Ralph Nader?

Pat Buchanan's Interview with Ralph Nader..

There is a whole Web page devoted to Nader's dark side.

From the New Republic:
THE MYTH OF THE 'GOOD' NADER
Make You Ralph
by Jonathan Chait
Post date 02.29.04 | Issue date 03.08.04

As Ralph Nader prepares for another spoiler run at the presidency, liberals are again wringing their hands at the damage he may do not only to Democrats' chances of retaking the White House but to his own reputation as well.

"The most regrettable thing about Mr. Nader's new candidacy is not how it is likely to affect the election, but how it will affect Mr. Nader's own legacy," editorialized The New York Times this week. "Ralph Nader has been one of the giants of the American reform movement. ... [I]t would be a tragedy if Mr. Nader allowed [his anger] to give the story of his career a sad and bitter ending." The same theme was sounded in November of 2000. "Bernie Sanders is right. Ralph Nader is 'one of the heroes of contemporary American society,'" argued Eric Alterman in The Nation. "How sad, therefore, that he is helping to undo so much of his life's work in a misguided fit of political pique and ideological purity."

As Robert Scheer lamented in the Los Angeles Times, "What Nader did was to impulsively betray a lifetime of painstaking, frustrating, but most often effective, efforts on his part to make a better world. He is a good man who went very wrong."...

Or Mr. Levine's "RALPH NADER AS MAD BOMBER"
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A Few Thoughts for the Green Party from Ralph Nader
June 28th, 2004
Dear members of the Green Party –

Since 1996 we have carried the banner for free elections, clean elections, and the ten key values for a just nation and world all over our beloved country. But the corporate supremacists and their Two Party monopoly have sent the American people their own message—exclusive, rigged elections, sold elections, no other choices and more and concentration of power and wealth, against workers, consumers, small taxpayers, environment, community, and a sane foreign policy. In fact—the Republican and Democratic Parties have left most voters with only one incumbent party through redistricting and carving up the country into one-party domination. This is not even a semblance of democracy.

We have to break up this political plutocracy of the corporate government with a combination of our efforts that strengthen our efforts rather than subtract from them. There are too many good people in our country who know how to build the good society who have solutions—technical, social and economic—but who have no political voice. We strive to be their voice. Our voice and your voice must find a unison this weekend to range our mutual call for action throughout our land.

In this spirit I had the privilege of selecting Peter Miguel Camejo as my Vice President. He brings so much to our candidacy—knowledge, experience, commitment, precision, civic courage for over 40 years of struggle for justice. He brings bilingual eloquence that for the first time can communicate Green values to thirty-nine million Latinos as a Vice Presidential candidate on a ticket already polling 6 to 7% and 12% among younger voters in their teens and twenties. And as you recall he has run twice on the Green ballot for Governor of California, distinguishing himself in the rerun debates last year before a worldwide television audience.

As you know, what is already in place for our candidacy is important for local, state and national Green Party efforts this year. You can make a decision tomorrow that can amplify your resources, visibility, lasting ballot presence and impact at the state and local level where building the Green Party is so critical. With the Republicans and Democrats supporting the War, the Patriot Act and endless military and corporate welfare budgets, less and less is left for the people, their children and their future, especially the tens of millions of poor people. And this corporate political duopoly is making American people pay for their own oppression, their own deprivation, their own disrespect. Enough of the Politics of Fear. It is time to shift the power. It is time for the Solution Revolution. It is time to choose between fear and fortitude.

On the exercise of free accessible elections at all levels, we are working to bring together Third Parties and Independents.

I find Peter Camejo’s Unity Resolution as being in the interests of state Green Parties and as the best way to keep the Green Party together and advance common pursuits of justice. This resolution will make it possible for the Nader-Camejo campaign to support candidates, help preserve your ballot lines and expand the resources of the Green Party. I have had some experience since 2001 in participating at 43 fundraisers and other activities for Greens in 31 states and the disenfranchised District of Columbia. I felt that this effort was both my duty and pleasure.

Many of you have urged my attendance. In my letters to Greens a few months ago I indicated that the Greens should make their decision by themselves, absorbing all well-intentioned advice, on the merits. There is no role for any dramatic arrivals from this quarter. If you decide on nominations, you will achieve different results than if you decide on endorsements. Some want you to lie low this election and not receive many national votes in the close states. This is a peculiar way to expand your Party and establish a poor precedent that the Democrats will seek to exploit. In any event, it is your decision as delegates to make a deliberative choice. May your conscience be your guide.

Thank you for reading these words. Best wishes for your convention.

Ralph Nader

P.S. I am on my way to our Oregon convention this Saturday, but will try to call your gathering this evening in the spirit of further solidarity.
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An Open Letter to Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader replies, in "Whither The Nation?"
Dear Ralph,

According to the latest news reports, you've pushed up your self-imposed deadline for announcing your decision about an independent 2004 presidential campaign from the end of January to mid-February. We're glad to hear that, because maybe it means you're still not sure about the best path to follow. For the good of the country, the many causes you've championed and for your own good name--don't run for President this year.

