In a one-on-one matchup, Barack Obama leads John McCain by six points, 47 to 41 percent. But with Nader and Barr in the mix (and the sample size cut in half), Obama’s margin explodes to 13 points – 48 to 35. It’s a result that undercuts the conventional wisdom that Nader’s leftist agenda appeals almost exclusively to voters who’d otherwise back Democrats.

This reflects the enthusiasm gap that’s been noted in previous polling. When fringe candidates are included in national polls, their support is typically inflated, with respondents invoking their names in lieu of “none of the above.” Obama enjoys an unusually large and loyal following, and the anti-G.O.P. political climate makes Democrats who are ambivalent about him much more likely to stay loyal to their party. McCain, meanwhile, faces mistrust from within his own party and hesitation from independents who may still respect him personally but who are now deeply suspicious of anyone or anything associated with the Republican Party. And so it is McCain, with his softer and more conflicted support, who suffers when pollsters start giving respondents more choices.

This is certainly a phenomenon worth noting, but the publicity this poll is receiving probably isn’t a good thing, since it only encourages frenzied talk about all of the ways that Nader (or Barr – or even Cynthia McKinney, this year’s Green Party candidate, who figures to have her name added to a poll at some point) could cause mischief in November. This is a radically overstated concern, one that gets far more attention than it deserves. Almost certainly, Nader and all of the other third-party entrants will play no role in shaping the final outcome.

Nader’s own history suggests this. Four years ago at this same time, as he was mounting an equally unnoticed effort, pollsters threw his name into another survey – and reported back that he was running at 5 percent. That prompted a wave of familiar stories about his spoiler potential in the Bush-Kerry race. But he ended up with just 465,000 votes and 0.39 percent of the popular vote – barely ahead of Libertarian Michael Badnarik.

The same thing happened in 1996, the first year Nader ran in a general election. (Well, that may be the wrong way of phrasing it – he only consented to the Green Party’s request to field him as their candidate in the handful of states where they had ballot access and adamantly refused to campaign himself.) Polls in some of those states – like California – showed Nader in the mid-to-high single digits, and heated media speculation ensued. Had Bill Clinton’s triangulation fatally alienated him from the left? Would Nader pull just enough votes from the president to hand California and a few other states – and the presidency! – to Bob Dole? It was all foolishness. Nader finished with 0.7 percent of the vote – less than the Libertarian and U.S. Taxpayers’ Party nominees combined.

Those performances are consistent with what any third-party candidate can expect to attain. The Libertarians, for instance, have been fielding candidates since 1972 and are a well-organized and well-known bunch. Many people casually describe themselves as having libertarian instincts. But they don’t vote that way. Despite attaining 50-state ballot access in almost every election, the best the party has ever achieved is 1.1 percent in 1980. And there was a simple explanation for that showing: that year, the party nominated David Koch, one of the richest men in the country, for vice president, and Koch bankrolled an unprecedented series of five-minute prime-time ads on the national broadcast networks. Besides ’80, the Libertarians have done well to crack 0.5 percent of the vote.

There is a clear limit to the number of voters who will actually pull the lever for a minor-party candidate, even if that candidate is well known, like Nader. These candidates may score respectably in pre-election polls – when their names are actually included – but almost all of this support is an illusion that vanishes come Election Day.

Of course, that leaves the case of Nader in 2000, when he did – supposedly – cost Gore the election. But several things need to be said about this.

One is that the mood of the electorate that year was unusually apathetic (if not hostile) to the major-party candidates, Al Gore and George W. Bush. Both (but Bush in particular) had defeated primary opponents who were well liked by political independents. The economy seemed strong and the country was at peace. The divisions between the parties were blurry and the political atmosphere was calm.

As a result, Nader became a more appealing option not just for leftists, but also for independents who liked neither major-party candidate – and didn’t feel it really made a difference which party prevailed. This allowed Nader to expand his Election Day performance – to 2.7 percent. (As usual, though, that figure still represented a drop-off from his performance in pre-election polls.)

