With less than two months before the election, Republicans and Democrats are driving it home: This is the election of the century. And they're right. There is a lot at stake this year.

This could be the year we change the lives of 47 million Americans by providing them with decent health care and millions more with a living wage.

It could be the year that 68 percent of Americans and 84 percent of Iraqis withdraw occupying forces. It could be the year that we cut the near-trillion dollar defense budget, repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), revoke the Patriot Act and the illegal wiretapping FISA bill, build a green energy infrastructure, discipline runaway corporations and reign in the manic speculation driving the current food and housing crises. That is Ralph Nader's plan, anyway -- to offer Americans what the polls show they want. While McCain sings about bombing Iran and Obama uses rhetoric about "smart" and "dumb" wars to stay in dumb wars and start new "smart" ones, Nader stands for strongly negotiated peace in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.

While Obama dismisses his earlier commitments to fair trade as "overheated," Nader would replace NAFTA with uniform environmental and labor standards. While McCain chants "drill, baby, drill" and Obama prepares to replace big oil with big corn or big nukes, Nader calls for a renewable infrastructure.

Democrats are the party of change, right? So why do we need a third party?

Because history, unfortunately, tells a different story. In 1992, Clinton ran an uncannily "Obamaesque" campaign, branding himself as a change candidate and peddling a vague but comforting populism. Convinced, progressives rallied behind him.

Clinton won, but progressives lost. Wage disparities between CEOs and workers ballooned 449 to one. Clinton pushed NAFTA, costing 525,000 U.S. jobs and devastating Mexican farmers. As a final flourish, Clinton repealed the Glass Steagall Act, allowing the mergers of banks and investment companies that are at the heart of our current financial crisis. In short, progressives got eight years of soft imperialism and a corporate dream economy that Clinton admitted, "helped the bond market and hurt the people who voted us in."

But that's not all.

Progressives fell for the same stuff in 2000 and then again in 2004, when anti-war Democrats voted in droves for a candidate who had no intention to end the war and lost both the election and the muscle of the peace movement. It seems that pretty words do not make pretty presidents.

Advisers and financiers are the best indicators of the tone and direction of a future presidency, and Obama's are sending clear signals that things will be business as usual after Election Day.

Bewilderingly, Obama plans to solve the nation's problems by recycling the architects of its moral and economic decline by relying on Madeleine Albright, advocate of unilateral aggression against Iraq, Robert Gates, Saddam Hussein's chief weapons supplier and author of violent intervention schemes in Libya and Nicaragua and Jason Furman, who favors decreasing corporate taxes, partial privatization of Social Security and the so-called Wal-Mart model of "prosperity."

Unlike average Americans, corporations don't have to hope for change. They can buy it, as long as the public remains too distracted by false promises to demand the real stuff.

Change has never been certain; it has always been a fight.

We can start now, or we can defer yet again, but the difference will be the difference between real change and the chump change we'll get from selling the movement to buying the machine.

Ashley Sanders is the youth spokesperson for the Nader campaign. Her e-mail address is ashley@votenader.org.