Ralph, you've been part of the Nation family for a long time, from the day in 1959 we published one of your first articles, the exposé of "The Safe Car You Can't Buy." Since then, you've been a consistent advocate for active citizenship, investigative scholarship and environmental stewardship. It wasn't hype when we called you Public Citizen Number One.

We know you've never been one to back down from a fight. When people tell you you can't do something, if you think it's the right thing to do, you do it anyway. That stubborn devotion to principle is one of your greatest strengths. It inspired a generation of Nader's Raiders in the 1960s and '70s, it helped produce notable victories like the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety & Health Administration, and it inspired a new generation of young people who flocked to your "super rallies" in 2000.

The issues you raise on your website, NaderExplore04.org--full public financing of elections, new tools to help citizens band together, ending poverty, universal healthcare, a living wage, a crackdown on corporate crime--are vital to the long-term health of our country. When those issues are given scant attention by major-party candidates and ignored or trivialized by the sham joint candidate appearances known as presidential debates, we join in your outrage.

But when devotion to principle collides with electoral politics, hard truths must be faced. Ralph, this is the wrong year for you to run: 2004 is not 2000. George W. Bush has led us into an illegal pre-emptive war, and his defeat is critical. Moreover, the odds of this becoming a race between Bush and Bush Lite are almost nil. For a variety of reasons--opposition to the war, Bush's assault on the Constitution, his crony capitalism, frustration with the overcautious and indentured approach of inside-the-Beltway Democrats--there is a level of passionate volunteerism at the grassroots of the Democratic Party not seen since 1968.

The context for an independent presidential bid is completely altered from 2000, when there was a real base for a protest candidate. The overwhelming mass of voters with progressive values--who are essential to all efforts to build a force that can change the direction of the country--have only one focus this year: to beat Bush. Any candidacy seen as distracting from that goal will be excoriated by the entire spectrum of potentially progressive voters. If you run, you will separate yourself, probably irrevocably, from any ongoing relationship with this energized mass of activists. Look around: Almost no one, including former strong supporters, is calling for you to run, compared with past years when many veteran organizers urged you on.

If you run, your efforts to raise neglected issues will hit a deafening headwind. The media will frame you as The Spoiler. It's also safe to predict that you will get far fewer votes than the 2.8 million you garnered in 2000, and not only because your rejection of the Green Party raises expensive new hurdles to getting your name on state ballots. A recent online survey by the progressive news site AlterNet.org found that only one in nine respondents said they'd vote for you if you run this year, a 60 percent drop-off from the number who said they voted for you in 2000. If you run and get a million votes or fewer, the media will say it means your issues were not important. This can only hurt those causes, not to mention the tangible costs another run may impose on the many public-interest groups tied to you.

You have said your candidacy could actually help Democrats by raising issues against Bush that a Democratic candidate would avoid and by boosting turnout for good candidates for the House and Senate, where the slender bulwarks against Bushism must be reinforced. But these arguments do not compel a candidacy by you. As a public citizen fighting for open debates and rallying voters to support progressive Democrats for Congress, or good independents or Greens for that matter, you can have a far more productive impact than as a candidate dealing with recriminations about being a spoiler or, worse, an egotist. And the very progressives distressed by the prospect of your candidacy would contribute eagerly to have that voice amplified.

And if you think that this year you can help the anti-Bush cause by running and peeling off disgruntled Republicans, McCainiacs, Perotistas and the like while not disrupting the Democratic charge, please be honest with yourself. Once upon a time, maybe as late as 1992, when you dallied with a "none of the above" campaign and got 2 percent of the vote in New Hampshire from write-ins in both the Democratic and Republican primaries, your appeal stretched across the political spectrum. No longer, alas. Your nephew, Tarek Milleron, wrote recently that if you run in 2004 it will be "the year of the Elks clubs, the garden clubs, meetings with former Enron employees, the veterans groups, Wal-Mart employees," not progressive super rallies. But how many Elks club presidents are inviting you to speak? How many veterans groups? Such relationships take time to build and can't be conjured out of thin air in the midst of a presidential campaign.

You once told us you play chess at many levels at once. For all we know, you're thinking of running hard and then, if the race is close, throwing your support to the Democrat in the final days. While such a tactic might make for a satisfying conclusion to an otherwise futile quest, we don't think it justifies the risks, antagonism, confusion and contortions that such a run would entail.

Ralph, please think of the long term. Don't run.
Sincerely,
The Nation Editors
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Ralph Nader Replies: Whither The Nation?
The following letter is a response to "An Open Letter to Ralph Nader," which appeared in the February 16 issue.

Washington, DC

As I reread slowly your open letter, which kindly started and closed with your demand "Don't run," memories of past Nation magazine writing, going back to the days of Carey McWilliams and earlier, came to mind. I share them with you.

