Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

When I was 14 years old, I heard Ralph Nader say that box cereal was less nutritious than the box it came in, and you'd get more nutrition out of tearing up the box and pouring sugar and milk over it, and eating that for breakfast. That's the kind of genius that Ralph Nader produces constantly, and why his ideas changed the world for Americans more than perhaps any political thinker of the late 20th century. He remains more relevant than virtually every other political thinker currently on the scene.

Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:28 am

Eight: On the Road to Fifty States

I most like campaigning in New England. Being a New Englander, I know die land, the towns, the history, the lore, and the life. Sure, the region has a few big cities and their sprawl, but in terms of sheer acreage and the number of distinct towns, New England has held on right into the twenty-first century. Places like Vermont, western Massachusetts, and Connecticut, the coastal towns, and the lake country still have the potential of recovering and enhancing their finest traditions with more local economies, local husbandry, and community self-reliance.

From Providence we drove to the Boston Commons, where a rally organized by high school students against the M-CAS standardized tests in Massachusetts and the looming privatization of public schools was· under way. From afar, one could think that those youngsters just didn't like tests. But these youngsters had done their homework. Created by consulting firms that saw the corporate management of public schools as a profitable objective, these tests appear to be designed to show that public education was not working .because so many students flunked. Experience in Texas with such manipulations led to high dropout rates for high school students under Governor Bush. This testing tyranny forces the schools to teach to the tests, which themselves are narrow-scoped and misleading yardsticks. There is plenty of evidence to show that behind these tests is a commercial ideology panting to take over more and more of the $320 billion spent annually on public schools.

A goodly number of high school students and their parents were planning to boycott these tests. I explained my support for the students, but unlike in Providence, the large Boston media rarely covers such rallies or citizen gatherings. Coverage is left to community papers or the large alternative weekly, the Boston Phoenix. Crossing the Charles in a hurry, we were late for an address at MIT arranged by Professor Jonathan King, a well-regarded microbiologist and civic activist on many fronts. He is in regular support of the M-CAS rebellion. King had a National Science Foundation grant to work with high school students on developing their scientific curiosity. Now, with pressure on teachers to produce good multiple-choice-test scores, he saw his program being shunted aside in favor of repeated classroom test preparation. He took us to a room at MIT where we met with the petitioners and members of the Green Party steering committee, which had the task of getting ten thousand verified signatures in order to get Our candidacy On the state bal1ot. They did.

***

That afternoon my remarks at MIT's Wong Auditorium included observations on technology and health, and academic science versus corporate science, with references to the struggle for auto safety, and the necessity for science to rein in a runaway biotechnology that is lacking both an ethical and a legal framework. I recounted a story from my law school days at Harvard when I was doing research on unsafe automobile designs and the law. In my innocence, I went to MIT looking for the department of automotive engineering, or a professor or even a graduate student researching auto safety. There was no one at arguably the leading engineering university in the Country. The motor vehicle transport system was only the largest engineering system in the land, and crashes on it were causing the fourth-largest category of fatalities in the country. Generating knowledge to nourish lifesaving policies and practices was not part of MIT's mission, certainly not when it conflicted with a major industry's practice, I suggested to the largely student audience. I asked them to reflect on what other contemporary deficiencies or corporate biases exist in MIT's Curriculum or research activities.

There was not much time for extended discussion because we had to motor to Concord, where Richard N. Goodwin was hosting a fund-raiser. It was a memorable drive, keeping in mind America's revolutionary history and driving over Concord Bridge as the sun was going down and spring was breaking out. Dick Goodwin -- special assistant to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, author, and political strategist -- was a law school classmate. Although he continues to be a tough Democrat and receives invitations to the White House, nothing can compromise either his independent thinking or his unerring retention of the fundamental ends of politics in a democracy. Governor Clinton, running for the presidency in 1992, praised Goodwin's Promises to Keep as "an extraordinary and brilliant book." His message was an eloquent reminder of how America's promises to its people, rooted deeply in American history, have been stalled and even reversed by greed and corruption. Clinton as president promptly forgot this admired analysis. Years later, Goodwin summarized the Clinton administration as one where "to mention it is to accomplish it."

Our short-term objectives were threefold: to achieve ballot status in as many states as possible, to participate in the presidential debates, and to receive more than 5 percent of the popular vote. This meant that we had to conduct a fifty-state campaign to attract our hard-core votes and then spend more time in states, such as California and New York, where we expected to do well. They were challenging but reachable goals, and my New England tour that May generated the enthusiasm that we could do it.

The next morning we left Boston and journeyed by car to Dismas House in Worcester, an unusual alternative to incarceration, which had inmates and college students working together. This was followed by a speech and rally at Assumption College, a meeting with signature gatherers, and a news conference. If Worcester was uneventful, the Phillip Metropolitan Christian Methodist Episcopal Church common room in Hartford brought home the grim realities that African-American pastors connect with daily.

Six reverends belonging to the interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and members of the inner-city community gathered to convey their concerns and hear my views. Reporters were present. Hartford was not unknown to me. It was twenty-six miles from where r grew up. I practiced law there for a while after law school and taught a few courses at the University of Hartford. All this did not mean that I was familiar. with their Hartford -- now one of the poorest inner cities in the United States, suffering violent, drug-ridden, devastated schools, crumbling houses and tenements, high infant mortality, and a stunning asthma rate among black and Hispanic children reaching 40 percent. But as I stood by the church, one sight, one glimpse, caught the tale of two cities that is Connecticut's capital. There over the horizon rose the gleaming office buildings and hotels of the insurance companies, with their tens of billions of dollars in assets and their well-compensated executives, who at the end of the day leave for West Hartford, Simsbury, and other lovely suburbs west of the city. There also were the banks that for years found reasons to abandon low-income areas, redlining them into sure decay.

Inside the church, the pastors knew about the two Hartfords, but they had more immediate matters on their mind. They grilled me for forty-five minutes on what I would do about police brutality, racial profiling, economic development, health care, failing schools, drug use and crime, and the hopelessness and human tragedies they minister to day after day with compassion and very few resources. I regretted that Elizabeth Horton Sheff, the first elected African-American Green in the United States, was not present due to a previous commitment. In 1999 I campaigned for her election to the Hartford City Council, and her widely publicized battles to reform the city's schools were not forgotten by the voters who chose her. Ms. Scheff is one of those rare urban/civic warriors who are pure empiricism -- intensely focused on mobilizing and taking on the injustices with no detours. Therefore she is seen as an irritator. It would have been a fascinating, instructive mix of exchanges had she been at the church that afternoon.

I knew from their comments that the ministers were backing the Democrats, but they were under no illusions about any party making much of a difference. I reminded them the Democrats have run Hartford's city government for decades and asked what they had done with few exceptions beyond presiding over decay, kowtowing to the corporate powers that be, and sweet-talking folks like them. It seemed that my words made a connection, going well beyond political correctness, and they concluded the meeting by forming a prayer circle with hands clasped and prayed for our campaign and its sensibilities. How do they keep their spirits up? They simply have faith that someday their just causes will overcome. I took leave of them, thinking once again, as little children innocently scampered around us, just how far politics and its smugness have gone in our country.

In the late afternoon we joined the striking workers who were picketing the Avery Heights Retirement Community on busy New Britain Avenue. The moving circular picket line did not have much physical space to maneuver, but the spirit of the workers was uplifting. They knew that the chain owners of this retirement community were making big money and could well afford assuring their workers just rewards for their labors.

Hartford being a compact place, it did not take long to reach the fund-raiser for the Connecticut Greens at the Hartford Brewery. I wouldn't call it a happy hour, but when I entered, it certainly sounded like one. The Connecticut Greens have been among my favorites and not just because they hail from my home state. The Core of the party is small in number, but they are hardworking and choose important issues, like stopping the Patriots football deal, the living wage, the troubled and risky Millstone atomic power plants, the pitfalls of electricity deregulation, and numerous environmental damages. They keep a steady eye on the objective of building a progressive political movement by tapping into any and all potential supporters, organizers, or leaders. Warming up an already warmed-up crowd were Mike DeRosa and Tom Sevigny, both early founders of the state Green Party and both candidates for local office as well. I reviewed some of the Green Party's accomplishments and took to task Connecticut's two corporate senators, Democrats Chris Dodd -- the opponent of state civil justice systems who wants to diminish the rights and remedies of injured or defrauded plaintiffs -- and Joe Lieberman, who has not seen a weapons system, an insurance company, or a drug company he doesn't like. They both have nice smiles, though.

The Greens and I then went to the Hartford Public Library auditorium for the evening discussion, where cable TV and other press reporters were waiting. The place was packed and my polls were hovering around 10 percent in Connecticut. But I knew better than to count on all those votes because many people tend to get cold feet in the voting booth, regardless of other Connecticut polls showing Gore in a landslide.

The next day found me giving individual interviews with the New Haven press at Barrie's Booters. We then walked to the Yale Co-Op, which had been run and defended against encroaching chain bookstores by my Princeton classmate Harry Berkowitz, who met me with a campaign contribution. Speaking in a large bookstore is a bit disconcerting, what with the aisles and shelves and different angles making eye contact a kaleidoscopic sport, and I wasn't at my best that day -- the nature of the room, the kind of podium, the lighting all affect my delivery. I've heard many other speakers say the same. For instance, a high platform stage looking down on the audience really affects the audience's intangible response as well as the sense of feedback the speaker gets while the audience is listening. I like rooms where the speaker is on the same level or just slightly elevated. Not good at all are those medical school-type lecture halls that are built as if they were on a hillside.