This was a truly extraordinary circumstance. The familiarity of Nader’s name made him more alluring than the other minor-party candidates (even Pat Buchanan), and the lack of a credible, well-financed independent guaranteed that Nader would monopolize the unusually high number of voters who wanted to vote against both major parties. Nader has plenty of left-wingers behind him, but they were not an overwhelming component of his coalition.

It was clear in the summer and fall of 2000 that Nader’s solid poll numbers would probably translate into meaningful Election Day support – just as it was clear in ’96 and ’04 that they wouldn’t. This year is nothing like 2000. The electorate is engaged, the divisions between the parties are clear, and voters clearly believe that it matters very much who wins. In a climate like this, theories about mass defections from one party’s base to a fringe candidate generally don’t hold up – as Eugene McCarthy, a brand-name politician, learned when he ran as an independent in 1976 and finished with well under 1 percent.

Nader and Barr and McKinney will all get their share of votes. But those shares will almost certainly be too small to matter, no matter what the polls say now.

When you buckle your seatbelts and when your air bag deploys—saving your life—you should thank Ralph Nader. The Clean Air Act, the Federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act are at least partially due to Nader’s skill as an advocate in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

I mention the history because Nader did not build his reputation as a consumer and environmental advocate by pushing symbolism at the expense of results. He must know that his popularity is trending down.

Running as the Green Party’s Presidential candidate in 2000 he received 2.7 percent of the popular vote and was seen as the spoiler who threw the election to George W. Bush. Partially in reaction to that election, he only achieved ballot status in 34 states and received 0.3 percent of the vote in 2004.

This year, he first supported John Edwards for President and when Edwards dropped out decided that the populist cause required a new candidate—himself. The point about third parties in American politics is: while they may be useful for raising issues, they are useless for achieving power.

The structure of the American political process is specifically designed to favor majority rule. Unlike some parliamentary systems with proportional representation, a candidate must achieve a plurality in a specific state or district to win an election. Small parties get nothing. You could get 25 percent of the vote in every congressional district in the country and elect no representatives. In the Presidential election, the real vote is for electors to the Electoral College. The system is winner-take-all, and whoever gets the most votes in a state gets all of that state’s electoral votes. (At least in 48 states: In two states, Maine and Nebraska, electors are selected by pluralities in Congressional districts.) If a third-party candidate received enough votes to win a state’s electoral votes and the election were close enough that no one got the 270 electoral votes needed to achieve a majority, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives. In the House, each state’s delegation gets one vote.

Currently, 26 of the delegations in the House are controlled by the Democrats, 21 by the Republicans and three are tied. If the House of Representatives were to decide this election, the Democrats would win.

The United States is a representative democracy, not a pure democracy. It is also a federation of still somewhat sovereign states. In U.S. politics, geography matters: Majorities matter too. There is little practical benefit to being a perpetual minority party. In American politics the whole game is about occupying and defining the political center. The goal is to build a tent big enough to attract a majority. Ronald Reagan knew that and built a center-right coalition. Bill Clinton knew that and built a Center-left coalition. If Ralph Nader wants to influence policy outcomes he needs to influence one of the two majority parties. Why doesn’t he do that directly? Why does he run for President?

If you run for office but can’t win, you are obviously doing it to raise issues and affect the agenda of those who win power. Symbolic candidacies and even strong third party candidacies can influence the political agenda. That’s what makes Ralphie run.

When Nader ran for President in 2000, he got a lot of free media attention. When he ran in 2004 he received some attention, but less than in 2000. In 2008, he is being noticed again, but some of the attention he is getting is probably not the type of attention he should be seeking. Instead of analyzing his issues, the media analyses his motivations.

In 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost the Presidency—in the Electoral College, or at least in the Supreme Court—many Democrats blamed Ralph Nader for the election of George W. Bush. It became clear that running a minor party race for President brought costs along with benefits. Many of Nader’s former supporters became skeptical of his motives and tactics and his national standing suffered.

