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Should Ralph Nader worry? Now that the application deadline has passed for “American Candidate,” Showtime’s upcoming political talent show, the grimly resolute, semitragically staunch third-party contender might rue the day he didn’t just mail in an application and kill the same bird with a stealthier, less overtly threatening stone. (It’s too late anyway. Twenty-four semifinalists convened in Los Angeles this weekend to meet with the show’s producers.)

No doubt “American Candidate’s” winner won’t be getting any mortifying open letters from “The Nation” trying to persuade him or her not to run. The magazine’s website recently ran a banner ad for the simulated candidacy of “American Candidate” hopeful and brow-grooming magnate Dal LaMagna, founder and CEO of the Tweezerman Corp., or so he writes in his Showtime-sponsored online campaign diary. Should he find himself among 12 finalists (they will be announced in June), LaMagna would go on to compete in the first televised, simulated political bake-off to coincide with the real thing.

The much-hyped “American Candidate,” which landed at Showtime this year after having previously alighted briefly on two other networks, is the brash, uppity notion of documentary filmmaker and television producer R.J. Cutler, who produced the influential 1993 campaign movie “The War Room” and directed “A Perfect Candidate,” a chronicle of Oliver North’s unsuccessful senatorial bid. (“A Perfect Candidate” was recently released on DVD.) Cutler, with whom I spoke several times in the past few months, in his Culver City office and over the phone, describes the show as “The War Room” meets “The Apprentice,” an “American Idol”-style talent competition for aspiring politicians.

Should the show turn out the way Cutler hopes, it could accomplish much of what Nader would like to do in his third-act role as doomed presidential candidate, only more amusingly: expose a compromised electoral system, encourage nonpros to run, increase voter turnout and help break down financial and media-related barriers to seeking office.

Cutler is cagey on the subject of whether he hopes “American Candidate” will produce a presidential one. (As Showtime’s website diplomatically puts it: “If a participant in ‘American Candidate’ chooses to run for president, he or she will have to follow the same process and operate within the same laws and regulations that govern all presidential candidates. We anticipate that if a participant does run, he or she will be doing so on a write-in basis.”) He says he hopes the show will raise public awareness about the electoral process, motivate more people to get involved in politics and get more people to the polls.

Which is nice and all, but this is America, where civics lessons are never “highly anticipated” (a modifier that seems to have been grafted to “American Candidate”) and everybody loves a deluded exhibitionist. Plus, marketers will be marketers. In a clever cross-promotional effort that lasted through the April 9 application deadline, Yahoo’s HotJobs helped recruit applicants by running an ad that read “Wanted: Leader of the Free World.” Showtime has gone with the snappy tag line “The Revolution Will Be Televised.” After it debuts Aug. 1, between the Democratic and Republican conventions, “American Candidate” will grant its 12 finalists the kind of name recognition that only a fading Hollywood career, a father in office or bazillions of dollars in special interest contributions can ordinarily bestow. Aside from receiving a substantial cash prize ($200,000), the winner will bask in radioactively high levels of media exposure. “American Idol” flameout/meta-stud William Hung still gets mobbed in public, and he appeared on that show for mere minutes.

Over a 10-week period, the “American Candidates” will hit the simulated campaign trail, traveling around the country pressing flesh, kissing babies and having their every move scrutinized by professional political consultants. At the end of each episode, America will vote someone off the dais. During the final two episodes, the remaining candidates will be pitted against each other in live studio debates.

On Showtime’s website, each applicant is given a Web page on which to post a photo, keep a campaign diary and disclose his or her views on hot-button issues. As these things do, “American Candidate” has attracted its share of goofballs, crackpots and single-issue fanatics. A droll aspirant wonders why we “can’t all get a bong” and one hopeful would like to see the homeless trained as [sic] “astronaughts.” Another, a John Ashcroft fan running on an “anti-feminist” platform, boasts of having “Ann Coulter brains.” A fourth, not altogether surprisingly, would like to put the “diva” back in democracy. Nevertheless, most of the applicants display all the hallmarks of intelligence, passion, commitment and sanity.

For all its exuberant overreaching, the conceit behind “American Candidate” is less of a credulity stretch than the premise of “The Apprentice.” In the real world, people get corporate jobs off camera all the time. In presidential politics, the camera is the interviewer. Elections now play out almost exclusively on television, so presidential hopefuls craft their personas to fit the medium, as those who are really good at it transcend the political to enter the pop icon pantheon. As Steven Stark wrote in the Atlantic Monthly about a biography of Edward Kennedy 10 years ago, “Along with the flood of docudramas about the first brother, ‘The Last Brother’ was yet another step in the transformation of the Kennedys from largely conventional political figures into pop-culture deities from the world of entertainment -- the cultural equivalents, perhaps, of Elvis Presley or the Jacksons.”