With a smooth, rapid-fire Connecticut trip behind us, thanks to the Greens' Peter Ellner, that evening I found myself in New York at Paul Newman's apartment, where he graciously hosted a fundraiser. There seems to be no end to Newman's talents. At the top of his craft as an actor, he entered professional auto racing at the age when most racers complete their careers. He's a smart and effortlessly charming figure who was so steeped in military weapon policies that one would have felt sorry for Gore or Bush had either had to debate him. A longtime advocate of international arms control, Newman for years has taken this issue to television talk shows and the like.

A little earlier, I had spoken to his daughter Nell, who lives in California and is a leader in the organic food movement and critic of unlabeled genetically modified foods, which more than 90 percent of the American people want the government to label. Paul Newman was not turning Green. He was and still is a Democrat and has endured much evasion, cowardliness, and dissembling by Democratic politicians without splitting from the party. But he and his celebrated wife, Joanne Woodward, seemed to be near their limits and saw my candidacy as at least shaking up the stagnation of the Democrats and broadening the political debate on issues about which they cared deeply.

I stood by the piano before some forty people in their living room, and Newman started to introduce me. He recalled a Mike Nichols impersonation of Tennessee Williams as he is questioned by a reporter: "Tennessee, can you tell us something about your new play?" Tennessee replies, "Well, as the curtain rises, our heroine is being accused of many heinous crimes such as public fornication, sodomy, corruptions of minors, money laundering, and puttin' on airs." "So," says Newman, "Ralph is safe on this last charge." Everyone roared with laughter. Among the people present were Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation; Russian specialist Professor Stephen Cohen; Victor Navasky; Dr. Warner Slack, the pioneer in computer medicine; Judith Vladeck, civil rights lawyer; Joan Claybrook; and Phil Donahue. They knew very well that basic changes were needed. What was on some of their minds, especially Victor Navasky's, was why I thought the pluses of a Green candidacy would not be canceled out by the risk of costing Gore a close election. Navasky and some others in the room would have liked Gore to win plus a significant Green Party turnout to push Democrats along a more active, progressive path. In addition, the composition of the future Supreme Court concerned them very much.

I described how bad the past twenty years have been for civic groups, how the Democrats chose not even to oppose Antonin Scalia. Indeed, every Democrat, including Senator Gore, voted for Scalia, who was confirmed by a vote of 98 to 0. When they had control of the Senate, the Democrats gave Clarence Thomas eleven decisive votes, in a 52-48 victory for President George Bush. My point: The Democrats, who are quick to say that these two justices are their least favorite, knew this going into the nomination process but did not have the fight in them that they had earlier displayed against Robert Bark and other rejected Republican nominees. Besides, who nominated Earl Warren, William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, and David Souter? Republican presidents.

I mentioned another reason for running: the increasing reluctance of good people to become candidates for public office. This is more than an immense loss of talent. It leaves too much of the field to the rascals. I told them of a conversation I had with Gerry Spence, a trial lawyer of great skills and a prolific author from Wyoming. The Senate seat was open in 1996, following the retirement of Republican Alan Simpson.

"Gerry," I said, "why wouldn't you throw your hat into the Senate race?"

"Ralph, I am better known here than any politician," he replied. "But why would I want to do that? Who in his right mind would want to go into that pit?"

"But what an eloquent voice. Who can better communicate to the American people than you? You would be the conscience of the Senate."

"Ralph, listen. I'm sitting in my office and looking out at the Grand Tetons. I'm happy where I am now," he said.

"Gerry," I replied, "the country needs you. It's just that patriotically simple. There are too few champions of the people there. What if a few days from now I filled a truck with manure and in the middle of the night dumped it on your front lawn? Next morning you get up and see it there. Would you turn around, go to your study, and look out at the Grand Tetons? Or would you clean it up?"

"You bastard," he declared.

I could just as well have mentioned Phil Donahue as an example. Donahue is a man of conviction, daring, compassion, and enormous awareness of the need for society to exercise its First Amendment rights. For nearly thirty years, his national television show gave voice early and consistently to the grievances and the rights of women, minorities, workers, consumers, gays, lesbians, antiwar advocates, children, and the downtrodden. He had the Reverend Jerry Falwell on the show thirty times. In right-wing circles, it used to be said that you're more likely to get on the Donahue show if you loudly condemn and criticize him.

This was a great compliment to Phil's fervent belief that advancing free speech must include giving it to those you disagree with. Is there a better listener? Was there a better speech on the mass media than the one he gave at the Newseum in 1998? Well, I thought that Donahue could run for the U.S. Senate seat from Connecticut as an independent in 1998 and become a superb senator. We had a group of people urging him to do so. Senator Dodd was up for reelection, and one poll had a sizable percentage supporting his retirement. The Republicans were putting up a candidate they knew did not have a chance -- defeated Congressman Gary Franks. A three-way race would help Donahue win. Money would not have been a problem. Phil has honesty, character, and an unblemished record in a talk-show industry that swells heads. Name recognition was high. Imagine town meetings in just about every town in Connecticut, and he could be back home in Westport every night. Ten years ago, Donahue would openly say how he would like to be a senator someday. This time it was nothing doing. To Donahue and many other potential candidates, the political process had turned squalid, myopic, and beholden. His polite refusal further fueled my sense that those of us striving for a clean politics could no longer be on the sidelines and self-indulgently recoil from diving in to be members of the cleaning crew.

At Paul Newman's house that night, I had no inkling of how involved and important Phil Donahue would become later in our campaign. He was quiet at the fund-raiser, other than suggesting that I not neglect the many cable television news and interview shows that were satisfying a demand for political expression.

***

The next day we were in Concord, New Hampshire, with Dick Ryan of the Detroit News accompanying our party. Along with New Hampshire Green leaders to greet us was Richard Grossman, who has pioneered the rediscovery of American corporate charter history. Indefatigably, he has launched citizen committees of discussion and local action throughout the country, challenging the legitimacy of corporate sovereignty.

A spirited press conference in the lobby of the legislative building and a meeting with Green Party petitioners was followed by a brief address to the New Hampshire Senate. The senators were very cordial, and a few expressed their support as I was walking to the speaker's podium.

I decided to use my few minutes that day to speak about the unspeakable -- that the large corporation is the dominant institution in our society. This very assertion was made way back in 1959 by William Gossett, then a vice president of Ford Motor Company and later president of the American Bar Association. Forty-two years later, the global corporations have ascended to far greater power over our elections, government, workers, and consumers, including children, jamming commercialism into just about everywhere.

I mentioned how public budgets are being massively distorted by the proliferating array of taxpayer subsidies, giveaways, and bailouts (known as corporate welfare) to corporations. And I described how these transnational companies have no allegiance to any country or community other than to control them. Company executives have yearned for years for their company to be "anational" -- outside any national jurisdiction. While this literally has not yet transpired, corporate globalism is creating its autocratic systems of governance under the guise of global or regional trade agreements such as the World Trade Organization and NAFTA. Increasingly, these modes of governance that subordinate nontrade standards, such as consumer, environmental, and worker conditions, to the supremacy of international commerce, will avoid and thereby undermine local, state, and national sovereignties. All this I said quickly because I wanted to revisit some New England history with them.

In the early 1800s, Massachusetts began legislating charters for the nascent textile factories that created their corporate form of limited liability for their investors. These charters constituted tight rein, stipulating what the new company wanted to manufacture, the term limits of the charter, which was then up for review and renewal, and the public purposes -- standards -- incumbent on the company.

People in those days were wary of these artificial legal entities called corporations having too many privileges and immunities. There were vigorous debates in the legislature and other forums. When companies misbehaved, their creator -- the state government -- could and did revoke their charters. The attorney general of Ohio revoked the charter of Standard Oil Company of Ohio late in the nineteenth century. Then came the corporations' single greatest legal victory. In the case of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled, in 1886, without even being asked by counsel, that a corporation was a natural "person" for purposes of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Today, the modern corporation has all the rights of real human beings, except for the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and all kinds of privileges and immunities that human beings do not or cannot have. Until we come to terms with this issue of "personhood" and the grave imbalances that follow, the warning of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in the 1930s about these big companies becoming Frankensteins in our midst will be more prescient than ever.

I don't think these lawmakers had ever heard such words. Some appeared thoughtful as they listened. Others were bemused, and still others -- probably hard-core corporatists themselves -- just wanted to resume their legislative business. Richard Grossman was standing in the back of the chamber listening. As I was leaving, I said to him, "Well, Richard, this must be the first time that any legislature has been spoken to about these issues of corporate charters .and personhood." He nodded knowingly.

On our way to Vermont, we stopped at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire, where I spoke to a gathering of local citizens. I emphasized local democracy and the need to resuscitate the town-meeting tradition -- possibly the most pristine form of democracy anywhere in the world today. I noted how large corporations, whose predecessors used to rip off consumers (monopolistic price-fixing and shoddy, unsafe products), now have expanded to take away tax dollars while they also become adroit tax escapees. Tax dollars were supposed to meet public needs -- like the public works, schools, medical research, parks, public safety, and the like -- that private enterprise was not interested in putting their investment capital into. Now, with their power, large companies, in direct and subtle, complex ways, siphon off large portions of the local, state, and public budgets via corporate welfare. Or as Ronald Reagan put it back in the mid-seventies -- by having their "hand in the trough." Only small business has the freedom to go bankrupt, I quipped. Green Parry materials were passed out, and I left for the Green Mountain state with a good feeling that basic populism was not contrary to the beliefs of conservative New Hampshire.