Nader of course, will hear none of this. Here’s how his Web site presents his candidacy:

While it is possible to admire Nader’s persistence, and even some of his principles, the suspicion that lingers is that his campaign is more of a desperate attempt to stay in the public eye than a well thought-out strategy for influencing public policy. As 2004 demonstrated, however, even his supporters are unlikely to vote for him if the alternative is John McCain and a permanent military presence in Iraq.

Still, one can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a better way for Nader to gain our attention. Unfortunately, as this blog and other stories now in the media demonstrate—running for President still works for Ralph Nader. In fact, we’re paying attention to him right now.

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Well, George W. Bush didn’t listen to Al Gore’s advice, and neither so much did God. But Ralph Nader evidently took it as holy writ.

Thus, seven-odd years later, Nader would show up on Meet the Press on Feb. 24, 2008, preserved in the amber of his own dried-up rectitude, to put himself forward as a candidate for the presidency. Or rather as an entrant in the presidential race, which is not the same thing.

“You know,” he told Tim Russert, “when you see the paralysis of the government, when you see Washington, D.C., be corporate-controlled territory, every department agency controlled by overwhelming presence of corporate lobbyists, corporate executives in high government positions, turning the government against its own people, you—one feels an obligation, Tim, to try to open the doorways, to try to get better ballot access, to respect dissent in America in the terms of third parties and, and independent candidates.”

At that point, Russert made a signal with his hand, and a producer opened a valve, sending three feet of filthy water flooding through the studio. A dead black person from New Orleans floated by, facedown.

Or not. The political discourse operates within certain boundaries, and Ralph Nader is nothing if not part of the political discourse. Russert let him keep talking, then asked a question about Democrats blaming him for costing Al Gore the presidency. Ralph Nader, it turns out, was the victim in the room—of “bigotry” and a lack of “tolerance” by a “liberal intelligentsia” that unfairly reduced the complexity of the 2000 election to his role as a spoiler.

It is true that the blame for 2000 can be doled out to nearly everyone. Yes, as Nader told Russert, Katherine Harris—“Katherine Bush,” he said—was an active agent of the Republican Party. Yes, Al Gore could have saved himself by winning Arkansas or Tennessee (though Nader credited himself with having pulled Gore to the left, even as he faulted Gore for losing right-leaning swing states).

Sure. And when you want to get down to it (537 votes!), if the young Karenna Gore hadn’t been dumb enough to play Purple Rain in front of her mother, there might never have been a Parents Music Resource Center, and a generation of fashionably oppositional youth might not have grown up reading anti-Tipper Gore messages in the runoff grooves of their punk records, and therefore might not have been quite so disposed to regard Al Gore’s candidacy as a symptom of AmeriKKKan Corporate Fascism and to follow Nader’s plea to seek an alternative.

But eight years later—these particular eight years later? In 2000, Ralph Nader was nominally carrying the banner for the Green Party. Now Al Gore has a Nobel Prize (and an Oscar) for his recent quixotic gestures on behalf of the environment, gestures he performed in the absence of the actual environmental regulatory powers of the American presidency.

Also there are soldiers in full combat gear on the streets of New York. And we seem to have built a global network of secret torture prisons.

Whatever has Nader been up to since his sad, abortive 2004 presidential run? (That little project of his only served to remind voting people of the trauma of his run in 2000. They ran from him. Bad touch!)

His most memorable recent accomplishment was the publication of a memoir last year that recounted his “serene and enriching childhood.”

The Seventeen Traditions, put out by the former publisher Judith Regan, sold, according to Nielsen BookScan, 26,000 hardcover copies—about the same number of votes Nader received in Tennessee in 2000.

Nader’s hometown, Winsted, Conn., he wrote, was built on the Mad River, which regularly flooded the town: “Yet Winsted never seemed cowed by the regular assaults of the Mad River.”

Also, in 2005, he wrote a couple of scoldy, lukewarm columns about Katrina. That was some time after Al Gore was, on his own dime, airlifting 270 people from New Orleans to Tennessee.

