>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>Are you concerned that the abortion issue may scare the women who
>>might otherwise vote for Nader into voting for Gore?
>
>Yes. Case in point: Katha Pollitt.
>
>> But you said yourself that the polling figures had not shown a
>>gender gap for Nader.
>
>That there is no gender gap is itself a gender gap: the more leftish
>candidate might be expected to attract more female than male
>supporters, so the fact that Nader's 4/4 is a sign of his weakness
>among women.
In that case, Nader needs to change his tune or outlook or perhaps both:
***** Ralph Nader on Abortion
No government role; let women privately decide
Q: So you are for abortion rights? A: I don't think government has the proper role in forcing a woman to have a child or forcing a woman not to have a child. And we've seen that around the world. This is something that should be privately decided with the family, woman, all the other private factors of it, but we should work toward preventing the necessity of abortion.
Source: Interview on 'Meet the Press' May 7, 2000
Roe v Wade is safe; GOP must back off pushing it
Q: If McCain or Bush is elected because of votes going toward the Greens, they'll appoint Supreme Court justices. Roe v. Wade will be overturned. A: I don't think that Roe v. Wade will ever be overturned. I think the Republicans will destroy their party if they push this to the limit. They're already very, very cautious about not taking a hard stand the way Pat Buchanan has, for example. The reason why they're doing that is because they know they're going to lose a lot of votes if they do. <http://www.issues2000.org/Ralph_Nader_Abortion.htm> *****
The privacy defence of abortion rights is better than conservative oppositions to it, but the privacy defence doesn't entail -- in fact rhetorically precludes -- an activist government role in improving access to abortion.
>> What you should be worrying about is race & education gaps:
>
>I am, which is why I called attention to them. Remember, I'm not a
>Nader enthusiast; I see him mainly as a not-pointless fuck you to
>Gore, and a way to give the Green Party some institutional legs
>(which might end disastrously, but which is still an interesting
>experiment).
Nader needs to grow out of his hostility to what he may think of as "identity politics," "gonadal politics," etc. And quit courting conservatives -- it's a big turn-off for women, GLBT people, & people of color; besides, it's a hopeless effort anyway, as is revealed in the following article:
***** The Weekly Standard Feature July 31, 2000/Vol 5, Number 43 The full article at <http://www.weeklystandard.com/magazine/mag_5_43_00/brooks_feat_5_43_0 0.asp>
Ralph Nader, Conservative Wannabe
America's most famous corporation hater has a surprising idea of who should support his presidential campaign.
By David Brooks
"I read The Weekly Standard," Ralph Nader confesses, leaning across the table with that deadly serious look of his. "You guys need to think bigger."
I take a swig of my Diet Snapple and fumble about for an appropriate response. We were supposed to have our interview at Nader's campaign headquarters, but at the last moment his press secretary called to say that he hadn't yet had lunch and would I mind meeting him somewhere where he could eat. I was going to suggest a few restaurants, but Nader had already picked one: the cafeteria of the National Education Association. It turns out you can walk into the NEA building on 16th Street, go into the cafeteria, and get a cheap lunchtray meal subsidized by compulsory union dues. It's the most frugal lunch in our part of Washington, so no wonder Nader knows about it. And no wonder he wants to meet there with a journalist; the man knows how to reinforce his public persona.
No one takes any notice of Nader when he walks in. He sits right down and starts talking, and never does get up to get lunch, so I guess that accounts for his famous gaunt look and his hollow cheeks. I don't have to wait very long to find out what Nader means when he says we at The Standard should think bigger. He means we should be supporting him in this year's presidential race. It's a little implausible at first, but Nader has clearly thought about this a lot, and he makes a long, detailed case that he is the true conservative candidate.
The essence of his case is that the major threat to conservative values right now comes not from global Marxists or countercultural leftists; it comes instead from nihilistic corporations like Time Warner that poison our children's culture with violent rap lyrics and soiled sensuality. It comes from the commercialization of life, which undermines family values, upsets communities, and trivializes virtue. It comes from corporate lobbyists, who instead of working for an honest day's pay finagle millions in corporate welfare out of money-mad politicians. It comes from international organizations like the World Bank and the IMF that inflict suffering on poor nations for the sake of big banks and nationalized industries.
