"The
What-If Nader Campaign of 2000"
by G. William Domhoff
from: Changing the Powers That Be: How The Left Can Stop Losing
and Win
by G. William Domhoff, Roman &
Littlefield, 2003
Read how it could have been.....
Ralph
Nader’s decision to challenge Albert Gore Jr. in the Democratic presidential
primaries in 2000 will go down in history as a major turning point for Americans
who seek greater equality and fairness for everyone in all areas of life, from
the personal to the economic to the political. Already it has had several
positive consequences in energizing egalitarian activists inside and outside
the electoral arena. Not that it was an easy decision for Nader; he needed a
lot of convincing, and almost went along with those who urged that he run as a
third-party candidate because of the "impurity,"
"corruption" and timidity of present-day Democrats.
In
the end, however, Nader was persuaded by comparative political studies of many
dozens of countries. They show it is rare for a third party to develop in a
"single-member district plurality" electoral system, which is what
the United States happens to have through historical accident and political
compromise. In the few countries with such a system where there is a third
party, it is usually one that represents a specific region or ethnic group.
These third parties can have an impact when they choose which major party to
join with to form a parliamentary majority, but such post-electoral coalitions
are not to be in the United States because it has a presidential, not a
parliamentary, system. Single-member plurality districts and a strong
presidency, itself rooted in one giant single-member district called the United
States, dictate that coalitions must be formed before the election by people
who want to avoid being governed by their least-favored candidate. Hence the
two pre-electoral coalitions called the Democratic and Republican parties,
which have been dominated by rival factions of the ownership class since the
1790s.
Nader
not only grasped this structural logic, but he learned from the disastrous
history of previous third parties, especially the Progressive Party of 1948.
The formation of that party led to bitter battles between "liberals,"
who stayed with the Democrats, and "progressives" (mostly Communists,
socialists and pacifists), who backed former Vice President Henry Wallace as
the third-party candidate. The campaign received only a little more than 1
million votes, about half of them from New York alone. Worse, it set in motion
the events that completely destroyed the strong left-liberal coalition built
slowly during the New Deal and war years. Nader also knew that the Peace and
Freedom Party of 1968 and the Citizen’s Party of 1980 had zero positive impact.
Nader
further understood that the two major political parties are now in part an
extension of the government, first of all because the government "registers"
citizens as "members" of one or another party, which means the party
cannot control its own membership by refusing admittance or initiating
expulsions. Then the government conducts "primaries" in which any
member of the party can run on any platform he or she so desires, thereby
contending with fat cats and hired guns for control of the party. From a
governmental perspective, the "Democratic Party" is the name for one
of the two structured pathways into government. It is a shell. That’s a far cry
from the days when court house gangs controlled nominations in the South and
city bosses decided on candidates in most big cities in the North.
Nor
was it lost on Nader that insurgencies in party primaries have done much better
than third-party candidates over the past 70 years. The most famous example is
socialist Upton Sinclair’s switch to the Democrats in 1934 so he could run for
governor in the California party’s primary, where he won 51 percent of the vote
in a field of seven candidates, and went on to take 37 percent of the vote in
the regular election against the incumbent Republican. The success of the New
Right in transforming the Republican Party was not overlooked by Nader either.
So the combination of structure and history came down in favor of a Democratic
insurgency. Third-party advocates were displeased, but not the great majority
of Nader admirers and those leftists who suffered through the lean times of the
last 30-plus years.
Not
that there was a groundswell of voters for Nader at first, or even later. It
looked for months like he was going nowhere; established political operatives
and the media focused on Gore and Bradley. But when Bradley dropped out and
Nader refused to quit, things began to get interesting. Suddenly there was more
media attention because it was a David and Goliath story at a time when there
was not much other news. Moreover, Nader’s principled decision to avoid
personal attacks on Gore, along with his laser focus on the tremendous failures
of big corporations, and his equal focus on the possibilities of using
government to tame them, gained him increasing respect. Nader’s slogan was also
ideal for showing that there are more egalitarian Democrats than the centrists
like to think: "Send Gore a Message about social equality and the
importance of the environment."
