It would be an appropriate metaphor. Twenty years after he faced down the Communist Party in the Gdansk shipyard, and a decade after he helped to engineer Poland’s epic transition to democracy, Walesa’s bid for a political comeback is sinking into oblivion. His campaign appearances, held in near-empty meeting halls, are greeted with apathy and sometimes even ridicule. Other candidates ignore him. Recent newspaper polls show that Walesa will attract just 1 percent of the vote in the Oct. 8 presidential election. That puts him at the bottom of a field of a dozen candidates, including the incumbent and clear favorite Aleksander Kwasniewski, a smooth-talking, former Communist Party apparatchik who narrowly defeated Walesa for president in 1995 (Kwasniewski received a setback last week, however, when an opponent released a video in which he and an aide appeared to mock Pope John Paul II). With Poland in the middle of an economic boom, the former Solidarity hero has come to be regarded as a relic from a long-faded revolutionary past, driven by vanity and unwilling to step gracefully aside.

Unlike Kwasniewski, Walesa hasn’t reshaped his message or persona to fit the changing times. His rambling speeches, in which he flails away at communists, the prospect of massive factory layoffs and other old demons, elicit more bewilderment than excitement in a country with a healthy 5 percent growth rate. “Walesa has nothing constructive to offer,” says Tomasz Wroblewski, deputy editor of the Polish newsmagazine Wprost. “He was good at the politics of confrontation. But it’s a different era now.”

Then there’s the still-painful memory of his 1990-95 term as Poland’s first democratically elected president. Walesa scored several major accomplishments: presiding over the departure of Russian troops from Polish soil and backing free-market reforms. But his term was marred by a corruption scandal involving a top aide, angry squabbles with Parliament and the perception that he had grown remote from the people. In addition, his cantankerous personality and lack of refinement grated on many Poles. “His spoken Polish was not too good, and he was boorish,” says Andrzej Rychard, a political analyst at Central European University in Warsaw. “Poles want to see the president as someone better than themselves, but Walesa was too close to them.”

Walesa’s campaign style hasn’t helped matters. On the trail, the candidate evinces none of the common touch that carried him to the forefront of the trade-union movement. Decked out in hard hat and blue smock, Walesa was escorted last week by mining executives through a copper smelter in the southwestern town of Goglow. Workers watched as their onetime hero surveyed trays of molten metal moving along a conveyor belt–then walked off without saying a word. “He was a good man when he was one of us,” said mechanic Krzysztof Kiwala, 50, who has worked half his life at the smelter. “But when he got into politics, he talked differently, thought differently. Nobody listens to him now.” Later, at a press conference, Walesa attempted awkwardly to explain himself before a group of disappointed smelter employees who burst into the room: “The planning of this campaign is so bad that I don’t have any time for you guys,” he said, shrugging.

Walesa insists he’s still a man of the people. In a disjointed interview with NEWSWEEK in Wroclaw, he said it was “the call of the nation,” not a stubborn desire to secure his place in history, that drew him back to politics after five years on the international lecture circuit. The economic gap is widening, he warned: “Yesterday we were equally poor. In the next five years, one man will stay poor, but his neighbor will grow even richer. They won’t want to know each other anymore.” Walesa attributes his low standing in the polls to his harsh message: “I yell at people. I call them names, and they hate that. They don’t want to hear it.” But later, he seemed to concede that he had little new to say. Comparing himself to Mikhail Gorbachev, another 1980s giant now ignored in his own country, he said: “Our times are over, but that’s OK. The time of your great-grandmother is also over, but without her, you wouldn’t be here today.” That’s something that Poles acknowledge–but it’s hardly enough to make him a viable candidate.