The next day we were in Burlington, Vermont. A noon press conference at the City Hall auditorium evoked the obvious question: Would Congressman Bernie Sanders, former Burlington mayor and now officially independent, support our candidacy? I said that Bernie's endorsement would be welcome, but they would have to ask him. Earlier in the campaign, however, Bernie had told me that while he sympathized and agreed with our pro-democracy agenda, he could not come out officially for us. The reason was that his modus vivendi with the House Democrats would be ruptured and he would lose much of his influence, including a possible subcommittee chair. Fair enough. He did agree to introduce me before an assembly that night at Montpelier High School.

But first there was a sit-down lunch at the Society of Friends building with Ruth Coniff, a reporter for The Progressive. Following this unaccustomed luxury, we met at two P.M. with the signature petitioners for their kickoff drive to get us on the ballot. These good citizens, like others of their avocation around the country, are the unsung heroes of third- party candidates. They are the rebuttals to the ugly collaboration between the Democrats and Republicans in state legislatures who do whatever they can to exclude competition. Some states are much worse than others. Little Vermont was in the modest barrier category, requiring only one thousand signatures for a presidential candidate.

The fund-raiser that followed at the home of environmentalist Crea Lintilhac was not much in terms of dollars, but made up for it with the dazzling presence of Vermont's activists of all ages and incomes. Of course, the location also helped to dazzle. Crea's home and the expansive landscapes around it are a splendid reminder of why people love to visit Vermont.

That sunny afternoon, the star of the show was Anthony Pollina, the gubernatorial candidate of the Vermont Progressive Party. Pollina was a longtime civic leader in Vermont, heading the Vermont Public Interest Research Group with illustrious results. He knew Vermont upside and downside. Taking the podium, he stated right off that his was a campaign to win, not just to make a few points. He quickly distinguished himself from Vermont's Democratic governor, Howard Dean, by listing the governor's positions and neglects and adding that Vermont's Democrats and independents would have been outraged at these same policies were Dean a Republican.

Pollina then launched into a concise, articulate description of what Vermont needs and what he would accomplish as governor. At the time, I said to myself, this is a real political comer. Pollina had it together. Moreover, Vermont's campaign finance reform law had just taken effect. This meant that Pollina would qualify for the maximum matching funds, which totaled just over $300,000. This brought the state toward a little more level playing field.

As the guests started to leave, I was so impressed with Pollina that I asked him to join me in Montpelier. He agreed to come, though I sensed a hesitancy, which was explained that evening. Driving through the bucolic countryside -- and it verily defined "bucolic" -- I made a call to Steve Yokich, the United Auto Workers' president, urging him to get the Democrats to give labor a better agenda in return for the UAW's probable endorsement of Gore.

When I arrived at the bustling high school auditorium, with its tables, volunteers, and incoming audience, Bernie Sanders took me aside and in grave tones expressed his concern at my having invited Pollina to speak with us. Clearly he was worried that the Democrats, who had agreed no longer to seriously challenge Bernie (with one exception in 1996), ·thereby sparing him a three-way race, would see his association with Pollina as a hostile act to their party and their governor.

I expressed surprise. "Bernie," I said, "Anthony was once your staff member, and there are no positions that I know where you are in disagreement."

He acknowledged that but repeated his displeasure nonetheless. Going up to the stage with Bernie, I thought to myself that an Independent should not have to worry about such matters. Bernie graciously introduced me and described our work together. But he left the stage and departed in the middle of my speech before I asked Pollina to come up and give his precise, factual stem-winder. He was a great hit with the crowd. There was very little time after the question and comment period to circulate with the Greens. It was late. We had to drive that night to Portland, Maine, which was nearly five hours away.

It was a fast-paced tour and I have to admit that I started counting down the states left.

***

Maine is one of two states -- the other being New Mexico -- where the Green Party first started getting the attention of the press and the dominant parties. This is in no small part due to the energy and intellect of John Rensenbrink, who, until retirement, taught politics at Bowdoin College. He came very early to Green politics in the eighties, converting or actively participating in its raucous· conferences and meetings and giving as good as he got. In 1997 he published his book Against All Odds, a history of the U.S. Green Party, with emphasis on its ecological and political reform stands. John is insistent, always exhorting people to surpass any of his own previous efforts. I visited Maine three times during the campaign, but that was not enough for him.

On this trip, following our daily press conference near Brunswick, we attended the Maine Green Party nominating convention at Noremega Hall in Bangor. I spoke for a few minutes and then Nancy Allen placed my name in nomination. In a field of three, I was voted their nominee. The Associated Press and MSNBC were there. Our numbers in the polls were still inching upward. What more could one ask?

The next morning we stopped for Sunday breakfast with a jam-packed crowd of Greens at the Mesa Verde restaurant in Portland. For nine A.M., these people were sure charged up. Two Green Party candidates for the state legislature, Derrick Grant and David Palmer, spoke about their first-time plunge into politics. I went over some local issues, reminding some of the old-timers of our book The Paper Plantation, which exposed the enormous power of the giant paper and pulp companies in Maine. These mills literally controlled and ran major rivers, and the struggle over the legendary Maine woods was still ongoing with rallies, statewide referenda, and lawsuits. If there was ever a state for the Greens to thrive in, it was the land of the Mainers.

That evening I stayed at the home of Herschl and Selma Sternlieb and discovered again what political campaigning finds -- talented, engaged citizens who hold up far more than their share of democratic society. A successful, semi-retired businessman, Mr. Sternlieb is a clear-eyed progressive moored in fundamental principles of candor, justice, and resolve. He is a satirist of both right-wingers and wobbly liberals, and you can't stop laughing at his myth-puncturing poetry and prose.

The next morning we were back in Washington. I went to the ABC studios to do a Webcast with Michael Oreskes, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, and Josh Gurnstein of ABC News. No news organization wanted to be left behind in this new medium, though I have to ask if Webcasts are worthwhile. The next day I did a similar Web interview with MSNBC, and there were more upbeat assurances about audience size.

All the presidential and vice presidential candidates used the Internet with elaborate, heavily worked Web sites. They enthusiastically counted the millions of hits. They poured out notices and messages and got replies back. Millions of voters purportedly got more engaged in watching, reacting, and commenting on these campaigns. The Internet age, a hundred pundits predicted, would greatly change political campaigning and fund-raising. Well, it proved to be a very cheap fund-raising medium that encouraged small givers. But for increasing voter turnout -- another frequent prediction -- it was disappointing.

From virtual reality we set out for our West Coast journey that included Alaska and Hawaii-two states that major candidates treat as off-limits -- too far away, populations too small, and too politically predictable. But first we attended a fund-raiser held in Berkeley, thrown by my nephew Tarek Milleron's close friends Stacia Cronin, a pediatrician, and David Wilson, a home builder, wife and husband. Stacia and David, somewhat less than impressed with the major choices in the election, had generously offered their help to our campaign. Despite a few heated phone calls, the turnout for the fund-raiser was healthy indeed. The house, high in the Berkeley hills, was filled with professionals who would ordinarily be skeptical of Green politics and even a few of whom would ordinarily be voting Republican. Tarek introduced me, feeling at home in his hometown, and recounted memories of fielding the fly balls I used to hit to him when he was a kid. It was a stark contrast to the campaign we were now waging. Two years earlier, Tarek told me he would be with me in 2000 if I ran. Now he took time out from earning a graduate degree in tropical rainforest ecology to hit the campaign trail -- a different sort of jungle, to be sure.

The next morning, accompanied by reporters from Business Week and the Los Angeles Times, we flew to Portland, where I spoke at Portland State and met with the anti- sweatshop students who were incensed that Nike CEO Phil Knight had pulled the plug on a $30 million contribution promised the University of Oregon because of their protest. Then in rapid succession, a fund-raiser at Julie Lewis's home, which included a marvelous exchange with eighth graders, an editorial board meeting with the Portland Oregonian, and an address at the First Unitarian Church before leaving for Anchorage, landing there at eleven P.M.

We arrived late in Anchorage and groggily made our way the next morning to an event at Cyrano's Bookstore. I was amazed that the reporters, camera crews, and radio hosts managed to squeeze into the available room. The questions ranged over a multitude of Alaska matters, including oil, timber cutting in the Tongass Forest, and regulation of the fisheries.

The state is a quarry for raw materials extracted by American, British, and Japanese corporations with very little value-added industry. Alaskans were having to purchase imported finished products or fish that actually originated in their state. A far cry from Alaska's early Democratic and progressive years, the state is almost completely dominated by Republicans, as are most other low-population western states defaulted by the Democrats. The only exception is the kindly Democratic governor Tony Knowles, who tries hard to be a Republican on matters such as restrictions on tort law, overcatering to the oil companies, and openly voting for the Republican senator Ted Stevens.