The following March, Nader wrote a finger-wagging letter to Bill Clinton about unused FEMA trailers rotting in Arkansas—where, he did not point out, at least they couldn’t potentially poison hurricane-displaced poor people.

That was about it. The nation’s most famous consumer advocate, the man now inexplicably back on the TV to style himself as a crusader, is neither.

He wants to cast himself as a symbol of a commitment to finding a safe space for dissent in American politics. He is going to open a window and let the clean air of reform blow away the suffocating air of acquiescence.

But that is what the major-party candidates are running on, too, more or less. Unhappy politicians are all alike. Sometimes the problem is that the system is deadlocked by partisanship; sometimes the problem is that the system is deadlocked by collective greed and timidity. What’s important is that the system be deadlocked. Ralph Nader, nihilist, is as invested in this premise as anyone. Without it, he is nothing.

Actually, the independent bid that Nader announced on “Meet the Press” will be his fifth White House campaign: Besides his 2004 and 2000 efforts, there was also 1996, when he ran as the Green Party’s nominee in about 10 states; and 1992, when he ran as a write-in candidate in a series of Democratic primaries to protest the lack of a “none of the above” option on the ballot.

And the historical comparison that Russert probably should have reached for was not Willkie, the progressive Republican who won his party’s nod in 1940 and waged an unsuccessful but credible follow-up bid in 1944, but rather Harold Stassen, the one-time governor of Minnesota who embarked on no fewer than nine increasingly hopeless presidential campaigns between 1948 and 1992.

But the point is well taken: Nader has become the new Stassen, whose final futile campaign fittingly dovetailed with Nader’s first, in 1992. In fact, when it comes to presidential politics, he’s never been anything but a Stassen, a gadfly with a familiar name but little more than a fringe following.

In ’92, Nader’s write-in push netted 6,300 votes. In the ’96 general election, he polled 685,000 votes -- about 200,000 more than Libertarian Harry Browne, and good for 0.7 percent of the popular vote. And in ‘04, despite considerable media attention to his spoiler potential, he secured a mere 465,000 votes, beating out Libertarian Michael Badnarik by 67,000 votes.

That leaves 2000, when his performance swelled to 2.7 percent, with 2.8 million popular votes (and a nine-to-one margin over that year’s Libertarian candidate). The 2000 election will almost assuredly be Nader’s legacy: Long ago, a “he cost Al Gore the presidency” narrative took hold, something that -- as Russert’s questions on Sunday indicated -- Nader will never shake.

As Nader tried mightily to express on Sunday, the “blame Nader” reading of the 2000 results represents a dramatic oversimplification of a complex set of circumstances. There were hundreds of thousands of Democrats in Florida alone who voted for George W. Bush, for instance, just as there was the miserable campaign that Gore waged, which led to his defeat in numerous winnable states, including his own Tennessee. And the presence of several right-leaning third-party candidates -- like Pat Buchanan and Browne the Libertarian -- could also be blamed for Bush’s narrow losses in New Mexico, Wisconsin and Iowa, the same way Nader is blamed for Gore’s loss in Florida.

But the most glaring problem with this idea is the assumption that Nader’s votes must automatically represent people who would otherwise have supported Gore. Logically, this makes sense, given the audience that is likely to be swayed by Nader’s left-of-center message. But politics is never this rational. (Just consider the hordes of anti-Iraq-war independents who have voted in G.O.P. primaries for John McCain -- the war’s staunchest Congressional defender.)

Nader ran strongly in 2000 because of the unique dynamics of that year’s race, not because of his own ideological message. In picking their candidates that year, the two major parties both essentially gave the middle finger to independent-minded voters, who had been lopsidedly attracted to Bill Bradley in the Democratic race and McCain in the Republican race.

But the party establishments instead saw to it that two of the most conventional and least inspiring candidates imaginable were nominated: a wooden vice-president with a penchant for condescension, and an intellectually shallow and largely unaccomplished legacy politician whose main experience was holding the nation’s weakest governorship for six years. A popular bumper sticker emerged in the summer of 2000 deriding them as “Gush and Bore.”

