CLEVELAND – It should come as no surprise that Ralph Nader has thrown his dunce cap into the presidential ring once again.

The man has become the hardy perennial of recent American presidential campaigns – neither to his advantage nor the country’s. Other candidates come and go, but Nader never leaves anymore. This will be the fourth presidential race in a row that he has entered, usually to no great effect. But in 2000, the 97,000-plus votes he received in Florida surely cost Democrat Al Gore the presidency and saddled the country with the abomination that is the Bush presidency.

There’s consolation this year, however. Nader’s emerging image as quixotic, self-indulgent and ego-driven means he’s likely to do no harm this time.

It is instructive that Nader, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, refuses to acknowledge his role in George Bush’s 2000 victory. Other minor candidates took votes that could have made the difference in Al Gore’s 537-vote Florida loss, he argues, and Gore could have won had he captured Tennessee, his home state. True enough.

But Nader’s campaign, unlike others, was meant to provide a liberal alternative to Gore, whom Nader said, in error, was no different from Bush. And in Florida, it worked perhaps better than Nader intended – or can bring himself to admit.

The saddest part of this saga is the damage it has done to Nader’s reputation – and perhaps to the consumer cause he has so admirably championed. Beginning with his crusade against unsafe American autos 40 years ago, Nader and his “raiders” led the way in the rise of consumer consciousness and protective legislation. He was an icon; Barack Obama, ironically one of Nader’s targets this year, called him “a hero” over the weekend.

But it’s hard to escape the feeling that all that idolatry has gone to Nader’s head, that he has made the ultimate error for a public man. He has come to believe all the praise he has received, to believe that he alone has the answers and that politics, particularly presidential politics, requires not merely his wisdom but his presence as a candidate. In the process, he begins to appear ridiculous.

Over the weekend, on television and in newspaper interviews, Nader made clear his dissatisfaction with all the major candidates. Hillary Clinton he dismissed as “Wall Street’s favorite Democrat” and John McCain as a warmonger. Barack Obama earned faint praise as “a person of substance” but then drew Nader’s scorn for selling out “his better instincts and knowledge” to win the Democratic nomination.

The reactions to Nader’s announcement were overwhelmingly negative from Democrats campaigning here for next Tuesday’s critical primary. They don’t see Nader as so menacing this time but don’t want any distraction in an election year that looks like theirs to lose. Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, understandably, saw the news as positive – “he’s likely to take Democratic votes.”

But it was Obama who put his finger on what seems to drive Nader these days. “I don’t mean to diminish him,” Obama said, “but I do think there’s a sense that if you’re not hewing to the Nader agenda, you must be lacking in some way.” Industrial-strength arrogance.

Nader is not the first respected public figure to trash his own reputation with kamikaze presidential efforts that made him seem foolish or worse. Harold Stassen, the boy wonder of Republican politics as governor of Minnesota in the 1940s, ran regularly for the GOP presidential nomination into the 1970s but was never taken seriously after the first one or two times.

But Stassen had a money motive as well as a lust for the political limelight. He advertised himself as an international lawyer and used the many presidential campaign outings to solicit business. Nader isn’t driven by the dollar. He’s hooked on ideas – the corrupting power of corporations in Washington; the lack of a countervailing consumer power in the national capital; the gold-plated Pentagon budget; the way the legal deck is stacked against unions; the lack of a single-payer, federally financed national health care system.

Nader’s agenda and his thinking on public policy deserve to be taken seriously. He has given his whole life to this. It’s his belief that he can best advance his ideas as a presidential candidate – railing against both parties rather than trying to influence one or both and their candidates – that makes him seem little more than a common scold at best, a victim of his own ego at worst.

John Farmer is national political correspondent for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. E-mail him at [email protected].