Ralph Nader's Harvard Homecoming

With polls showing a narrowing gap between President Bush and John Kerry, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader says he will continue campaigning in key battleground states in the final month of the presidential election.

Nader, a Harvard Law School graduate, will be back at Harvard Monday night speaking at the university's Kennedy School of Government, a training ground for those with serious political ambitions and others eager to implement their ideas on how to make a better world.

The speech, "Barriers to the Presidency" is the kickoff of a New England campaign swing by Nader and tackles a subject close to Nader's heart and his own vision of what he believes would be a better America.

Nader has consistently and repeatedly disagreed with Democratic critics who have tried to keep him off the ballot and call him a "spoiler" who could take key votes away from Kerry and cost him the election. Nader critics contend that is what happened to Al Gore in 2000 when he lost by just a few hundred votes in Florida, where Nader got 97,000 votes as the Green Party candidate.

Nader - who'll be campaigning this week in the swing states of Maine and New Hampshire - says defeating Bush is a priority, but he's still trying to capture as many votes as possible in November.

"The assumption of all these questions is that I take more votes away from Kerry than Bush. Part of that is in Kerry's hands. He once said he wants to take away my votes by taking away my issues: I'm delivering it to him on a silver platter. He's responsible for that problem," says Nader.

In a Newsweek poll, the first taken since the debate Thursday night, Kerry was running even with Bush after having trailed him in the same survey last month. The Newsweek poll showed Kerry had the support of 47 percent and Bush 45 percent, with Nader at 2 percent.

Bush led 49-43 in the poll in early September and was up by 11 points in the poll following the GOP convention. The Newsweek poll of 1,013 registered voters was taken from late Thursday to early Saturday and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Tobe Berkovitz, a political analyst and professor of communication at Boston University, said Nader's role could prove pivotal once again in the election.

"Nader is a factor because, in a race that seems to be this close, a point here, two points there in a battleground state can make a real difference in the Electoral College," he said.

Nader says that his supporters don't pull votes from one party or the other. He argues that half of his supporters would not otherwise vote at all, and the other half are split equally between Kerry and Bush.

"You never know. Our problem is how to break up the two-party system, not how to concede to one or the other," says Nader.

Nader's potential swing role in the election spurred a California peace activist to pledge last week not to eat until Nov. 2 in an effort to convince Nader to drop out of the race.

"We're sending him some carrot juice," says Nader.