That created an opening for Nader, who became the default “none of the above” candidate for many Americans across the ideological spectrum. His poll numbers ran in the mid to high single digits for much of the campaign, although they crashed on Election Day, probably because the Bush-Gore race seemed tight and casual voters decided they’d rather vote for someone with a chance of winning.

As Nader pointed out on “Meet the Press,” surveys have found that at least a quarter of his vote came from people who listed Bush as their second choice -- not Gore. And nearly 40 percent said they would simply have stayed home if Nader hadn’t been on the ballot. His “theft” from Gore was not nearly as clear-cut as history records.

The broader point, though, is that 2000 was the exception for Nader as a presidential candidate, not the rule. The “Gush-Bore” apathy that prevailed in 2000 will be absent this fall, partly because the stakes are perceived as much higher (the country was at peace and the economy seemed strong in 2000) and partly because, in Barack Obama and McCain, the two parties are poised to field candidates who won’t create a broad “none of the above” desire.

And that should sentence Nader to a worse showing than he enjoyed in 2004 and 1996, when he barely registered in the returns. His name recognition remains high, but with so many hopeless campaigns under his belt, it’s easier than ever for voters to tune him out. As Stassen himself proved, perennial candidates usually attain a high-water mark (for Stassen it came in 1948, his second bid) and then watch helplessly as their share of the electorate diminishes in subsequent elections. He also faces the hurdle of qualifying for state ballots without the assistance of a third-party organization (like the Greens, who backed him in 2000). In '04, Nader only made about 30 ballots.

Sure, there are those who will argue that any votes Nader receives will be at Obama’s expense. But Nader’s core following -- probably a few hundred thousand voters nationwide -- have myriad reasons for backing him. Many will be protest votes, from people who abhor the two-party system, or who have some kind of grudge against the major candidates that can’t be encapsulated in polling. A small chunk of the electorate is always going to reject the two major-party candidates, whether they side with Nader or one of the lesser-known third-party candidates.

No doubt, we will be subjected to countless stories over the next few months about whether Nader is about to spoil another election. But he’s really not worth the trouble.

In a conversation with NY Press scribe John DeSio:

-- Azi Paybarah

But only one candidate for Governor of New York wants to make sugar a controlled substance, convert the armories into tai chi centers, stock Bob’s Big Boy with organic produce and require people all around the state to “sit outside” and talk to each other on Monday nights.

“I am not that much, really, like the others,” said Malachy McCourt, author, radio personality, reformed tippler and now candidate for the highest office in the state. “But I could do; I could govern.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. McCourt reclined in an armchair in the living room of the 93rd Street and West End Avenue apartment where he has lived for the last 41 years. At his feet was a suitcase overpacked for an Irish festival in Milwaukee. Staring out across the overflowing bookshelves was a photograph of the stone-and-wood house where he grew up in Limerick. Above his head hung a framed advertisement, in which a younger Mr. McCourt smiled into a mug of amber beer.

“That was an old Schlitz beer thing that I did years ago, when I was red-headed and bearded,” said Mr. McCourt, who now has rabbit-white hair on his head and in his bushy eyebrows. His face is clean-shaven, but his cheeks and neck are still flush. “That morning, I was pissed—I was hung over from the night before. I don’t drink anymore. I haven’t drank in 21 years; those days were …. ”

Here he broke out laughing. At 74, Mr. McCourt still appears to be having a fine time. As the Green Party’s nominee for Governor, he gets to sound off about all the issues facing the state and also has the opportunity to add his two cents about the aforementioned competition.

“Most of the candidates are deadly,” he said. “And if you have a look at ’em, they all look exactly alike. They have the suit, the tie, and they go about campaigning with the coat over the shoulder and the finger through the little hanger thing.” (Mr. McCourt wore a blue shirt, khakis, black socks and cheap white sneakers.)

“And they actually talk about rolling their sleeves up and getting to work—those fuckers. I have been a laborer. I worked on the docks. That was my fucking living for years. These fuckers have never worked—not a day.”