I received good media coverage that evening and the next morning on the day's activities. From the news conference we joined a protest march outside a hospital by the self-help coalition Alaska Injured Workers. It was a beautiful warm day. Drivers passing by would honk their horns in support of the demonstrators. The insurance companies were bringing in physicians from outside the state who deny workers' compensation claims and then return to California or elsewhere. The stories told to me by the marchers were heartrending. Serious back, neck, knee, or other disabilities kept them from working but did not keep away the bill collectors. Even for most tort attorneys, the whole workers' compensation system is off their screen because the fixed fees are so small they cannot make much of a living representing these workers. Tens of thousands of workers are thus herded into a backwater of American law with meager benefits when their claims are accepted. Workers' comp lawyers call these payments a meat chart -- so much for a leg or an arm, with laws not permitting pain and suffering compensation.

During my campaign I spoke often about the avoidable violence of occupational deaths, injuries, and diseases from the factories, mines, and farms. According to OSHA, about fifty-eight thousand work-related fatalities occur in the United States every year. This figure exceeds by a considerable margin the number of fatalities on the highways and is almost four times the number of homicides in the United States. But these are not media- attracting casualties save for some collective tragedy such as a big coal mine collapse. The workers die in their beds, one by one, often from long-term exposure to toxic chemicals or lethal particulates. These losses are almost all preventable by the companies in charge. Yet this subject is almost never a campaign plank or a debatable condition of American life.

From the picket line we went to a fund-raiser for AKPIRG at the Snow City Cafe. The turnout was great, with old friends like Peter Gruenstein, Hugh Fleischman and Steve Conn present. The spirited response to a· great little citizen group heightened when I started to match dollar for dollar contributions beyond the ones made at the door.

This was followed by a full-length address before six hundred people, an impressive turnout, since it was Memorial Day weekend. I took the occasion to critically comment on the record of the two Republican senators and representatives from Alaska whose seniority had given these arch-reactionaries -- Ted Stevens, Frank Murkowski, and Don Young -- powerful chairmanships of key committees relating to public lands, energy, and appropriations. The once-dominant Democratic Party and the once-powerful Teamsters Union had both lost influence to the Republicans and the large oil and gas companies. I urged the audience to strive for a strong progressive movement in the state that would have considerable leverage to limit the damage done by their legislators in Congress. The Alaska Green Party, as it turned out, got Winona and me 10 percent of the vote, the highest percentage of any state.

Alaska is the trustee for a very large portion of America's natural resources, including fisheries, yet it receives a disproportionate amount of inattention from national environmental and other citizen groups -- not to mention the Democratic Party.

That night I thanked the Garas family for hosting us and got to the airport just in time for the flight to Seattle en route to Honolulu. It was, as I said, the Memorial Day weekend, but the Hawaii Greens succeeded in arranging a meeting of union representatives and environmental leaders on a Sunday. Following that, I did one-on-one interviews with reporters from the major Hawaii media that focused on these beautiful Pacific islands and their growing battle with air, water, and solid-waste pollution.

Hawaiians are very sensitive to the problem of "pollution in paradise" due to their reliance on the tourist industry. More than twenty-five years ago, I sent a young man, Davitt MacAteer, from West Virginia coal mine country, to Hawaii to shake up the complacency among the ruling classes. He spent a few weeks there and created an uproar that older Hawaiians remember to this day. Davitt's strategy was to send mass mailings to travel agencies on the mainland showing pictures of raw sewage being dumped into the Pacific not far from Waikiki. Not very appetizing fare for your average family vacation plans. Some of the raw sewage problems have since been taken care of, but judging by our public meeting with a couple hundred people that evening at the Harris United Methodist Church, the environment was very much on their minds. Folks were also hard-pressed by exorbitant prices for food and other necessities. Hawaii has long been beset with large importers who did not like competition. After all, this island for years was dominated by what was commonly referred to as the "Big Five" corporations -- AMFAC, C. Brewer, Alexander & Baldwin, Castle & Cooke, and Theo H. Davies & Co. Also present at the church were advocates of the Hawaiian native movement, which seeks a stronger cultural identity and autonomy.

The highlight of my visit to Hawaii was just outside of Honolulu on a large fenced-in lot. Inside was a small area of less than half an acre surrounded by barbed-wire fence and klieg lights. Our group included Woody Harrelson, the actor and Hawaii resident, and Dave Frankel, an attorney and industrial-hemp activist. As we approached the internal fence, we were greeted by Dr. Dave West, a plant geneticist, who was in charge of the only federal legally licensed plot to grow industrial hemp -- a long-fiber, versatile plant domesticated five thousand years ago by the Chinese.

When the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed, industrial hemp fell into the category of a similar prohibited product. It helped that the paper industry wanted this to happen because industrial-hemp producers would be an undesirable competitor. But the U.S. military used industrial hemp throughout the war effort ("Hemp for Victory" campaign) because of its strength in the manufacture of rope and such items as webbing in parachutes. Perhaps the best summary of the position held by President Clinton and his drug czar, retired General Barry McCaffrey, was that "industrial hemp is a stalking horse for marijuana." This comes as a surprise to agronomists who know that industrial hemp, at one-third of one percent of THC (the psychotropic component), would cross-pollinate and dilute any nearby plot of marijuana. Moreover, both General McCaffrey and Bill Clinton could smoke (even inhale) a bushel of industrial hemp every day and nor get high.

So there I was walking toward a clump of the "dreaded" industrial-hemp plants, which Hawaiian state and legislative officials and the University of Hawaii had urged the Clinton administration to allow as an experiment to test varieties of industrial hemp. They all saw a potential multibillion-dollar industry emerging in the United States, which would increase the income of many hard-pressed farmers. Like their counterparts in numerous other states, such as Kentucky, North Dakota, and Wisconsin, they could not understand why it was legal to import industrial hemp from France, China, Romania, and recently Canada, but it was illegal to grow the crop in the United States. They also agreed with former CIA chief James Woolsey that industrial hemp could reduce our reliance on imported oil and was a national security plus.

Back to the tour, where Dr. West patiently explained how this industrial-hemp experiment had resulted in lots of paperwork .and incessant reports to Washington. For example? I asked. Well, he said, the other day some birds flew over the barbed wire and ate some hemp seeds. He had to report this. I asked whether the birds flew away in a shaky fashion. He said of course not.

Woody Harrelson, months earlier, had gone to Kentucky and announced that he was going to plant some industrial-hemp seeds. He was immediately arrested. In late 2000 a court threw his case out, but his civil disobedience generated quite a bit of publicity and public attention to the cause of legalizing industrial hemp. I told him how I once spoke to two dozen midlevel employees of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and asked if anyone believed industrial hemp should continue to be banned. Not one person raised his or her hand.

Little did I realize standing by that industrial-hemp plot the extent to which the Clinton regime would go in its war on this issue. Five thousand miles away on the impoverished Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota, Alex White Plume was carefully and openly cultivating industrial hemp plants, which had grown to ten feet in height. Two years earlier, the Oglala Sioux tribal council had passed an ordinance reviving the legal distinction between industrial hemp and marijuana to encourage what tribal members called "land-based economic development." They knew that there would be a legal challenge by the federal government to both the ordinance and tribal sovereignty in federal court. But what they never anticipated was what happened on the hot early-summer morning of August 24, 2000.

About twenty-five federal law enforcement officials from the DEA, FBI, and the U.S. Marshall Service, wearing bulletproof vests, in twelve vehicles, two airplanes, and a helicopter, swooped down on this isolated land north of Wounded Knee. They carried automatic weapons and large Weed Eaters that were instantly turned on the tall plants. More than two thousand plants were chopped down or uprooted.

White Plume watched the raid in a state of shock, later telling a reporter from the Lakota Nation Journal, "This crop was going to be the beginning of our future, we followed all the criteria of the tribal legislation, we were totally open with everyone." The DEA agents were friendly, he said, revealing that they had gotten some leaves from his crop earlier and tested them and found they were below 1 percent THC content. Meanwhile, a few hundred miles to the north, Canadian farmers stood ready to legally export their industrial hemp to the Sioux or anyone else in the United States who wanted to buy it.

I'm going into some detail here because our campaign believed that industrial-hemp growth has great environmental consequences, eliminating the need for chemicals such as chlorine and lots of dangerous byproducts like dioxin associated with cotton and other fibers and fuels. But this issue also pointed out in the clearest fashion how hard it is to break through with a new proposal in a presidential campaign. Not one national reporter, to our knowledge, wrote about our detailed position on industrial hemp except AP's Eyn Kyung Kim, covering our press conference in Washington after the Pine Ridge raid. Not one reporter ever asked Bush or Gore about industrial hemp -- a product that millions of Americans and the nation's farmers want to be grown in the United States.

On short notice I had a quick lunch with Governor Ben Cayetano. He is my favorite of all incumbent governors. Without much organized citizen support, he, more than the other state chiefs, stands up for workers and consumers when companies overreach or bully them. For years he has taken on the rapacious auto insurance companies, often against a hostile legislature controlled by his own conservative Democratic Party. When I mentioned Clinton's recent announcement on restoring Hawaii's reefs, Governor Cayetano shrugged and said, "Just talk."

We also broke some bread with the pride of Hawaii's Greens -- the compelling Keiko Bonk, who, having been elected to the Big Island's council, was running for mayor. Polls had her leading the race and she was causing the Democrats real concern. Although she did not win in November, she'll be back.

