Here's my fantasy: Near the end of a long if
quixotic presidential campaign, Ralph
Nader, our enduring public citizen, notices
his poll numbers still hovering in the low single
digits and decides to do the right thing --
throw in the towel and urge his supporters to vote for John
Kerry. Nader stumps for Kerry and drives the message home in
the week or two left in the campaign. In several key battleground
states, Kerry wins by a close margin -- less than the
projected number of votes Nader would have received if
he'd stayed in the race.
That would be the Nader miracle. That would be the
Democrats' little October surprise for George W. Bush.
That's my fantasy.
The reality is otherwise. Judging by everything he's
done and said during this campaign, and during the previous
one, Nader is determined to be the skunk at the
political garden party. His so-called devotion to principle,
and his muddled conviction that not only Bush but Kerry
are sell-outs to corporate interests, drive him to a blinkered
and monomaniacal campaign that helps not a single
one of the causes he cares about.
Many have written off Nader this year as less than a
nuisance. His jousting with Democratic groups over ballot
access turned into an unseemly barnyard fight. Some
feel his one or two percent of the vote comes mainly from
cranks and kooks who would not otherwise vote; they
cost John Kerry nothing.
But that's a dangerous calculation. After all, if Nader
wins even one-half of the 2.8 million votes he got in
2000 -- or even one-fourth of the 97,000 ballots he won
in Florida -- it could once again make the difference in a
swing state. For all the mistakes the Gore campaign made
in 2000 to get itself into a squeaker contest, Nader cost
Democrats the election in Florida and maybe New
Hampshire. Winning either state would have made Gore
president.
If Nader can't see the effect of his mulishness, the
Republicans certainly can. And they are absolutely bald-faced
about it. To them, promoting Nader is just another
election tactic. That's why they gathered 43,000 signatures
in Michigan and why in Oregon a conservative group
raised money to make sure, over Democratic objections,
that Nader got on the ballot (he was later removed from
the Oregon ballot). Maybe Democrats should be gathering
names for Patrick Buchanan.
President Bush has done a wonderful
job of uniting the Democratic
Party, including some of its
far-leftish elements, in the cause of
beating him. The outliers are Nader
and the remnants of his earlier following
who, like him, would rather
die hard than win well. Even the
The Nation, perhaps the farthest-left
national publication, argued
against a Nader candidacy in 2004.
"Ralph, this is the wrong year for you to run. ...The overwhelming
mass of voters with progressive values ... have
only one focus this year: to beat Bush."
I hate to hate Nader. He was one of the heroic figures
of my youth. He opened the eyes of my generation to the
problems great corporations can have reconciling the public
good with their fundamental profit motive. He was the
man who single-handedly took on General Motors and its
shameful safety record, risking his reputation and even his
life. Now he has carved out a place in history that he'll
never live down. He'll forever be known not as the great
Public Citizen he once was, but as The Spoiler. Poor
Ralph, not great Ralph.
The egomanical quality -- not to say messianism -- of
Nader's quest is evident when he justifies his out-of-the-mainstream
effort as being like other reform undertakings
that arose outside the two big parties: the women's suffrage
movement, the civil rights effort, abolitionism. This
is an attempt to put his mini-movement in the same
league with great and noble causes that were supported by
millions of people, and affected whole but distinct segments
of our population, even before they coughed up
the leaders that got them there. Martin Luther King Jr.
didn't give us civil rights; civil rights gave us Martin
Luther King Jr.
Nader wants it the other way around; he'll be the leader,
on issues of his choosing, and demands that a following
line up behind him. Hardly millennial stuff.
Whatever Nader's apex was -- taking on safety issues or
helping to create the Environmental Protection Agency
and the Consumer Product Safety Commission -- he's certainly
strayed far from that lofty path today. In what could
be the 70-year-old Nader's final years in politics, he is not
heaping glory on his legacy with a crowning coda to one
man's dedicated trek through a long public life. In his valedictory
moment, Nader has reached not his zenith but his
nadir.