Mr. McCourt’s history, of course, is exceptionally well chronicled. His older brother Frank, who Mr. McCourt calls his “education consultant,” made a compelling tale of it in Angela’s Ashes, and Malachy filled in the humorous blanks with his own best-seller, A Monk Swimming, in 1998. Little in that latter memoir suggested a life destined for politics.

But now Mr. McCourt, whose silver wristwatch is frozen at 1:15, is looking ahead. He will make campaign stops in Albany, New Paltz and Woodstock. There and elsewhere, he intends to articulate, in lilting tones, his vision for the state.

And it is some vision.

He wants to scrap the Governor’s personal plane and make the National Guard a civilian environmental corps that would “get going around looking for emissions, pollution of rivers, cleaning up the environment. There is millions of tons of steel and iron lying around our state which could be recycled—and we could sell it, you see, so they would go around picking up that.” He wants to repeal the Taylor Law, which prohibits the striking of public workers, and “take every third or fourth street and lock it off and make it green.”

He plans to prohibit the purchase of sugar by a minor without adult consent and will pass laws promoting organic food in any fast-food restaurant abutting a state highway.

“I would as much as possible discourage fried food,” he added ruefully. “It is the killer in our society.”

The McCourt Governorship would radically alter every facet of the state. The education system would be turned on its head, because Mr. McCourt—who failed out of grade school in Ireland—is opposed to any form of testing.

“If they want to test kids, the first thing is to take the test yourself, asshole—and if you pass it, then get somebody else to do it,” he said, adding: “Being born is a fucking test of itself.”

Even New York’s nickname of the Empire State is not safe from Mr. McCourt’s micromanaging style: “I’m changing the name from Empire to Prostate, because they have made it the arsehole of the world.”

While there is clearly an element of playfulness in Mr. McCourt’s candidacy—he has no expectation whatsoever of actually winning in November—his effort, at least to the Green Party, is a meaningful one. The last time they had anyone approaching Mr. McCourt’s celebrity was back in 1998, when the nominee was the cantankerous and considerably less cuddly Al Lewis, who played Grandpa on The Munsters. This time, the party actually has a decent shot of getting on the ballot. Mr. McCourt expects to have more than 40,000 petition signatures by the end of the week, despite raising only $12,000. He hopes to add to that sum with a fund-raiser held on his birthday at nearby Symphony Space on Sept. 20, as well as with another party at Connolly’s Pub, where the group Black 47 will be playing. He is even leaving appeals for contributions on his own answering machine:

“I’m standing for Governor of the State of New York and I need money,” it says.

A script for another message sits handwritten on a desk among scores of books and papers in his study, a little nook of a room between the kitchen and hallway. “Money, being the mother’s milk of politics, is badly needed for my campaign,” the script read.

Mr. McCourt has also taken to studying the strategies of other unorthodox candidacies. He is currently reading Run the Other Way, a book by Bill Hillsman, the political adman who worked on the campaigns of Paul Wellstone, Jesse Ventura and Ralph Nader.

Still, he is not unrealistic about his chances.

“We’re certainly not going to win,” said Mr. McCourt. “But we are going to be bloody victorious, because the others will be dodging me because I have a lot of challenging questions.”

Just at that moment, Mr. McCourt’s wife Diana entered the apartment eating from a bag of cheese doodles. She had been out shopping for new mattresses.

“I bought two beds,” she said.

“We are making this the Governor’s Mansion!” shouted Mr. McCourt.

Ms. McCourt didn’t answer and drifted out into another room.

Mr. McCourt kept laughing. “I said to Diana—we were walking along last night: ‘This is supposed to our declining years.’ Jesus! I’m not declining. No, I never thought that anything like this would happen.”

They’re the ones who have always come back for more, keeping Mr. Green in the business of running for office over the past 26 years, during which time he has sought election seven times—and succeeded, so far, twice.

Now, fueled with contributions from this very same band of enablers Mr. Green is at it again, attempting to overtake Andrew Cuomo to win his party’s nomination for State Attorney General.