Woody Harrelson must have noticed how sleepless we looked after days on the road. So he and his wife, Laura Louie, invited us to join their family for an excellent Thai dinner. Since I can count on two hands the number of leisurely, sit-down dinners we had on the road, this dinner was a godsend. Afterward the Harrelsons gave me a handsome industrial-hemp shirt, which I am wearing right now as I write. Woody said I could wear the shirt but I could never wear it out. We'll see how it resists on the elbows.

Back -- to the mainland and Los Angeles. A few press interviews and then over to the beach at Santa Monica, where in full view of the tourist hotels, I joined a living-wage rally with hotel workers, labor leaders, and members of the Santa Monica City Council, including Kevin McKeown and Michael Feinstein, who that election year became one of five Green mayors in California.

A major fund-raiser was planned that evening at the home of Betty and Stanley Sheinbaum. We expected to raise about thirty thousand dollars -- a big deal for our campaign. When we arrived there around six, the living room and outside terrace were already full with many friends, including Leo and Sherry Frutnkin and Lila Garrett, and newcomers who were curious to hear what I had to say. The Sheinbaums were not endorsing the campaign. They were longtime real Democrats upset with the direction of their party, for which they had raised millions of dollars. Stanley is an institutional economist of the old school and a dedicated public citizen. He has had a major supervisory role on an official commission looking into the behavior of the Los Angeles Police Department and for years has spent much time working for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement. I asked Pat Caddell to say a few words, and he delivered an impassioned indictment of the Democratic Party. This descendant of Democrats who had held high elective office listed one betrayal after another by the Clinton administration and the Democratic Leadership Council. A party that for now is beyond redemption, he declared. Whatever I had to say about the Democratic Party was an anticlimax, so I stressed the pro- democracy message and the many improvements in our country that were being held down by business lobbies and their political servants. We need a new progressive political movement to change the dynamics and expectations of politics in America, to push the major parties in the direction of renewal and revival, or begin to replace them. I emphasized the defensive collapse of the Democrats who were making a habit of losing to the right wing of the Republican Party in both state and federal elections. Some listeners voiced their concern about the Greens costing Gore the election. I told them again that it was Gore's election to lose.
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:29 am

Nine: "We, The People"

By June our campaign had reached William Jefferson Clinton's political consciousness and calculation. On June 13, he attended a fund-raiser at the palatial Washington home of his close friend attorney Vernon Jordan. The large Contributors were assembled there to finance the shoo-in campaign of longtime District of Columbia's nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives, Eleanor Holmes Norton. One of the big givers approached Clinton and asked whether the Nader campaign would hurt the Democrats in California. Obviously, Clinton had thought about this matter. He said, "It's weird, he really wants it. But when people get into the Voting booth, they usually move away from third-party candidates because they want their vote to count." Then the president began to show his grasp of the political numbers. He said that the Green Party could affect the Democrats' chances in New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington State. But this, he added, wouldn't be the case in the blue-Collar states of the Midwest.

This was the source of the Democrats' confidence -- that the Green Party polls, as with other third parties, would sink once people were in the voting booth. Voters want to be with Winners, they asserted. But as civil rights attorney Sam Riddle told a rally in Flint, Michigan, some weeks later, "They keep telling us to Vote for the Winners, and we keep losing." But as the campaign Wore on, this "cold feet" syndrome in the voting booth was seeming less likely, and the thousands of people who told us they were supporting Nader- LaDuke never gave a hint of any such indecision.

Back at campaign headquarters, the staff was nearing the end of two drives. The first was qualifying for federal matching funds by raising at least $5,000 in contributions of $250 or less in each of twenty states, and the second was completing ballot access in as many states as possible. Already, Georgia and North Carolina were lost, and a few other states weren't looking good. We got tens of thousands of signatures in Oklahoma and Indiana, but fell just short of numbers needed to get on the ballot. South Dakota was also out despite a lawsuit brought by our pro bono lawyers at NYU Law School's Brennan Center. So was Wyoming. In Idaho, someone swiped a clipboard full of signatures while it was being circulated in a restaurant. That unfortunate theft resulted in our being kept off the ballot, though we received a remarkable twelve thousand write-in votes. All in all, we ended up with our names on forty-three state ballots as well as the District of Columbia ballot. This was achieved almost entirely by volunteers, whose efforts were truly heroic.

One of my favorite examples was Dr. Frances Mendenhall, a Nebraska dentist, who periodically closed her office and drove far and wide across the state collecting a large share of the two thousand signatures from each of three congressional districts. On August 1, she, Tom Rinne, and their fellow Greens rallied on the steps of the state capitol with 10,700 signatures.

Nebraska is a big state. When Dr. Mendenhall learned that I visited Chadron in western Nebraska, where farmers and ranchers were having a tough time economically, she drove hundreds of miles there to pick up more names.

The role of volunteers in most campaign books is reduced to different ways of saying thank you. But volunteers have an effect on candidates and their staff that cannot be quantified in numbers of envelopes stuffed, calls taken, or data entered. Their effect on me starts with not wanting to let them down, to strive to set an example that illustrates my dedication to them. Late in the campaign, when Democrats and quite a few of my friends were urging or demanding that I step aside and let my voters go for Gore, my very first reaction to the press was, "Do you think I would ever let our volunteers down? They have given us a level of trust that can never be breached."

To whom am I referring when I reply this way? There were thousands. Let's start with Cesar Cuauht'moc Garcia Hernandez, a twenty-year-old native of McAllen, Texas, who worked his way to Brown University. Cesar translated our brochure and Web site materials into Spanish, prepared ten thousand flyers and distributed them on the Washington Mall during Fourth of July festivities, then returned to Brown in the fall, where he started the Brown Students for Nader-LaDuke.

And then there was Lauren Mooney, all of thirteen years old, who expected to be treated as a grown-up by adult volunteers at the office and certainly produced like one. Or imagine my handing votes over to AI Gore after Fred "the Phoenix" Mauney rode his bicycle from Salt Lake City to Washington, D.C., while trailing a huge VOTE FOR RALPH NADER FOR PRESIDENT sign on a contraption that he referred to as a buggy. He arrived at the office with many newspaper clippings of his journey across America. He became a superhuman volunteer right through and into the election's aftermath. One time he cobbled together a giant Fred-powered moving billboard that he would ride around town and at the rallies, including the biggest, at Madison Square Garden. The amazing thing about Fred was the least known. Back in Utah years earlier, he came down with a condition that led to partial paralysis. Doctors told him he would not walk again. But he was too determined to accept their verdict. There was no way r would ever let him down.

The same held for Sally, who came almost daily to our headquarters on arthritic knees and cheerfully took on what chores needed to be done. Or the Communications Workers of America volunteer who came in on his days off, or the housewife who made hundreds of phone calls for us while her children were in school, or the carpenter from suburban Maryland who helped set up one of our adjunct offices in record time.

Thousands of e-mails and letters poured into our campaign from the widest variety of backgrounds and places. From Massachusetts, a young Jonah chose to make his contribution to Nader 2000 from the money he received for his bar mitzvah.

There are the images of people while we were on the road -- people we saw expressing their feelings from a distance but whom we could not engage. Like the elderly man at a labor rally in Detroit handing out flyers while tears streamed down his smiling face. r was on the stage speaking and wondering what was going on in his mind -- memories of the sit- down strikes, or perhaps joy at hearing Taft-Hartley denounced after decades of silence by candidates. I could only wonder, but I could and did take heart from all these good people.

College students performed herculean tasks. In Pittsburgh, one student came up and told me how he drew a slew of media attention in his small town by hanging large, hand-painted Nader-LaDuke signs from highway rails. On Election Eve, with just a few hours' notice, a Boston University freshman mobilized his friends and filled the Armory with three thousand exuberant students and faculty for an eleventh-hour rally.

What was so touching were the many stories told me by elementary school children, in the company of their parents, who proudly described how they persuaded their teachers· to include the Green Party candidate in any mock debates or straw votes conducted in the classroom and how many of their schoolmates they persuaded to go Green. So when I hear some people say, "Yeah, but you got only 3 percent of the vote," I urge them to consider the intangibles -- the many people who will intensify their civic activities in their communities and the many more people who had intelligent conversations with their friends and relatives about politics, power, justice, peace, and strong democracy. And consider the children and teenagers too young to vote, but who thought more seriously of themselves and their future roles, whether running. in elections or widening their horizon. Then there are the many fledgling Green candidates who will be coming forth at all levels of government. I saw the enrichment of the public dialogue and more than a little effervescence of many hitherto demoralized Americans. The volunteers were the vanguard of the intangibles, of these seeds and insights and awarenesses that someday may bear the fruits of more justice and revitalized political institutions. In my opinion, they. were engines of inspiration.

It was also in June, while experiencing a sudden barrage of national media requests for interviews, that I realized the severe limitations of agenda alone in getting press coverage. New or rarely advanced ideas were not sufficient. No matter that the subjects and positions conveyed were specific, timely, important, ignored by major candidates, and related to the concerns of millions of Americans. Press coverage galvanizes a political campaign only when there are controversies or a murky perception of "momentum."

And the first sign we were moving was that the Democrats were getting fidgety.

