Enter the Un-Candidate : Politics: Ralph Nader is a rarity among presidential contenders: He doesn't want to end up in the White House--he just wants people to listen.

By PAUL RICHTER

Jan. 31, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

CONCORD, N.H. — The candidate’s hair is tousled, his suit ill-fitting and his message gloomy. But Ralph Nader, the antithesis of the telegenic politician, seems to be just the person many New Hampshire voters have been longing to see in the state’s presidential primary.

“I’ve listened to politicians so long, and finally this man is talking sense,” computer programmer David Holt, 35, said after Nader spoke--for almost three hours--to an audience of 200 at Franklin Pierce Law Center. “I’m in a state of shock.”

Nader, the warhorse of populist activism, is urging voters to write in his name on the Feb. 18 Democratic ballot to register their disapproval of other candidates and to bring pressure for reforms he says give more power to average citizens. His goal, he insists, is to promote the agenda, not to become President--which makes him a sort of non-candidate of anti-politics.

A sour economy has helped make this a banner year for alternative candidates in New Hampshire: The primary ballot lists 36 Democrats, 25 Republicans and 1 Libertarian, and it seems all but President Bush are trying to portray themselves as outsiders.

But on many nights Nader draws bigger crowds than any presidential aspirant: 900 at Exeter, 650 at Nashua and 600 at tiny New London. “The turnout for him has been phenomenal,” says Joseph Grandmaison, a former state Democratic chairman.

The crowds come partly because of the enduring celebrity of a man who drew public attention with his 1965 book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” an attack on the design of Chevrolet’s Corvair. (“People still come up to talk about their Corvairs,” says Ken Deutsch, Nader’s state coordinator. “They tell Ralph how much they liked them.”)

People are also drawn to Nader’s attacks on big government and big corporations, which play well in anti-government New Hampshire, where so many seem to view Washington politics as a dismaying spectacle they see through the big end of the telescope.

Nader also has a special familiarity here because he made frequent appearances in New Hampshire in 1989 and 1991 to speak against congressional pay raise.

Nader says he doesn’t care why they’re coming, so long as it focuses attention on his “citizen-power agenda.” He calls for term limits for elected officials; full public financing of elections; broader citizen rights to sue for remedies; greater public access to TV and radio; government help in the creation of voluntary watchdog groups; speedier access to government and corporate information, and broadened powers of initiative, referendum and recall.

Nader says he hopes to get “a few thousand” of the 100,000 or so ballots cast in New Hampshire. Then it’s on to Massachusetts, where the state Democratic Party chairman placed Nader’s name on the March 10 ballot as a nationally recognized candidate. If the campaign goes well, Nader says, he will stump in California, where he has an organized base in the Voter Revolt group that battled successfully for the 1988 auto insurance initiative, Prop. 103.

These days, at age 57, Nader’s hair is a little grayer; his 6-foot-4 frame a little more stooped, and his message about the forces of government and business a little darker.

Citizens, kept largely helpless and ignorant by the “power juggernaut,” need a “new toolbox of democracy . . . commensurate with the concentration of power arrayed against the citizenry in a converging governmental and corporate bureaucracy,” he warns. This power, he declares, is “in ever fewer and fewer and greedier hands, ever more elegantly and artfully concealed.”

He speaks of the “corporate conspirators”--”overpaid, self-perpetuating, insulated, sneering at anybody who would bring them to account”--and the politicians, “jaded, co-opted, bought and rented.” Such lines often bring applause from his audiences of retirees, students, small businesspeople, homemakers, teachers and others.

Nader denounces sound-bite politics, but he has a few snappy lines of his own:

* How does he describe the $140 billion he says is spent yearly as subsidies, emergency aid and special breaks for businesses? “Aid to dependent corporations.”

* He insists that he does not dislike insurance firms, despite his California crusade for insurance reform. “They’re among our most religious institutions,” he says. “They view all sorts of events as ‘acts of God.’ ”

* To a reporter’s question about which of George Bush’s acts most hurt the economy, he replies, “Taking the oath of office.”

Nader appeals to disaffected New Hampshire voters from a variety of political backgrounds. Part of the attraction is the image of the rumpled ascetic who could not be discredited by General Motors or bought by the panjandrums of Washington.

“I admire Ralph Nader for his works and his lifestyle,” says Jim Malatras, 65, a retired manufacturing executive who showed up at a house party for Nader in Nashua earlier this month. “Many have tried to waylay Ralph Nader, and they’ve all failed.”

When Nader appeared at the house party, he plopped into a red velvet wing chair. He was offered wine but asked for fruit juice, straight up. He agreed to autograph two “Nader ‘92” bumper stickers, but firmly refused to sign more when he realized that all the guests had planned to line up for a memento.

“If you know anything about me, you know I abhor that,” he said.

Some fans, including several over 60, sat cross-legged and hushed at his feet. The crowd included Clare Dynes, an 80-year-old retired businessman who voted for Bush and believes in a strong defense.

It included Prudy Piechota, a Nashua housewife-gadfly who said she had been threatened, shot at and had her mailbox blown up because of a toxic waste cleanup campaign that had angered some union workers.

And it included Kim Brown, leader of a Nashua group that stopped construction of a garbage incinerator, who told him: “I’m a big rights person from way back. And when I hear you, it’s like--wow!”

Nader does not get the same sort of hero worship from leading Democratic candidates or party regulars. Although they praise his accomplishments, they seem to view him as another of the lesser candidates who, like troublesome insects, are circling the edge of the fray.

“The only people who ask me about Nader are reporters,” says Mitchell Schwartz, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s state campaign director.

“With all respect, I don’t know what his agenda is,” says Peggy Connolly, press secretary to former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas.

Only two candidates have acknowledged Nader’s efforts. Former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., a Democrat also stumping on campaign reform and anti-incumbent fervor, has promised that Nader would be offered an important post in any Brown Administration.

And Republican Patrick J. Buchanan, the conservative columnist, has called Nader “my favorite liberal.”

Grandmaison, the former New Hampshire state chairman, says: “The reasons for admiring Nader are as long as your arm, even if he may be somewhat off the deep end these days.” But he predicts the leading candidates will not respond to the questionnaire that Nader campaigners are sending them this week to record their views on his reforms.

Back at the house party, Nader offered guidance to his acolytes about what it means to be on the right side of the power struggle. In a discussion of Nader’s plan to set up a public-access cable network, one earnest voter asked: “But how do you keep the wackos out?”

“Be careful,” counseled Nader. “One person’s wacko is another’s crusader.”