It
was the huge rallies at arena after arena across the country that really
ignited the campaign, though. Thousands of people turned out in small cities up
and down the Left Coast, along with nearly 10,000 in Chicago and Washington,
and 15,000 at Madison Square Garden. Student audiences in Boston and other
college towns went wild for Nader. It was just like what the old days of
grassroots politics were imagined to be, and even the skeptical and disaffected
began to enjoy the campaign. They also admired the dogged way in which Nader
insisted on visiting every state and speaking in every venue, even ones
unlikely to give him any votes. Clever ads in the spirit of Sen. Paul Wellstone
and Gov. Jesse Ventura before him also added to the excitement and fun as Gore
soldiered on in his usual stolid way.
Still,
Nader never won more than 20 to 25 percent of the votes in any primary, even in
California and Oregon. But he never got less than 5 to 10 percent either,
whereas he would have been lucky to take 3 percent as a third party candidate
in the regular elections. Overall, his vote totals were far more than the Gore
campaign expected, forcing Gore to respect the egalitarian wing of the party,
but less than Nader hoped for, a sobering reminder to insurgents that they have
their work cut out for them if they expect to attract the many people they
think of as their "natural" allies.
But
Nader’s overall showing was enough to make it necessary for Gore to allow him
to speak at the convention. The negotiations were intense, with Gore’s handlers
trying to keep Nader’s appearance short and far from prime time, but 10 minutes
in the early evening wasn’t bad, and the speech was a bell ringer that is
available on video to rally new activists for years to come. Rehearsing once
again the many failures and injustices of raw neoliberal/neoconservative
capitalism, and explaining the remedies available by government planning
through the market system, Nader then cemented his future role by praising Gore
and calling for his election. Saying those positive words wasn’t easy for him,
because he felt that Gore had treated him and other egalitarian activists
shabbily over the previous eight years, but there was just enough politician in
him to get the words out.
Gore,
of course, did not return the favor, saying little or nothing about Nader
during the regular campaign, and limiting his official role to a few fringe
appearances. Not that Nader was a wilting lily; as a supporter of the party’s
candidate, he took advantage of the campaign fervor to visit liberals and
egalitarians on his own hook everywhere he could, working to convince the few
remaining holdouts for futile third parties that they could have more influence
inside the Democratic Party than outside it. He also used these visits to start
Egalitarian Democratic Clubs in 43 states, laying the basis for the future
takeover of the party in the same way liberals had taken over the California state
party with their California Democratic Clubs in the 1950s and 1960s. He also
used these occasions to make plans for the national post-election EDC
convention that was held in March 2001, where club members were given the task
of developing a more detailed set of programs for future elections, and urged
to find candidates to carry the egalitarian message in state and congressional
races.
Although
Gore continued to ignore Nader after his narrow victory, which was decided late
in the evening by the electoral votes in New Hampshire and Florida, he quietly
paid off the left with several of his second- and third-level appointments.
Former Naderites gained some influence at the Environmental Protection Agency
and OSHA, where they implemented several rulings and regulations that the
Clinton-Gore team had been sitting on because they did not want to stir up the
corporate pressure groups.
Nader’s
decision to help send a moderate Democrat to the White House also made good
sense in terms of the leverage it gave liberal Democrats in the Senate, such as
the new senator from New Jersey, Jon Corzine. Chastised by purists for spending
tens of his own millions to win the seat, the former Wall Street investment
banker is nonetheless the most progressive Democratic Senator with real
leadership potential and a grasp of the inner workings of capitalism to appear
in two decades. Moreover, Nader earned credit for helping the Democrats come
very close to a House majority, thanks to last-minute victories in districts in
Michigan, New Jersey and New Mexico, where his visits helped to reduce the vote
for Green Party candidates just enough for the Democrats to squeak by.
In
the aftermath of his campaign, Nader’s longstanding connections with
non-electoral egalitarian organizations means that the Egalitarian Democrat
Clubs will be able to generate the pressure on elected officials that has to be
exerted on every issue that comes up for a vote, either to be sure these
officials don’t collapse to the center, or to give them cover for what they
want to do anyhow. By being inside and outside of electoral politics, the wider
egalitarian movement he is championing can have the best of both worlds. Most
of the time its members can continue to work in specific environmental, social
justice, or workplace organizations that have no electoral focus, but they also
can involve themselves periodically in electoral politics through the EDCs.
No
matter what the future may bring in the face of a formidable corporate power
structure and a great many citizens satisfied with the status quo, Nader’s
decision to take egalitarian activism into the Democratic Party was a brilliant
expenditure of moral capital, providing egalitarians with new hope and a new
direction.
Or so it could have been.....