By Micah L. Sifry
Sunday, February 29, 2004; Page B01
What is Ralph Nader up to? Why does he stubbornly deny the obvious -- that his candidacy risks hurting the Democrats? And why do so many of his progressive friends and allies view his decision to run again as a tragic blunder?
Even for those of us who have supported Nader in the past -- and still admire him and his accomplishments in four decades of civic advocacy -- there's little about his candidacy that makes sense this time around. He says he wants to defeat Bush, but he can't help but criticize Democrats, too; it's in his nature. He says that both parties are "ferociously competing to see who's going to go to the White House and take orders from their corporate paymasters," then he admits that either Sen. John F. Kerry or Sen. John Edwards would be an improvement over Bush.
He dismisses as "political schizophrenia" suggestions that he concentrate on "safe states" to avoid tipping the election to Bush. But then he engages in his own contradictory thinking by arguing that disaffected Republicans will be attracted to his critique of budget deficits, unpatriotic businesses and "corporate pornography and violence beamed to children." Maybe some will, but how will conservative voters stomach his calls to raise their taxes, regulate their businesses and shrink their glorious military?
He claims to be running for the benefit of all third-party and independent candidates, but refuses to join the Green Party and abide by its process for choosing a presidential candidate. By walking away from his one solid group of supporters, he has embarked on a quixotic independent bid that will leave nothing behind. Contrast that with the noble effort of Eugene V. Debs to build the Socialist Party nearly a century ago; Debs never won the White House, but he left a legacy of municipal victories and innovations.
Instead, Nader's push into the no man's land of no-party affiliation is taking him perilously close to the political fringe, like onetime Pat Buchanan campaign co-chair Lenora Fulani, the boss of New York's cultish Independence Party, who wants to put Nader on her party's ballot line.
Nader does have an explanation. He says his campaign will open a "second front" against Bush. Last fall, as Nader was gearing up to run, he told me Bush couldn't be defeated "without a third party effort to raise the issues that the Democrats are too dense or cautious or too indentured to raise themselves." He predicted that the Democrats would "pick up" those issues. This is indeed what usually happens with a successful third party; its best issues get co-opted.
Nader isn't oblivious to the anger he's generated among Democratic voters who blame him -- fairly or not -- for Al Gore's narrow loss in 2000. But that is precisely why, at the National Press Club this month, Nader told "the liberal establishment" to "relax and rejoice" about his candidacy. Tarek Milleron, Nader's nephew and confidante, e-mailed me last week to promise that his uncle's campaign "will make significant inroads into the Perot/Reform/liberal Republican and other unconventional spheres." In other words, Bush will lose more votes to Nader than the Democrats will.
But the problem with this thesis is that Nader is now a leftist prophet, not just a tribune of the angry middle or the little guy.
To fully fathom Ralph Nader the presidential candidate, you need to understand the old Ralph Nader -- the dark-eyed, tousle-haired lawyer who did stand up for the little guy and who grabbed the public's attention over car safety long before he veered off into presidential politics.
Nader's crusade follows from what the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes purportedly exclaimed while illustrating the principle of the lever: "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world." Nader has leveraged all kinds of societal changes. With a dash of determination, a sympathetic press and a friendly Congress, he helped bring about the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environment Protection Agency and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. He also championed the passage of such laws as the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Freedom of Information Act. At the zenith of Nader's influence, President Jimmy Carter appointed Naderites to top regulatory positions. The outsider was almost an insider.
The anti-corporate wave that Nader rode in the '60s and early '70s triggered a powerful counterreaction from the business community. Soon companies were pouring funds into political action committees and think tanks, which asserted that government, not business, was the source of our troubles.
In the late 1970s, the efforts of the public interest community Nader had helped spawn were regularly trumped by equally well-organized and better funded business groups. It was hard to get anything done, Nader told audiences. Congress was falling in thrall to big money, with both Democrats and Republicans racing for the gold. The media were doing fewer investigative reports, he lamented, and those weren't producing legislative action the way they used to. The White House was what he called a "corporate prison," hemmed in by powerful special interests no matter who was president.
