http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0418/levine.php
May 5-11, 2004
How the Great Crusader used the Green Party to
get his revenge
Ralph
Nader, Suicide Bomber
by Harry G.
Levine
n Friday, October 13, 2000, at
Madison Square Garden, the largest of Ralph Nader's "super rallies"
kicked his campaign into high gear. It was a great event in many ways. Fifteen
thousand ticket buyers cheered songs, jokes, skits, and pep talks delivering
timeless radical truths about wealth and power in America. Nader's speech was
actually the low point, circulating randomly through riffs about corporate
power, health insurance, the environment, and what Ralph Nader had
accomplished.
But Nader also served up disturbing untruths. Most notable
was his insistence that Al Gore and George W. Bush were "Tweedledee and
Tweedledum"--they look and act the same, so it doesn't matter which you
get. I went home angry. But it took me a while to understand that my progressive
hero had turned suicide bomber--that Ralph Nader had strapped political
dynamite onto himself and walked into one of the closest elections in American
history hoping to blow it up.
The next day I was invited to a fundraising party in
Greenwich Village. There I approached Michael Moore and described how the
campaign could use the Web to provide the latest data on battleground states
like Florida, where Nader supporters should hold their noses and vote for Gore.
When Moore realized what I was suggesting, he puffed up like one of those fish
that expand when threatened, leaned into me, poked his finger into my face, and
yelled: "You can't say that! You can't say that! You can't say that!"
Later I was introduced to Nader's closest adviser, his
handsome, piercingly intelligent 30-year-old nephew, Tarek Milleron. Although
Milleron argued that environmentalists and other activists would find
fundraising easier under Bush, he acknowledged that a Bush presidency would be
worse for poor and working-class people, for blacks, for most Americans. As
Moore had, he claimed that Nader's campaign would encourage Web-based
vote-swapping between progressives in safe and contested states. But when I
suggested that Nader could gain substantial influence in a Democratic
administration by focusing his campaign on the 40 safe states and encouraging
his supporters elsewhere to vote Gore, Milleron leaned coolly toward me with
extra steel in his voice and body. He did not disagree. He simply said,
"We're not going to do that."
"Why not?" I said.
With just a flicker of smile, he answered, "Because
we want to punish the Democrats, we want to hurt them, wound them."
There was a long silence and the conversation was over.
Milleron's words are so remarkable they bear repeating:
Ralph Nader ran so he could hurt, wound, and punish the Democrats. His primary
goal was not raising issues, much less building the Green Party. He actively
wanted Gore to lose. Where did this passion to punish come from?
In his admiring, balanced 2002 biography, Ralph Nader:
Crusader, Spoiler, Icon, Justin Martin explains that early in his career,
"Nader felt he could achieve anything" in Washington. He testified
regularly before Congress and was seriously proposed as a Democratic candidate
for Senate and even, under McGovern, vice president. He was so allied with the
Democrats that in 1972 he rejected a New Party presidential run because, he
explained, that might "help throw the election to Nixon." Nader had
access to the Carter White House, where many of his former staffers worked,
although his notorious nastiness and self-regard prevented him from fully
capitalizing on it.
After 1980, however, he was completely shut out by the
Reagan Republicans--and just as galling, the Democrats tried to ride out the
right-wing onslaught, challenging it only selectively and knuckling under on
electability issues such as crime and energy policy. In 1992, Nader campaigned
briefly in a Democratic primary, but during the Clinton years, says Martin,
Nader was "a pariah even among the most liberal members" of Congress
and was altogether shunned by the White House. By 1996, he'd had it with
Democratic gutlessness. Running on the Green ticket against a Clinton who
supported NAFTA and "welfare reform," he told Mother Jones, "I
think his best nickname is George Ronald Clinton." Nevertheless, Nader did
little campaigning. In 2000, after a slow start, he threw himself into the
process. Clearly, this election was going to be extraordinarily close, and in a
September 2000 interview, Nader discussed playing spoiler:
Rolling Stone: "In 1996, you told the New York Times, 'If I
really wanted to beat Clinton, I would get out, raise $3 or $4 million, and
maybe provide the margin for his defeat. That's not the purpose of this
candidacy.' Since you're planning to raise $5 million and run hard this year,
does that mean you would not have a problem providing the margin of defeat for
Gore?"
Nader: "I would not--not at all."