Long ago the The Nation stood steadfastly for more voices and choices inside the electoral arenas, which today are more dominated than ever by the two-party duopoly trending toward one-party districts:

"Don't run."

The Nation's pages embrace large areas of agreement with the undersigned on policy matters and political reforms, especially the abusive power of Big Business over elections, the government and the economy:

"Don't run."

The Nation has been sharply critical of the Democratic Party's stagnation, the corporatist Democratic Leadership Council and its domination by Big Money. This is the same party that has just ganged up on its insurgents and reasserted its established forces:

"Don't run."

The Nation has urgently reported on a tawdry electoral system--ridden with fraud and manipulation--that discourages earnest people from running clean campaigns about authentic necessities of the American people and the rest of the world:

"Don't run."

The Nation first informed me as a young man about the deliberate barriers--statutory, monetary, media and others--to third parties and independent candidates for a chance to compete, bring out more votes and generate more civic and political energies. This led me to write my first article on these exclusions against smaller candidacies in the late 1950s:

"Don't run."

The Nation has often encouraged the longer- run effect of small candidacies (civil rights, economic populism, women's suffrage, labor and farmer parties), which have pushed the agendas of the major parties and sown the seeds for future adoption:

"Don't run."

The Nation has dutifully recorded the hapless state of the Democratic Party, which for the past ten years has registered more and more losses at the federal, state and local levels. The party even managed to "lose" the presidency in 2000, which it actually won, even with all other "what ifs" considered, both before (Katherine Harris's voter purge), during (the deceptive ballots) and afterward (recount blunders by the party):

"Don't run."

The Nation has editorialized about the spineless Democrats who could have stopped the two giant tax cuts for the wealthy, the unconstitutional war resolution, the Patriot(less) Act and John Ashcroft's nomination (to mention a few surrenders). Yet you have not pointed to any external ways to stiffen the resolve or jolt the passivity of Jefferson's party, which lately has become very good at electing very bad Republicans all by itself:

"Don't run."

The Nation believes this cycle is different and that the Democrats have aroused themselves. This view is not the reality we experience regularly in Washington. Witness the latest collapse of the party's opposition to the subsidy-ridden, wrongheaded energy and Medicare drug-benefit legislation--two core party issues:

"Don't run."

The Nation's venerable reputation has been anything but conceding the practical politics of servility, which brings us worse servility and weaker democracy every four years:

"Don't run."

The Nation has intensely disliked being held hostage to antiquated electoral rules, from the Electoral College to the winner-take-all system that discounts tens of millions of votes. Such a stand would seem to call for candidates on the inside to highlight and help build the public constituency for change over time:

"Don't run."

It doesn't seem that The Nation would disagree with the conclusions of George Scialabba, who wrote last year in The Boston Review, "Two-party dominance allows disproportionate influence to swing voters, single-issue constituencies, and campaign contributors; it promotes negative, contentless campaigns; it rewards grossly inequitable redistricting schemes, and it penalizes those who disagree with both parties but fear to 'waste' their votes (which is why Nader probably lost many more voters to Gore than Gore lost to Nader)":

"Don't run."

The Nation's open letter does not go far enough in predicting where my votes would come from, beyond correctly inferring that there would be few liberal Democratic supporters. The out-of-power party always returns to the fold, while the in-power party sees its edges looking for alternatives. Much more than New Hampshire in 2000, where I received more Republican than Democratic votes, any candidacy would be directed toward Independents, Greens, third-party supporters, true progressives and conservative and liberal Republicans, who are becoming furious with George W. Bush's policies, such as massive deficits, publicized corporate crimes, subsidies and pornography, civil liberties encroachments, sovereignty-suppressing trade agreements and outsourcing. And, of course, any candidacy would seek to do what we all must strive for--getting out more nonvoters, who are now almost the majority of eligible voters:

"Don't run."

The Nation wants badly to defeat the selected President Bush but thinks there is only one pathway to doing so. This approach excludes a second front of voters against the regime, which could raise fresh subjects, motivating language and the vulnerabilities of corporate scandals and blocked reforms that the Democrats are too cautious, too indentured to their paymasters to launch--but are free to adopt if they see these succeed:

"Don't run."

The Nation has rarely been a hostage to prevailing dogma and electoral straitjackets. Its pages have articulated many "minorities of one" over its wondrous tenure and has watched many of its viewpoints today become the commonplace of tomorrow.

I have not known The Nation to so walk away from those engaging in a difficult struggle it champions on the merits, in a climate of conventional groupthink--much less with a precipitous prognosis of a distant outcome governed by a multitude of variables. Discussions and critiques from a distance, after all, are a dime a dozen in an election year. O apotheosis of the exercise of dissent inside and outside the electoral commons since 1865:

"Don't walk."

RALPH NADER
www.naderexplore04.org
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THE EDITORS REPLY

Dear Ralph,

We agree with your characterization of The Nation and what it stands for--and has stood for since 1865. But we disagree with your characterization of why we appealed to you not to run for President this year.

Please don't run. --The Editors
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