"Every major religion in the world," Nader says, going full throttle, "has warned us of the evils of commercialism." Nader proceeds to list some of the conservative leaders he has worked with in the past: "Bill Bennett, Paul Weyrich, Gary Bauer, Grover." The "Grover" he is talking about is Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform.
This isn't just an argument Nader trots out when he's sitting with the likes of The Weekly Standard. Nader talks about conservatives a lot. During interviews with local media, he talks about his conservative values. I heard his running mate Winona Laduke interviewed on Minnesota Public Radio the other day and she went out of her way to make a pitch to conservative voters. Nader accepted the Green party nomination for president in Denver on June 25, and the first group he addressed in his speech, in the third paragraph, was conservatives. "These are also conservative goals," he declared. "Don't conservatives, in contrast to corporatists, want movement toward a safe environment, toward ending corporate welfare and the commercialization of childhood?"
And in truth, Nader does radiate some conservative values. He certainly dresses conservatively. The Green party convention may have been a gathering of the Birkenstock brigades, but you almost never see Nader out of his gray suit, white shirt, and red tie. His lifestyle is about as parsimonious as the most comstockian sort of conservative could want. He doesn't have any of the sensual vices (except for a secret weakness for strawberry shortcake). He doesn't go in for countercultural excess. Nader announced recently that if he had been serving in Congress at the time, he would have voted to impeach and convict Bill Clinton. We all know people who vote right and live left, but Nader votes left and lives right.
And Nader's argument about conservative values is plausible. Conservatives, he says correctly, have never been as corporatist as the Republican party with which they are now allied. The interests of big business and the ideas of conservatives often conflict. This is a point a lot of conservatives have also made, especially during the fight against communism in the Soviet Union and China, when the business types wanted to trade with any tyranny that paid its bills, while conservatives wanted to topple and disarm all of them. And Nader really does compel one to ask certain questions: Is rampant commercialism now the biggest threat to conservative values? Has the Right become too cozy with the corporate types who are funding the GOP? Is the Nader candidacy more than just the last gasp of the granola Left? Could there actually be a new populist movement forming that joins left and right populists against both the corporatist media and the corporate donors who now fund both major parties?...
...Nader seizes on this sentiment again and again in the speech. He says that his campaign will be a success if it builds a data bank of progressives, if it strengthens progressive groups at the grass-roots level. He all but says that he is a mere John the Baptist figure, laying the groundwork for the next stage in the great revolution.
Which brings us to why Nader is not a conservative, and why his appeals to conservatives ultimately fall flat. Nader, like left-wing revolutionaries through the centuries, is a secular monk. He may be ascetic, he may seem to have a conservative lifestyle, but his faith is in the earthly paradise that will be achieved the day after the triumph of the masses. His answers to the problems of evil and greed and commercialization are all legal and political. Utopia comes with the right laws.
Conservatives through the ages, like Edmund Burke or the pope or, for that matter, Bill Bennett, Gary Bauer, and Russell Kirk, have seen some of the same problems of commercialization. But they tend to look to cultural or religious solutions. They tend to believe that capitalism needs to be embedded in a religious and moral framework that will restrain impulses and wrongdoing. While conservatives make religious and moral arguments, Nader always has a technical solution to moral problems.
To be fair to Nader, sometimes the mundane technical solution-the seat belt or the breakaway rearview mirror-can improve lives. But if you spend four hours ranting to your audiences about a world consumed by evil and selfishness, as Nader does, you had better have something more to offer in its place than a brief history of corporate charters. *****
And quit railing against China (e.g., <http://www.greeninformation.com/NADERCHINA.htm>), & stop relying rhetorically upon platitudes that have been already coopted by liberal imperialists:
***** Nader supports the Green Party Platform, which states: The Green Party asserts that security and liberty prosper together. HUMAN RIGHTS are the foundation of EMERGING DEMOCRACIES and international relations. We argue that the support of democracy, human rights and respect for international law should be the cornerstone of American foreign policy. <http://www.issues2000.org/Ralph_Nader_China.htm> *****
Why not a clear opposition to capitalism & imperialism instead? You can oppose them without sounding sectarian (you don't even have to mention the C-word & the I-word, if you think that they are big no-nos in mainstream political discourse), can't you?
Yoshie