Martin reports that during the 2000 campaign, "no
matter how hard he tried to be evenhanded in doling out criticism of Bush and
Gore, Nader did show a bias"--against Gore. "It was clear to
many," writes Martin, "that he truly despised Gore, while he was
merely dismissive of Bush." Martin was especially struck by a Portland
speech where Nader said that Gore was "more reprehensible" than Bush
because Gore "knows so much and refuses to act on his knowledge."
Gary Sellers has a simpler way of putting it. Although
Nader was the best man at Sellers's wedding, the two are no longer close. After
extensive discussions with his old boss in late 1999, Sellers created Nader's
Raiders for Gore in 2000. He believes Nader hated Gore, he told me, because
"Gore wouldn't return his phone calls."
Ralph Nader exploited his reputation as a self-sacrificing
idealist to pursue an utterly selfish goal. He claimed his purpose was to build
the Green Party by drawing the 5 percent vote required for federal funding. But
this was cover--a way of justifying his lust for revenge. Nader campaigned as
the honest man who told the truth while lying about what he believed and
wanted.
The most pernicious myth spread by his campaign was the
Tweedledee and Tweedledum line--a claim columnist Marianne Means branded
"insane" and his opposite number Pat Buchanan never got near. Perhaps
Nader concealed from himself that his nostalgic view of a Democratic Party that
had shifted away from its progressive traditions was at odds with the
hodgepodge he actually grew up with--an amalgam of machine hacks and Ivy League
liberals, rip-roaring Southern racists and farmer-labor populists. But he
certainly recognized the huge difference between a timid moderate Democrat like
Al Gore and fierce right-wingers like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. These
were Republicans of a sort never in power before Reagan. Like most politicians,
however, Nader couldn't reveal what he really thought. He needed an explanation
for campaigning in the swing states. So he exaggerated, distorted, misled, and
dissembled. He lied.
"Throughout the campaign, Nader brushed aside concerns
that he might help elect Bush by employing one of several blithe quips,"
wrote Jonathan Chait in the November 2002 American Prospect. "If
asked about being a spoiler, he'd invariably reply, 'You can't spoil a system
that's spoiled to the core.'" Chait concludes: "Not since Steve
Forbes has a presidential candidate turned aside unwanted queries so
robotically. Nader's one-liners were pure, made-for-television nonsequiturs,
all refusing to engage on any substantive level the fact that his candidacy might
prove a decisive factor in Bush's election."
Nader's swing-state strategy was the crux of his anti-Gore
game plan. If Nader had been truly committed to getting the Greens their 5
percent, he would have taken the safe-state route mapped out by many party
advisers. In Stupid White Men, Michael Moore says he rejected Nader's
invitation to join him in the battleground states as the election neared.
Instead, Moore chose to work only "in those states where Ralph could get a
lot of votes without being responsible for Bush winning the
election." Places like New York, California, Massachusetts, and such
liberal enclaves as Bush's own Austin, Texas, as Chait puts it, "offered
the richest harvest of potential votes." This is what Reform Party candidate
Patrick Buchanan did. Nader took precisely the opposite tack. He spent the last
days of the campaign in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and,
especially, Florida, which according to Sellers he visited five times all told.
Pennsylvania and Michigan went Democratic, but Nader forced Gore to expend time
and resources on states he should have had in his pocket. And in Florida,
though Nader's poll numbers dipped from 6 percent to 4 to his final 1.6, his
97,488 voters tipped the election.
Reached by telephone recently, Martin explained Nader's
motives as "a neat blend of his desire to go where the cameras and media
are and his desire to make the Democrats pay." But even in the Nader camp
this was at best partially understood. Danny Goldberg reported in Tikkun
that Nader told supporters he wouldn't campaign late in swing states. Sellers
suspects that Moore didn't get it until the last moment. And Ronnie Dugger, the
veteran journalist who nominated Nader at the Green convention, learned about
Nader's battleground-barnstorming strategy long after the election. "Why
hasn't Nader been building the Green Party for the last four years?" he
asked me. "Nader was more interested in beating Gore than beating Bush.
And Nader has said he will not follow a safe-state strategy in 2004
either."
Hand it to Nader--he ran a brilliant campaign, approaching
the loony task of punishing the Democrats by defeating Al Gore with typical
hyper-rationality. A mad scientist in both senses of "mad," he
devoted his enormous skills, knowledge, and reputation to a bizarre personal
agenda. Nothing he has said since indicates he thinks he made a mistake.
The day after the election, I saw a Nader press conference
on TV. I'd been watching TV news reporters, various Gore and Bush
representatives, Republicans and Democrats, almost nonstop. Everyone was grim.
Nobody thought this was a good outcome.