***

The reason incumbent politicians do not welcome debating their opponents, or large corporations seek to ignore their critics, is that up to now, these tactics for the most part have worked. It takes "two to controversy" and invite media attention. My rolling criticisms of corporate power and its control of government fit those tactics of silence perfectly. The ability of entrenched interests not to reply over time is a, genuine sign of their true power and fundamentally reflects the weakness of any democratic society and its supposed countervailing forces and systems of accountability. Citizen groups have realized that their investigative reports about pollution or fraud or corruption by companies have little effect if they are not followed by better business competitors, civil lawsuits, legislative hearings, or criminal prosecutions, which by their nature do produce responses. The media likes to see issues joined so that it can report on the contesting parties.

In an early June swing through North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho, I took a strong stand against any commercial logging in our national forests and on a beautiful day in Missoula, Montana, I joined with a like-minded group from the National Forest Protection Campaign. At a press conference located in the sparkling Missoula Children's Theater, I made the arguments. About 3.3 percent of the nation's timber demand comes from the national forests, where the remnants of America's ancient forests survive the power saw. The taxpayers are subsidizing the timber companies for roads and other gifts at a level of $1.2 billion a year. Many of these logs have been exported from Alaska to Japan. Using that money to preserve and restore these precious forests would produce far more enduring jobs, enhance recreational and tourist activities there, and stop the extinction of species, soil erosion, floods, landslides, and water contamination. A forest full of stumps creates few jobs for loggers. A modest effort to recover the waste wood thrown in the nation's dumps would make up for any lost timber from the national forests.

Gore and Bush declined to support a ban on commercial logging on public lands, I noted, adding the names of the giant timber corporations whose executives were backing one or both of the other candidates. Aside from an occasional bark of disapproval from a newspaper columnist, there was no response either from the candidates or from the timber barons. No controversy, no press, no joining of the issues, no move toward resolution in the reasonable future. The issues continued to dangle, shorn of a dynamic electoral context. Even were there a clamor by the citizens, if it occurred in any of the forty states that were landsliding either for Bush or Gore, why would either of them care? In Idaho, people were resigned to being ignored by both candidates because the state was overwhelmingly Bush country. The lesson learned: Clamor needs contested exchanges to have an effect.

To prove this point, there was a great deal of clamor regarding coal companies blowing off the tops of mountains in West Virginia, over the preservation of the Everglades in Florida, and over the toxic emissions of a giant incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio. We visited these states, which were closely contested between Bush and Gore. We took detailed environmental positions. There was no controversy generated because both Bush and Gore chose not to distinguish between themselves on these matters. The lesson learned: Clamor needs contrasts to have an effect.

Well, what about endorsements? There are two kinds. One is the celebrity imprimatur, which attracts attention to the candidacy and maybe some votes. Celebrity endorsers, including political celebrities, have historically produced few votes (recall Michael Jordan's declaration for Bill Bradley), but they do produce larger numbers of people who hear about what you are striving to achieve and can help in raising funds. We had very fine celebrity endorsers, people with a long record themselves of social justice activities: Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Jackson Browne, Willie Nelson, Cornel West, Bonnie Raitt, Eddie Vedder, Pete Seeger, Barbara Ehrenreich, Ani DeFranco, Casey Kasem, Patti Smith, Studs Terkel, Randall Robinson, Richard N. Goodwin, Jim Hightower, Michael Moore, Barry Commoner, Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry's), Danny Glover, Linda Ronstadt, and Phil Donahue. Some of these declared supporters raised alarm bells with the Democrats, and they went to work to get them back. William Daley, in his first press conference in July after taking over from the money-tainted Tony Coelho as Gore's campaign manager, said as much. Common practice in politics, he indicated. Both Al Gore and he calmly tried their persuasions with Phil Donahue. From Air Force Two, Al Gore made his arguments about keeping the Republicans out. Donahue replied, "Well, Mr. Vice President, I may have my head in the attic, but I'm going with the Green Man." (There are some memorable recountings in a political campaign, and this one caused a repetitive chuckle for us.)

The other kind of endorsement can be a membership or constituency kind, such as the cogent voter-turnout support of the Latinos for Better Government of Santa Barbara County, California. On. June 14, the California Nurses Association, with more than thirty thousand members, led by President Kay McVay and executive director Rose Ann De Moro, came to Washington for a press conference announcement under the rubric "RNs for RN."

Favorable comment from an unexpected source came from Jimmy Hoffa Jr., the newly elected president of the large Teamsters Union. This event occurred at their union headquarters near the U.S. Capitol on June 22, at a media-filled press conference with Hoffa, other Teamster officials, and me. A few moments earlier I met with the Teamsters Executive Board, a seasoned team of union veterans from all regions of the country. It went very well while we were all concentrating on the power of multinationals, NAFTA, job safety, and labor law strengthening. It continued to go well when the discussion moved to the anemic labor policies of the Democratic Party and the need for organized labor -- critical for Al Gore's chances -- to insist that a firm labor agenda replace Democratic lip service. But then an upset board member raised the lawsuit that Public Citizen had filed on behalf of dissident Teamsters against the union. I reminded him of the longtime work that Public Citizen had done for truck safety and reform of the former corrupt ways of the union that seriously undermined internal union democracy years ago. Now, in the latter stages of the federal government's trusteeship over the union, I simply stated that the more honest a union is, the larger it will grow and the more beneficial effect it will have on workers. I assumed that all in the room shared this philosophy. We then walked over to the room with the cameras and reporters to begin the news conference, where the unionists were kind enough to give me a standing ovation.

Because the 1.4-million-member Teamsters, known for their comparative militancy, independence, and occasional endorsement of Republican candidates, had not joined the AFL-CIO in its early Gore endorsement, the major media reporters were in attendance. Hoffa did not disappoint them. "There is no distinction between Al Gore and George W. Bush when it comes to trade," he said, adding that Gore was "wrong on trade."

He continued: "No one in the political arena speaks stronger on the issues important to American working families than Ralph Nader. We agree wholeheartedly with what Mr. Nader has said." This event was only a few weeks after Clinton-Gore rammed through Congress the China Permanent Normal Trade Relations bill that organized labor strongly opposed. Also, the Teamsters were very concerned with the NAFTA agreement to allow eight-dollar-a-day Mexican truck drivers in heavy, poorly maintained rigs to take their cargo throughout the fifty states.

The next day, Richard L. Berke, the prolific political reporter for the New York Times, wrote a page-one story titled "Once Seen as the Odd Man Out, Nader Is Rocking the Gore Boat." Berke reported that Gore advisers told him "they had moved aggressively behind the scenes to try to keep Mr. Hoffa from endorsing Mr. Nader" and that other Democratic leaders, led by Senator Harry Reid, were contacting several labor leaders to discourage them from defecting to our candidacy. How seriously did I take all this? It was a breakthrough just to hear about some unions having doubts about Gore to this degree. But I was under no illusions. All the large unions, including the Teamsters, would endorse Gore, however unenthusiastically. One of the two major parties, they believed, would win, so they'd go with the least worst and once again be taken for granted. That said, Jan Pierce, former vice president of the Communications Workers of America and our "Labor for Nader" organizer, told me that our campaign had more union endorsements than Jesse Jackson had in 1984 and 1988 combined. Labor for Nader Committees were forming around the country, thanks to Jan and local leaders like Dan McCarthy of UAW Local 417 in Detroit.

The other audition, for an endorsement by Friends of the Earth, seemed more promising. This was like old homecoming week, or so I thought. President Brent Blackwelder, a brainy Ph.D. superactivist and severe critic of Clinton-Gore's environmental surrenders from biotechnology to NAFTA/WTO to pesticides to forest issues, joined many a collaboration with us over the years. He had gotten his board to break from the environmental groups and endorse Bill Bradley in the primary. So in a one-hour exchange with him and several members of the board and staff, we connected on what the two parties haven't done and what needed to be done to take the global, national, and local environmental missions to a new level of action. I left feeling confident and remained so even after Brent told me on the telephone that there was some division among the board members. I received a call on September 5 from a reporter saying that Brent Blackwelder had released an endorsement for Gore with a ringing resolve to campaign heavily for him, especially in close states where many residents favored a strong environmental enforcement stance. The bells of the duopoly's least worst syndrome rang in my ears. If the arch-critic Blackwelder could fall into line, the task of our candidacy to deal with what later became a full-fledged fear campaign by Gore suddenly seemed more formidable.

Earlier, both the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, knowing full well how early arid pervasive my work on the federal environmental laws had been, nonetheless endorsed Gore. The grassroots environmental groups, such as the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, led by Lois Gibbs, did not have a political arm, so they could not legally endorse candidates. There was little doubt in my mind, though, that her seven thousand local chapters of people living and fighting on the toxic ramparts would have formally supported our candidacy. We had met too many of them who appreciated our work to think otherwise.

***

The Green Party nominating convention was coming up the weekend of June 23 in Denver's Renaissance Hotel. We 'wanted to do as much press as possible to raise visibility and enthusiasm and I began a series of press interviews that started with the Philadelphia Inquirer and included USA Today, radio programs, the giant Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, Fox Sunday News, the Village Voice, the Washington Post, Hardball, the New York Daily News, and my first interview with Don Imus, who told his sidekick Charles on the radio that he could see himself voting for me. People who are daily aficionados of Mr. Imus told me this was a big deal in getting voters because of his large following.

And on top of all that I had two more states to visit in order to make all fifty. I flew to Little Rock for a meeting with activists and petitioners and a press conference. It was one hot, humid day there. Then on to St. Louis for a fast-paced series of meetings, media, lectures, and a half hour with my favorite big-city editorial board at the St. Louis Post Dispatch. The Greens were sharply split in Missouri, with one camp in St. Louis and the other in Kansas City. So to reach both sides I flew to Kansas City and spoke at the Kansas Community College. Driving across the Missouri River into Kansas, our little party erupted in cheers at meeting our pledge of campaigning in every state.