So just who are these people who keep Mark Green going, and why—in the fashion of a pack of really, really rich lemmings—do they continue to do it?

Sometimes even they don’t know.

“We’re recidivists,” joked 74-year-old Lawrence Buttenweiser, a trusts and estates lawyer who has donated over $15,000 to Mr. Green’s campaign for attorney general, and thousands toward his six previous runs for office.

Other than being repeat offenders, Mr. Green’s share a number of other traits—wealth and a liberal political outlook chief among them. They are accomplished media, real-estate and legal professionals. If they work in the public sector, they have family money.

But in other ways, they don’t fit the typical Manhattan donor profile. For example, they tend not to live on Park Avenue, and with the exception of Mr. Wasserstein, they aren’t captains of industry. Like Mr. Green, they are wonky and earnest.

Mr. Green’s most significant non-familial contributors—his brother Stephen is also a major donor—are the same people who have been appearing on his campaign disclosures for more than a dozen years.

Of that core of supporters, four have been giving since Mr. Green’s first race in 1980. In addition to Mr. Green’s brother, there is Mr. Wasserstein, the Lazard Frères chairman and Mr. Green’s classmate at Harvard Law School, who has given $40,000 to the attorney-general campaign. Mr. Boies, a regular four-figure contributor and friend of Mr. Green’s since the 1970’s, has so far donated $15,000 to the campaign. And then there is Mr. Buttenweiser, a member of an old New York banking and real-estate family.

(Mr. Wasserstein and Mr. Boies didn’t respond to calls for comment.)

The recidivist in chief, of course, is Mr. Green himself.

“If rivals tease my candidacies,” he said in an interview, “these friends admire that I never quit because I love public service.”

After beginning his career as a protégé of Ralph Nader in Washington, Mr. Green ran unsuccessfully for the House of Representatives in 1980 and for the U.S. Senate in 1986.

Mr. Green’s 1986 Senate run, in which he was defeated in the general election by incumbent Al D’Amato, attracted a roll call of boldface-name donors, including Woody Allen, John F. Kennedy Jr., Ralph Lauren, Diane von Furstenberg, Barbra Streisand and Roy Lichtenstein, whose widow has continued to contribute.

That race also marked the beginning of a long involvement for many of Mr. Green’s biggest financial contributors. Philanthropist Anne Hess started contributing to Mr. Green that year. She and her husband, Craig Kaplan, are giving $25,000 for this race.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation; Ken Lerer, a former Time Warner executive who co-founded the Huffington Post; William Samuels, a Democratic fund-raiser and businessman; and Danny Goldberg, a music industry executive who discovered Nirvana, also began donating that year.

“It’s a different kind of passion—it’s a respect,” said Mr. Samuels. “Mark’s supporters tend to be committed Democrats who are not looking to have a seat at the table but just respect the day-to-day work.

“He tends to get the people who are more what I call thoughtful, and not the contractors, the lobbyists,” he added.

In 1993, Mr. Green finally was elected to something, winning the first of two terms as the city’s Public Advocate.

But those victories for Mr. Green were followed by disasters. In 1998, he ran again for the U.S. Senate, losing badly in an acrimonious primary to Chuck Schumer. And then he ran for Mayor in 2001, winning a racially charged primary contest before losing to Michael Bloomberg in a general election in which he was opposed by much of his own party.

No matter. For Mr. Green’s persistent donors, supporting him has become an ideology unto itself. And like the people who profess loyalty to Mr. Green’s onetime boss, Ralph Nader, his supporters tend to believe in him in a way that obviates the necessity of him actually winning.

“The kinds of people that were attracted to the Nader movement were also attracted to Mark,” noted political consultant Norman Adler.

Even though much of the political world has written him off after each successive loss, his hardy group of supporters has sustained and even multiplied their support. In fund-raising circles, this phenomenon is not uncommon—once donors give, they tend to be more willing to give again, in order to see their initial investment realized.