And then up stepped Nader. He had not smiled at the New
York party surrounded by his supporters. But now, after a few comments, he was
beaming. With this deadlocked election, where his efforts in Florida made all
the difference, Nader looked happy, very happy. On the first strange day after
the election, Ralph Nader may have been the happiest man in America.
What does Nader want to do in the 2004 election? Does he
again want to defeat the Democratic candidate by taking swing-state votes?
"Absolutely," says Gary Sellers. This time the Greens will likely run
David Cobb, who is committed to a safe-state strategy. But not Nader. So voters
in Florida and other battlegrounds where the differences will again be
razor-thin can expect to see a lot of him. The stampede of his prominent 2000
supporters means many of them know what their former hero has in mind. But
there are always new citizens to con. In 2004, as in 2000, Nader's real
campaign slogan is: "Vote for Ralph Nader. You too can punish, hurt, and
wound the Democrats."
VILLAGE VOICE LETTERS / May 12-18, 2004
From Tarek Milleron: In "Ralph Nader, Suicide
Bomber" [May 5-11], Harry G. Levine relies heavily on his
imagination. The Voice should have checked the words he attributed to me in
quotation marks before publishing them: I never uttered the words "we want
to punish the Democrats, we want to hurt them, wound them." Levine and I
had a conversation about the "safe states" strategy that he espoused.
Since Ralph Nader's campaign was one based on principle, rather than political
games, I knew that he would never undermine his own convictions on the issues
by semi-endorsing Al Gore, and I expressed that to Levine. I told Mr. Levine
what I had repeated many times during the 2000 campaign: "The Democrats
should not be allowed to take progressive voters for granted anymore.
Democratic politicians should pay for their betrayals in votes." This was
a rather banal statement of the most basic of political truths.
Although some commented, during the 2000
campaign, that environmentalists and others would have an easier time raising
money under Bush, I never took that view to justify potential benefits to a
Bush presidency, as Levine implies. What I did repeatedly say in 2000 was that
I thought that the same damage to the environment that occurred under Clinton
would receive much more attention under Bush because of his awful record in
Texas.
Levine claims that I "acknowledged"
that a Bush presidency would be worse for poor, working-class, and black
Americans. Nonsense. I acknowledged no such thing, having seen, in one area
after another, the plight of poor and working-class Americans worsen or
stagnate under Clinton. Furthermore, I had recently met a black Justice
Department lawyer who characterized civil rights enforcement--that is, actions,
not words--under Clinton as being "as bad, or worse, than [under] Reagan
and Bush." Levine has invented this "acknowledgment" on my part
to bolster his baseless contention that Ralph Nader's campaign was an act of
destructive revenge.
In fact, Nader and many of us working on his
campaign were quite certain, as soon as Bush had the Republican nomination
locked up, that Gore would win the election. But--far from Levine's absurd
characterization that dozens of people on the Nader campaign worked their
hearts out for a personal vendetta--that was beside the point for us. Our every
effort went toward competing for votes on the issues and the record.
Finally, if I were indeed "piercingly
intelligent," as Levine claims, it would be obvious to Voice readers that
I would not have discussed anything with Levine.
Tarek
Milleron
Berkeley, California
Harry G. Levine replies: In 2000, Ralph Nader claimed that
he was running to win 5 percent of the vote and build the Green Party by
getting it federal funding. But this was a deception, a lie. Nader's chief
campaign goal was actually to punish the Democrats by taking enough votes in
some swing states like Florida to defeat Al Gore. In effect, Nader tried to
"Kill Bill and Al." Now, in 2004, Nader has nothing to do with the
Green Party and is running as an independent claiming to be the anti-war and
anti-Bush candidate. But this too is a deception, a lie. Nader's chief goal
this time is to punish the Democrats by taking enough votes in some swing
states to "Kill Kerry."
Tarek Milleron indeed said the things I reported. And
despite his protestations, Mr. Milleron just about admits this. He writes:
"Democratic politicians should pay for their betrayals in votes."
This doesn't mean Kerry should win by a smaller margin--it means Kerry should
lose and Bush should win. Mr. Milleron's own words show us that Nader truly
views his presidential campaigns as weapons of vengeance aimed to defeat the
Democrats.
Harry G. Levine is a professor of
Sociology at Queens College, City University of New York, and can be reached at
hglevine@QC.edu. The longer essay this was based on can found at:
http://www.soc.qc.edu/Staff/levine/. A few words that were cut or changed by
the Village Voice have been restored for this version.
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