It was announced this week that the Reform Party has
chosen to endorse Ralph Nader as a presidential candidate
for 2004, giving a definite boost to his campaign. This
does not automatically put Nader on the ballot nationwide,
but rather on the ballot in the seven states where the
party has legal status. Nader will continue to run as
an Independent, but has graciously accepted the Reform
Party’s endorsement.
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In a press release, the Nader campaign expressed hope
that this kind of endorsement will only strengthen their
fight for “a solution revolution.” The Nader
campaign isn’t known for its energetic soundbites.
And in certain liberal circles across the country,
we now hear a collective growl.
Nader gained his reputation as a consumers rights advocate.
On the campaign’s official website, his long history
of political activism becomes a list of generic praise:
he “saved lives, opened minds, implemented solutions,
and inspired citizens everywhere to participate in building
a better, more democratic world.” A bit more specifically,
he left a law practice in the early 1960s and moved
to Washington to work in the U.S. Department of Labor.
He also wrote freelance articles, and one piece from
The Nation became his first book, Unsafe at Any Speed:
The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile,
published in 1965. By 1967, he was named one of ten
Outstanding Young Men of the Year by the U.S. Junior
Chamber of Commerce. He quickly became a leading progressive
voice, working against the cold corporate world in America.
Nader has always been a practical crusader, pinpointing
specific abuses and working on legislation to curb corporate
power throughout the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s.
He’s managed to work in the system and against
the system as necessary. He was able to keep this balance
best in the 1970s, but by the 1980s, as corporate power
came to truly own Washington, his power with politicians
lessened.
His courtship with political candidacy has been long
and spread out, with the Oval Office cooing at him from
afar as he spurned it, then eventually gave in to its
siren song. As early as 1972, his name came up as a
possible vice president to Democratic presidential nominee
George McGovern, or even as a presidential nominee for
the New Party. He rejected the presidential candidacy
for fear of aiding Nixon’s campaign.
By 1996, many politicians, Republican and Democrat
alike, avoided and ignored Ralph Nader. Many would say
his fights against big business put a certain “guilt
by association” fear in these politicians, who
chose their own fights very carefully based on constituency
and donors’ interests. He decided to run for president
against incumbent Bill Clinton in 1996, but his heart
wasn’t in it. He ran under the Green Party banner
and mostly pushed environmental initiatives. He lost
support among many progressives as a straight white
male refusing to engage in issues of race, gender and
sexual orientation.
The Green Party might have proved it wasn’t quite
ready for a national campaign, despite their growing
success on the local level.
Then came the big 2000 election. His role in Gore’s
defeat cannot be overstated. In a recent Village Voice
piece, Harry G. Levine writes that Nader ran that year
“so he could hurt, wound, and punish the Democrats.”
He walked away with 2.7% of the votes nationally, and
it is a well-reported fact that Nader’s 1.6% in
Florida, which equals 97,488 votes, helped hand the
election to our current president. Gore lost by 537
votes.
This election was Nader’s very thoughtful, passive
aggressive moment to teach the Democrats something about
shutting him out. Levine goes on to remember Nader’s
press conference on the day after the initial results:
“With this deadlocked election, where his efforts
in Florida made all the difference, Nader looked happy,
very happy.” Three years later, he’s back
in the ring.
Is it possible for Nader to maintain his personal vendetta
against the Washington politicians as a national campaign?
Howard Gold, professor of government at Smith College
and commenter in an April Christian Science Monitor
article, refers to current Nader supporters as “the
ultimate protest voter,” participating in a kind
of extreme voting. He is a kind of catch-all for any
voter feeling completely disenfranchised by our political
system. He is the anti-Gap, anti-McDonald’s, anti-Friends.
But again, he is not the anti-straight white male.
Nader could stand a chance if he could somehow steal
the elusive Deaniacs, but Howard Dean killed that dream
in an April Op-ed in the New York Times in which he
praised Nader but stated clearly that a vote for Nader
is a vote for George W. Bush.
Their leader has spoken, and their vote has now drifted
back to Kerry.
Will the Reform Party carry Nader to victory? No, no
it won’t. But Nader could still have an impact
on this election. In an eerie reminder of the close
2000 election, Andrew Cohut, director of the Pew Research
Center for the People and the Press, recently stated
that Senator Kerry has gained a small lead in early
surveys of voters since the recent Iraq prison scandal,
but that lead virtually disappears when the group is
limited from registered voters to “likely”
voters and those surveyed are asked to consider Nader’s
candidacy as well.
Before we see the Nader vote as frustrated liberals,
let us examine another piece of evidence. In a move
that might make more than a few of us squeamish, Nader
posted an open letter to conservatives asking for their
support, stating oddly, “I have been for a long
time noting the overlapping agreement between more and
more conservatives and liberals on the above noted issues
facing America.” Those issues were largely concerning
the power of big business and the failure of the “No
Child Left Behind” Act. Again, this statement
proves Nader’s political blindness to issues of
race, gender and sexual orientation, as these issues
rarely manage to bring conservatives and liberals together.
So Nader moves forth with the support of a somewhat
legitimate political party, and President Bush and Senator
Kerry slug it out with expensive ads, carefully chosen
photo ops, and endless new scandals. Will voters get
bored of their fighting and turn to the alternative
as a protest vote, if nothing else? And if nearly 3%
do vote in such a way, as they did in 2000… will
it mean anything to Washington or America at large?