So Nader began to experiment with a different kind of lever: electoral protest politics.
Nader's flirtation with presidential campaigns dates to 1984, when he traveled to key electoral states to force the major party candidates to address issues such as energy and consumer protection. Back then he was still working within the two-party system. The tipping point for him may have come in 1989-90, when Congress voted itself a 25 percent pay raise and leaders of both parties agreed to deny funding to any candidate who used the issue in the next election. As a result, Nader angrily notes in his 2002 book "Crashing the Party," the Democrats withheld vital funds from a Georgia candidate named David Worley in his spirited challenge to Rep. Newt Gingrich, who had just forced House Speaker Jim Wright from office. Worley lost by fewer than 1,000 votes.
Everything Nader has been doing since then is of a piece, tempered only by his own strategic calculus and comfort level. In 1992, he allowed associates to organize a write-in campaign in the New Hampshire presidential primary, where he got 2 percent in both the Democratic and Republican columns. In 1996, he let the nascent Green Party work to put his name on state ballots, but refused to run a traditional campaign on the charming theory that if he didn't do the heavy lifting, others would fill the vacuum. In 2000, he abandoned all pretense of not being a politician and ran a full-throated, if disorganized, campaign -- raising more than $8 million and rallying thousands of volunteers. In each case, he railed against a complaisant two-party establishment and tried to raise voters' expectations about what they could do together in politics.
This is who Ralph Nader is and has been for quite a while. People who have begged him not to run this time, myself included, have been deluding themselves into thinking Nader could go back to being the consumer activist of old. Whoever becomes the Democratic nominee, Nader believes that there won't be much talk of issues such as poverty, media concentration or universal health care. Add the fact that Kerry voted for the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, NAFTA and some sops to corporate power (such as the Contract With America's Private Securities Litigation Reform Act) and you've got the raw material for a full-scale Naderite attack . (In fact, Nader ought to credit Kerry for advocating for full public financing of elections.) He will direct much of his fire at Bush, whom he calls "the giant corporation in the White House masquerading as a human being." But Nader cannot repress his anger at Democrats for betraying the cause.
The tragedy, in my view, is that he didn't run as an independent in 1992, when the conditions were ripe for a populist outsider. Nader and a loose cabal of talk-radio hosts had just forced Congress to rescind its own pay raise. Anger against incumbents was at an all-time high. Many public interest group leaders were prepared to go on leave and work full-time for him. Sure, it would have been a long shot. But even if he hadn't won, picture him at the head of a multimillion-member organization called United We Stand America instead of the maniacal Ross Perot. In 2000 I suggested this scenario to Nader. He wrinkled his brow, and said, "I should have run in 1992. But I wasn't ready."
From tragedy, we move to farce. If the bright side of Nader is his stubborn devotion to moral principle, the dark side is his inability to play well with others. "He's one of the most stubborn men in America," says his close friend Joan Claybrook, the head of Public Citizen. One irony of his insistent call for "more civic and political energies inside the campaign" is how little he attends to the civic and political voices of others. He dismissed a call from the editors of the Nation not to run this time -- which I helped draft -- as "crossing from opposition to censorship."
If Nader weren't so stubbornly set on his mode of campaigning, he might realize how much positive change has already been achieved. Citizens and activists have a powerful new way to bind together and amplify their voices as the Howard Dean campaign demonstrated. The Internet genie of mass organization is out of the bottle; all the money-driven top-down parties, candidates and interest groups can't stuff it back in.
But this new online era is at odds with Nader's instincts; he's never worked with an organization that he didn't control. Asked by a New York Times reporter about his poor showing on Web site Meetup.com, Nader said, "I really don't deal with the Web. There isn't enough time in the day to go into virtual reality." As writer Matt Stoller said on The Blogging of the President: 2004, a vital new blog, "the conversation [Nader] wants to have with the country is on the Web, but he is not." Nader's style is all output from him and no input from us. That lever used to work, but no longer.