“What we are dealing with here,” Richard Schickel wrote in 1986 of John F. Kennedy’s effect on politics, “is a recognition on the part of a candidate and his managers that traditional debts and alliances within the party and among various outside interest groups were, in the age of television, of less significance in winning elections, and in governance itself, than the creation of an image that gave the illusion of masculine dynamism without sacrifice of ongoing affection. Which is, one hardly need add, exactly what a successful male movie star recognizes his job to be.” Reagan biographer Lou Cannon quotes the former president, “an accomplished presidential performer,” as quipping, “I don’t know how anyone ever did this job who wasn’t an actor.” Who knows? Maybe one day somebody will be swapping that last word out with “reality show contestant.”

Carina Chocano: Is “American Candidate” a comment on the electoral system, a satire, a way to effect change, or a prank?

R.J. Cutler: I think it’s everything, except I wouldn’t say prank. But certainly the show is meant to comment on the process. We will show how the sausage is made. You will learn a lot about the way presidential candidates conduct their daily lives and the decisions that they make. And I don’t even mean the big decisions on the issues. I mean the small decisions on what tone of pancake they put on their face before they go on the air.

What types of things will it reveal that most people don’t already know?

You’ll see how opposition research is used, you’ll see how advertising is used. When you then go back and watch the major party candidates going at it, you’ll see them through a fresh lens. At the same time, our goal is to engage people in the process. In this country, only 50% of eligible voters bother to show up at the polls. And we’d like to find ways to engage the other 50%.

Would more people vote if they could phone in their ballot directly to a TV show?

No, I don’t think it’s hard to vote. I think people don’t vote because they feel disenfranchised. They don’t vote because they think it doesn’t affect them, because there aren’t leaders who genuinely stir their passions. I think we saw that in the last election. They see lifelong politicians, wealthy, upper-class, Ivy League-educated white men who disagree on the narrowest of issues. But of course, we know better than that. We know who we elect president does matter. We live in George W. Bush’s world now, whether you think that’s good or bad.

Originally, the requirements for applying to be on the show were the same as the requirements for running for president. But later, you changed the age requirements. What prompted that change?

We wanted to open up the process. The whole philosophy of this show is to make the process available to those who don’t otherwise have access to it. And during a political moment when Orrin Hatch and Teddy Kennedy both come out in favor of a constitutional amendment that would no longer restrict the office of president to those people who were born in America ...

Paving the way for Arnold ...

Paving the way for Arnold ... We started thinking maybe this will contribute to the debate. Maybe this will give an opportunity for people to see what it would be like for people under the age of 35, and citizens who aren’t born here. And most importantly, maybe it will contribute to our principal goal, which is to discover new political talent and identify it and introduce it to the country.

Did anything surprising come out of the application process?

No, I stopped being surprised when we first announced the show and started getting e-mail from hundreds and then thousands of people who said they were going to apply. There are men and women from all walks of life, from all socioeconomic, geographic, educational, ideological backgrounds. It was kind of exactly what we had hoped for.

Have the applications you received been representative of the types of people that normally run for office?

I will say that I wish more women and people of color really felt an entitlement to the process. When you talk to voter registration advocates like the White House Project -- which is an organization devoted to encouraging women from whatever party to run for office and to vote -- their research shows that [a large percentage] of nonvoters are single women. We plan to countervail that in our show.

When is the deadline for getting on the presidential ballot?

It’s different in every state, and the rules are different, and it’s very arcane. We’re told that any little boy or girl can grow up to be president, but nobody would ever say that any little boy or girl could actually get on the ballot. It is the hardest thing in the world. I mean, talk to the people who ran Ralph Nader’s campaign. The state governments are interested in Democrats and Republicans getting on the ballot. But basically, the deadline begins some time in April and extends through the end of the summer.

And then will the winner run?

I see the winner of this show influencing the presidential campaign more in the way he or she will represent an unheard voice of the people through interviews, through appearances on television, through a special that we will produce, in which the person will give a speech to the American public. Then they’ll return home and launch their political careers.

What was it like to go from working on “The War Room” to working on “A Perfect Candidate”?