In this, his seventh bid, Mr. Green’s friends have once again seen that he is provided for. As of his January filing, Mr. Green had $1.7 million in his war chest, after raising $800,000 in the last cycle of 2005—essentially putting him in a tie with Charlie King behind front-runner Andrew Cuomo, who reported a balance of $4.7 million.

Mr. Goldberg spoke admiringly of Mr. Green’s persistence. “He’s not scared of long odds,” he said. “This is another underdog situation he’s involved in.”

Judith Hope, the former state Democratic Party chairwoman, recognized a special dynamic when she recently co-hosted a women’s breakfast for Mr. Green with Democratic Party fund-raiser Sally Minard.

“I’ve noticed that people tend to stay with him,” she said. “You see them showing up on invitations and in the news media and in consecutive races.”

Other significant contributors include Henry Jarecki, a metals magnate; theater scion James Nederlander; and peace activist Cora Weiss, the daughter of Fabergé perfume founder Samuel Rubin—each of whom started giving in 1993, when Mr. Green ran for Public Advocate.

There are certainly risks involved with relying on the same people for money year after year. For one thing, it becomes self-limiting after a time, allowing the candidate to rely on regulars without ever seeking to expand the base of financial support. For another, even the most loyal donors have their limits.

“Every donor in New York has a limited number of candidates that they support or are loyal to,” said one fund-raising consultant. “Mark has exhausted those folks because he’s come to them so many times and not produced.”

Mr. Green conceded the danger of attrition.

“Not everybody stays on board,” he said. “People can get financially tired, psychologically tired, so some people stop helping and other people start.”

But some of his supporters will never quit, it seems.

Mr. Green’s most loyal supporter, not surprisingly, is one he’s known from the beginning: his older brother Stephen, one of the city’s most successful real-estate moguls, who has given generously to his brother in nearly every race. And he has served an even more valuable role as an intermediary between his younger brother and the real-estate community, helping to bundle several times the total of his own contributions. (He didn’t return a call for comment.)

Stephen Green’s influence is manifest, for example, in the $20,000 contribution by developer Douglas Durst, and by the years of contributions by Newmark executive Jeffrey Gural. Some observers argue that his reach extends to the recent endorsement of Mark Green by the 32BJ building workers’ union, a group whose members benefit from continuing good relations with Mr. Green’s brother.

In addition to Stephen, Mr. Green’s sister-in-law, Nancy, and his six nieces and nephews have given him the maximum allowed for the race. Nancy has given the maximum in every race since 1993, as has his nephew Daniel. His wife, Deni Frand, has given twice: $1,127 in 1993 and $1,000 in 1997.

Mr. Green and Ms. Frand earned a combined income last year of $386,580. The bulk of his share came from his salary as president of a liberal think tank, as well as money from television appearances and books he’s written.

As of the January filing, the only contributors who had given Mr. Green the maximum allowed under law, $50,000, were those who shared his last name.

“I wish I had a bigger family,” Mr. Green remarked.

As for the others, the question must be asked: When will donor fatigue finally set in?

Never, say Mr. Green’s loyalists—at least when it comes to their candidate.

“I’m fatigued with the fact that conservatives have done so well over the past 25 years all over the country,” said Mr. Goldberg. “He’s one of the good guys.”

The Web site of one of the Green candidates for Governor, Sander Hicks, offers a reason why. Hicks is a pleasant guy who runs a good coffee shop in my Brooklyn neighborhood and who started a successful small press. His main political thrust, however, is discovering who really committed the 9/11 attacks.

From the site:

"Our campaign does not claim the entire Federal Government was behind 9/11. But a secretive compartment of the US intelligence machine has close ties to Pakistani intelligence and their shock troops, "Al Qaeda". ...[I]ndependent Green candidate Sander Hicks wrote a devastating book about the 9/11 cover-up. Carefully sourced, his book has been called one of the best on the subject.

"Sander Hicks pledges that, as Governor, he will hold an independent investigation on the 9/11 attacks. 9/11 has ushered in an assault on the soul of America, and only an independent governor, working with the movement for truth, can lead us to start the healing."

Vote Green!