It's always good to stop in Boulder, where they gave me a resounding liftoff for the convention the next day at the large standing-room-only Chautauqua Community House.

More than at any other event in our campaign, many of the major media organizations were represented at the Denver convention, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The foreign press, mindful of the many Green parties around the world, was also present, and I was pleased to find out that there were Greens attending the convention from five continents. Saturday, June 24, was devoted to one-on-one interviews with reporters, meeting informally with many of the delegates, and preparing for the modest nomination festivities the next day.

Once again, the Green Party, under the convention leadership of Dean Myerson and Annie Goeke, set an example that went unnoticed by the media. There were no hospitality suites for companies, no freebies with corporate logos plastered on them, no fund-raisers shaking down fat cats. The signs held by delegates were about organic agriculture, solar energy, opposition to the death penalty, and corporate prisons. Now, it could be argued that the Greens could embody such virtues and be this noncommercial because no companies would care to sponsor us. What, after all, would it serve them? But there are many companies of lesser size and greater conscience that would have been pleased to be associated with the Greens. Companies prominent in energy conservation, renewables, recycling, wind power, or nutrition, or businesses with social crusades on behalf of indigenous peoples or arms control would have been pleased to be there. So far the Green Party, which has debated this very matter of convention sponsorships, has held the line between the political and the commercial.

Freed from the vested interests, even good ones, the Greens were still in thrall to their own schisms, especially between the Association of State Green Parties and Green Party USA. Fortunately, both groups, which differ in personality, style, and some tactics and positions but agree on far more matters, including the Ten Key Values (see Appendix F), submerged their differences long enough to have one unified convention and support the ASGP platform coordinated by Steve Schmidt. This was accomplished by a few Greens in each camp who had the patience and vision to agree that a certain degree of unity advances the Green cause on a faster track and quickens the likelihood of it becoming nationally certified by the Federal Election Commission.

The convention itself was a serious and joyful occasion with about five hundred Green delegates in attendance at workshops, caucuses, and receptions, with some casual music. There was nothing casual, however, about our attention to the abuses of power and the denials of justice that the political system has been allowing or even profiting from to advance the careers of its practitioners. There was no blather, few cliches, and little flattery among the speakers who came to this age-old problem of oligarchy from different angles.

Jim Hightower regaled them with his factual, homespun satiric darts and metaphors. Hightower is the closest human being we have in this country to a progressive Will Rogers and he is much funnier. His books cover a range and depth of subjects belied by his colorful titles, as with his latest, If the Gods Wanted Us to Vote, They'd Have Given Us Candidates. Dr. Sidney Wolfe, head of Public Citizen's Health Research Group, shocked even these Greens with his descriptions of how the HMO-dominated corporate medicine machine treats, mistreats, or refuses to treat patients in our country. Labor Party founder Tony Mazzochi, representing the best in democratic union labor, spoke about the nature of work in America, how it is defined, how labor is relegated to the lower rungs of the American power structure, and the suffering that comes from a weakened unionism. Steve Gaskin and Jello Biafra delivered their inimitable declarations. They were both vying for nomination votes from the delegates.

The renewable form of energy known as Ronnie Dugger provided a wonderful introduction to my acceptance speech. By this time, the delegates had seen and heard some of the best political orators around and did not exert any effort to suppress their enthusiasm for my acceptance remarks. I have always found it more difficult to speak to a supportive or applauding audience than to one critical of my positions. This feeling comes from an aversion to anything that sounds like pandering, instead of my desire to foster concurrence, reinforcement, and extension. I like to meet the challenges of persuasion or rebuttal. On the modest convention stage, however, watching the banners, balloons, and signs held by people enthusiastically on their feet, I felt their energy.

Most presidential candidates would have their advisers jockeying for the specific concerns of swing voters who could spell the difference in one or more states or, more crassly, to give a nod to a constituency of donors. My associates had only one basic plea: Keep it short. Say, about forty minutes.

Well, ninety-five minutes later, the delegates were still cheering. Why did I speak so long? So much required predicates, facts, and connections made. Major-party candidates can speak in short paragraphs of conclusions because what they are saying people have heard again and again within the retread regions of political rhetoric. I recall MIT professor Noam Chomsky, when asked why he would not go on television during the Vietnam War to convey his pronounced views on that conflict. Sound bites favor the status quo, he said. A pro-Vietnam person can simply say, "Peace through strength." In contrast, Chomsky would have to lay down some predicates to explain his antiwar position. Time allotted would be less than ten seconds on an evening news program, and even a three-minute segment of question-and-answer would not suffice.

In my case, I set about to reach a broad spectrum of voters with a deep array of subjects rarely presented or discussed in political campaigns. I had to find a way between soaring sermons and the Statistical Abstract. There was a need for a combination of irresistible rhetoric and unassailable evidence. I was aware that the audience for my remarks, in snippet, in part, or in whole (C-Span was there), contained the diversity and concern with the subjects treated. Different issues touch people's temperament, experience, and sense of injustice differently. People often are moved much more by one topic close to them than a series of other topics. Third parties historically have been viewed as single-issue movements, which made their continuance fragile. I was determined that the Green Party be seen, at least through its nominee, as broad and as comprehensive as its platform, its key values, and its most hardworking supporters.

Opening my remarks with, "Welcome to the politics of joy and justice," I led with what could be the longest acceptance sentence yet delivered:

On behalf of all Americans who seek a new direction, who yearn for a new birth of freedom to build the just society, who see justice as the great work of human beings on Earth, who understand that community and individual fulfillment can be mutually reinforcing, who respect the urgent necessity to wage peace, to protect the environment, to end poverty, and to preserve values of the spirit for future generations, who wish to build a deep democracy by working hard for a regenerative progressive politics, as if people mattered -- to all these citizens and the Green vanguard I welcome and am honored to accept the Green Party nomination for president of the United States.


Right away, I wanted to lift expectations and civic responsibility levels. But a few moments later, after elaborating the meaning of a deep democracy in terms of structural objectives, I stated that such goals were also conservative goals, driving the point home that conservatives are not corporatists with several rhetorical questions:

Don't conservatives want movement toward a safe environment, toward ending corporate welfare and the commercialization of childhood? Don't they, too, want a fair and responsive marketplace for their health needs and savings? Let us not in this campaign pre-judge any voters, for Green values are majoritarian values, respecting all peoples and striving to give greater choice to all voters, workers, individual taxpayers, and consumers. As with the right of free speech, we may not agree with others, but we will defend their right to free speech as strongly as we do for ourselves.


Oratory specialists tell us that speeches on such occasions have to provide vision. I provided scenarios of what our collective futures could be like as a country and as a world and then spent some time on the critical point of voter motivation.

I have learned that reminders of heroic reform achievements in our nation's past and comparisons with nations that have moved ahead of us in important areas of public need give people today hope, inspiration, and energy. The past struggles against King George III, slavery, the disenfranchisement of women and blacks, the rapacious robber barons -- to name a few -- provide a rhythm to the march for justice that each generation, if its members are to become good ancestors, must join. Moreover, our status as the world's leading power has often led us to ignore how much we can learn from other countries and the ways they have dealt with universal health care coverage, labor rights, worker benefits, child care, public transit, and other public facilities. I spoke about the tightening exclusion of civil society in Washington by an ever-stronger corporate state that for the past twenty years has obstructed citizen groups from participating in their government. After all, as Cicero said, freedom is participation in power. The words of Woodrow Wilson nearly a century ago ring so true today: "The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of their bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy."

I argued that this state of exclusion need not persist if we marshal the assets we already have into action. Besides bringing more nonvoters into the voting booth, we as a people legally own very significant assets that we have allowed corporations to control. For instance, we own the public airwaves (the highways for the television and radio companies), the public lands (one-third of the United States with the largest share of natural resources), and $5 trillion of workers' pensions funds. Imagine developing the mechanisms so that we can control what we own -- a rather conservative principle. If we did, we would have our own radio and television stations, our own use and preservation of the public lands, and large shareholder leverage over the major corporations on the stock exchange.

Other assets are more intangible but no less motivating. I spoke about who controls our yardsticks that measure conditions in our country. If the yardsticks are those preferred by business economists -- that is, profits, inventory levels, GDP, stock market levels, which we hear about almost daily -- that will set the economic agenda. If we use more people yardsticks -- e.g., child and adult poverty, affordable housing, hunger, the uninsured, failing schools, land erosion, environmental devastation, natural resource depletion, decaying public works, corporate subsidies, corporate crime, fraud and abuse against consumers, workers, and the government, nonliving wages, underemployment, child obesity, diabetes, and asthma -- then our public agendas and discussions become quite different. We can begin focusing on the distributional nature of the quality of both our economy and its growth, on who is benefiting and who is not.

But I wanted to conclude the address with something other than an oratorical flourish. So I posed questions and punctuated my answers with that simple phrase from our Constitution's preamble, "We, the people."