They are two very different films. “The War Room” was a celebration of an extraordinary moment, and the passion for work of these two men, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. It’s about what you can accomplish when you really, truly believe in your work. “A Perfect Candidate” is a portrait of a political system or process gone wrong. It’s the story of a couple of men crisscrossing the state of Virginia looking for something to believe in during a senatorial campaign and having a harder and harder time finding something.

Do you see “American Candidate” as completing a political trilogy?

Well, in a way. It’s different, because “American Candidate” plays in the real world but doesn’t play out in the real world. It’s not about a real political campaign, it’s ultimately going to be about the dreams of the people who are participating in it.

Kennedy understood the power of charisma. Some people credit Nixon as being the first president who understood the importance of using TV to shape perception. Cultural critic Neal Gabler has suggested that Nixon even framed policy “not to solve real problems but only to appear to solve them.”

That’s true. He makes a good point. Kennedy manipulated the media simply by using it. He utilized the media. Whereas Nixon manipulated the media by ... manipulating it. [He laughs.] The Nixon gang was the first image-conscious administration to use television. It wasn’t mastered until Reagan, Mike Deaver and all those guys. Deaver would send Reagan to have lunch with the senior citizens the day they cut Medicaid, or whatever, the day our program comes out that’s going to be screwing the senior citizens. It doesn’t matter what the text was. The picture was Reagan having lunch with the senior citizens. And now it’s beyond that, the distance between what they say and what they do. You’re almost foolish if you expect that what these guys are really doing and the picture of what they are doing have any relationship.

By the time Reagan was in office, “the picture of the thing” and the real thing had gone their separate ways.

They did. Now, you are naive if you expect them to be one and the same. If you look at Condoleezza Rice on the “Today” show, and you believe what she says, you’re naive. You have to analyze what she says in the context of all sorts of things: what the administration’s objective is, what they want you to believe, what they did yesterday, what they’re going to do tomorrow. There’s no expectation that what she is saying is actually true. When you see the president land on the aircraft carrier with a banner that says “Mission Accomplished,” and you think that means that the mission is accomplished, that’s now, unfortunately, your fault.

The additional unfortunate thing is that most people, even in this day and age, are not sophisticated viewers. They’re not performing the analysis on all these different things. As David Mamet says, always tell the truth, it’s the easiest thing to remember. Eventually, these kinds of disconnections between image and truth have a way of catching up to you. But who knows if this is even true in an environment where image might be everything. Most of us will never see the candidate that we vote for in person. We will see them, meet them, get to know them, feel them only through their televised images. And that is a central theme of our show.

“American Candidate” will be using the same medium to provide its contestants with an opportunity very few people will ever get. Will it expose the medium?

Hopefully it will illuminate and expose both the limitations and the power of the medium. My hope is that after watching “American Candidate” the viewer will be that much more sophisticated when he returns to watching the major party candidates going up against each other. When you see a major party candidate on television, you will have a better sense of what went into getting there.

Do you see your show producing a Nader or Ross Perot?

It could, but again that’s not our goal. Our goal is to identify future leaders. I think it’s more realistic and exciting to imagine each of the 12 people who are on our show returning home to their communities, getting involved, running for city council, running for Congress or mayor or senator and then looking back on this 12 years from now and saying, “Wow, half of those 12 people are in positions in government now and one of them is rising quickly.” That to me would be the most exciting thing.

I read an article in which a Democratic campaign official compared “American Candidate” to the last California governor’s race, accusing it of “adding to the game-show aspect” of politics.

That’s silly. If politics is a circus it has nothing to do with this program. And by the way, politics was a circus when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were duking it out.

If “American Idol’s” ability to turn wannabes into stars has taught us anything, it is that it doesn’t take much once you get someone on TV ...

It doesn’t take a lot. How many people voted for Ruben Studdard? Fourteen million people? If you received 14 million votes for president of the U.S., you would have seven times the votes Ralph Nader got.

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The numbers are slightly off, and of course “American Idol” viewers can vote early and vote often, but the point is taken. On his last night as a finalist on “American Idol,” Studdard got something like 12 million votes out of a reported 24 million -- about four times what Nader got in the 2000 election and 61% of the number of votes cast for Perot in 1992. Had Studdard been selling campaign promises instead of soulful renditions of R&B; songs, he might have qualified for federal matching funds. That is, of course, unless his fans turned out to be among the roughly 40% of eligible American voters who declined to cast ballots in the 2000 presidential elections.

Carina Chocano is The Times’ television critic.