"Who will achieve public financing of public elections and thereby remove many roadblocks to progress?" I asked the audience. "We, the people," they roared back. "Who will secure universal, accessible, and quality health care, with an emphasis on prevention, for all children, women, and men in America, at long, long last?" "We, the people." "Who will repeal restrictive labor laws such as Taft-Hartley, secure a living wage, enforce and strengthen the environmental, consumer protection, and job safety laws, end hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare?" "We, the people," rang through the ballroom and out to many more Americans across the country.

This back-and-forth was going so well that I decided to plow new territory: "Who will discover the small and medium-size businesses that practice their belief in sustainable economies, like the Interface Corporation of Atlanta, so as to refute the chronic nay-saying of big business? Who will elevate the many civil servants in our federal government above the demeaning stereotypes that politicians have pasted on them?"

Back and forth we resonated that "we, the people" will send bigotry and virulent intolerance into oblivion, expand the definition of national security and national purpose to drive back the global scourges of poverty, contagious disease, illiteracy, and environmental destruction, and support workers and peasants for a change instead of dictatorships and oligarchies.

Afterward, an associate told me that this sequence was overdone. I replied that repeating the civic obligations of "we, the people" can never be overdone, until it is done.

Some special groups of "the people" had to be addressed directly. They were the nonvoters whose varied objections to voting, I believe, were dissolved by the Green Party's platform of reform, empowerment, and goals. These include upper-income people, whose influence could be put to far greater good by giving voice to the majority of their fellow Americans who cannot exit from bad conditions as the affluent can, and the millions of retired Americans who have so much experience and perspective, which affords endless opportunities for applying their community-based patriotism and nurturing of the young. I urged the youth of America to avoid being trivialized by the commercial culture that tempts them daily. Because if they do not turn on to politics, the lessons of history are that politics will turn on them.

My remarks over, the Green assemblage erupted with cheers, as the balloons fell from the ceiling (a rare concession to traditional big-party hoopla). The person who made all this possible -- my mother, Rose -- came up and, holding a sunflower in one hand, gave me a big hug with the other.

That evening our United Airlines flight to Los Angeles was canceled. United rescheduled us for the next morning, but when we arrived, we learned that the 6:40 A.M. flight had also been canceled.

Presidential candidates prefer private jets. But if Gore and Bush traveled on commercial airlines, they would understand the outrage that airline passengers feel at the increasing delays, cancellations, poor service, cramped seats, and gigantic fares in many markets where there is little or no competition.

I have flown in coach for over forty years and coauthored, with Wesley Smith, a book on airline safety. In 1971 I started the Aviation Consumer Action Project, representing the rights of airline passengers with some success, especially in safety areas.

In the seventies, Allegheny Airlines (now U.S. Air) bumped me from a Washington, D.C., flight to Hartford, Connecticut, where a large audience was waiting to hear me speak. In the ensuing case, Nader v. Allegheny Airlines, our lawyer Rueben Robertson discovered that Allegheny, and other airlines, routinely overbooked their planes. The case went to the Supreme Court of the United States, where I won a ruling that later led to the airlines changing their overbooking practices.

Passengers, flight attendants, and pilots seemed to appreciate that I was flying coach with them, and a few said they would vote for me. If Gore and Bush had spent more time in coach class, perhaps consumer and safety complaints about air travel would become a priority for the FAA.

***

It was like another world the day after the convention at the William Meade Housing Project in South Central Los Angeles. It was just before noon under a blazing sun in the drab courtyard, and many little children and their moms greeted us with green and white "Nader for President" signs. A sizable contingent of press had arrived, including, and this is remarkable, two of the major Los Angeles television stations, as well as a very perceptive reporter for the Los Angeles Times. I was thinking back to the second day of our campaign, when we received almost no media attention at all.

The press conference lasted about thirty minutes as the small tot, started melting. What wasn't melting was a major worry of the mothers -- the toxic dust blowing off a nearby large pile of soil a, part of the city's casual attempt to clean up contamination under the project. You see, these very modest apartments were built on top of a former oil refinery site, and the soil was soaked with benzene and other chemicals. So many people in the project, which housed more than eleven hundred residents, have died from cancel that the surviving tenants listed their names on a little memorial in the courtyard. I thought this occasion was an appropriate one for releasing our statement on impoverished children in California When I first examined the data a year earlier, I was shocked. Children living in poverty greatly increased in number and percentage since 1980, when it was at 15.2 percent. That worsened to 21.9 percent by 1986 and 25 percent for 2000-2001. As documented in the annual California Children's Budget issued by Professor of Law Robert Fellmeth of the University of San Diego Law School, a respected Columbia University study places 48.9 percent of California's children under six years of age at "below or near poverty."

I went through some of the obvious health, education, child care, and higher minimum- age recommendations. Naturally, the reporters were most interested in my views, which I gave them, on the current controversy between the residents and city housing project officials (the oil company is long gone). The residents were angry and resigned, telling us that even their elected representatives were not doing much for them. I wondered why in this rich country of ours anyone, much less innocent children, has to live in such conditions. Especially in a country whose politicians of all stripes endlessly mouth the slogan "children first." As we were mixing with the press and the residents, a helicopter hovered overhead, an LAPD police car cruised by, and an observing Housing Authority police car parked by the curb for a while. This is the atmosphere that these children are exposed to in broad daylight -- even a press conference has to be monitored.

In any event, that evening and the next day the L.A. media produced some good television footage and column inches about the Meade Project's problem and child poverty. My departing impression was that the friendly people of Meade did not have any belief that Republicans, Democrats, or this newcomer, "El Partido Verde," was going to make any difference in their lives. Still, we wonder why half of the eligible voters don't bother to go to the polls. Grassroots politics will entail a great deal of work to fill vast vacuums bred by decades of political neglect.
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:31 am

PART 1 OF 2

Ten: The Media: An Ongoing Non-Debate

There is a major problem for anyone who runs for president, especially a third-party candidate. No matter how long or extensively you campaign in every state of the union, no matter how large your audiences become, you cannot reach in direct personal communication even 1 percent of the eligible voters. In essence, you don't run for president directly; you ask the media to run you for president or, if you have the money, you also pay the media for exposure. Reaching the voters relies almost entirely on how the media chooses to perceive you and your campaign. In short, this "virtual reality" is the reality.

Since the media controls access to 99 percent-plus of your audience, it is not shocking that 99 percent of most candidates' strategies is born and bred for media play. The media is the message. When George W. Bush nuzzles next to two little schoolchildren, his handlers make sure that the AP and other photographers on his campaign have good positioning. When Al Gore stands near some national park in his L. L. Bean attire, his handlers know they succeeded only if the image and a few choice words are played throughout the country. There are very few rallies anymore. Instead there are carefully orchestrated photo opportunities that often leave some locals resentful, feeling they have been used. And, of course, they have been used, just as the candidates use journalism for their poses, or try to, and just as journalism uses them.

There can be, though, alternatives to such contrivances. The people could have their own media, a point I made repeatedly at my press conferences. The people own the airwaves. "The people are the landlords," I would say, "and the radio and television stations are the tenants. They pay us no rent to our real estate agents, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), yet they control who says what and who doesn't, for twenty-four hours a day. What is needed are our own stations, well equipped, our own audience network, both controlled and funded by viewers. A portion of the rent that should be charged for this vast public asset, which since day one we have given away, would amplify the viewers' stations." The camera crews and attendant reporters first would appear curious, then amused, knowing that this was one long sound bite that would never make it onto the evening news. Neither did my words reach the newspaper columns. The media itself was never viewed as an issue in the campaign. A few years ago I asked a candidate why not? His reply stuck in my memory: "The media represents that part of my voice that gets through to the people. I'm not going after my voice."

There is another, much older and inexpensive way to reach people. Once under way, word of mouth is the most credible, quickest, and most lasting medium of all. It goes from friend to friend, neighbor to neighbor, worker to worker, relative to relative -- between people who afford each other longtime credibility. Word of mouth goes on all the time, but it is very hard to escalate to high levels of velocity or intensity. It would take a veritable cultural revolution of civic interest, awareness, and engagement to change the tide. We are far from that nexus as a society, except for a few hot-button issues such as abortion and gun control, which possess their own intense grapevines.

In an age of deepening concentration of conglomerate media corporations, their executives have their own interests to defend and expand. More and more, newspapers, magazines, and television and radio stations are caught up in larger megacorporate strategic objectives, which shape the nature of campaign coverage. During the summer, on the television in my hotel room, I saw Sumner Redstone, boss of Viacom, which bought CBS, being interviewed about his reportedly strained relationship with CBS boss Mel Karmazin. "Nothing to it," replied Redstone. "Mel and I are both driven by our stock price." Shades of Herbert Hoover and Edward R. Murrow, who saw the public airwaves as a public trust. That being Redstone's yardstick means that hypercommercialism becomes ever more the governing standard. This results in down grading respect for the public service requirement of the 1934 Communications Act and its famous provision for licensees to reflect "the public interest, convenience, and necessity."

When they are not merging or joint venturing, these mass communications giants are in a frantic race down the sensuality ladder, filling the airwaves with what John Nichols and Robert McChesney call the "trivial, sensational and salacious." These authors published a little paperback in the middle of the presidential campaign titled It's the Media, Stupid, where they illuminated the connection between "media reform· and democratic renewal." This little volume is a factually immersed brief for their thesis, best expressed by their own words:

The flow of information that is the lifeblood of democracy is being choked by a media system that every day ignores a world of injustices and inequality, and the growing resistance to it. No, the media system is not the sole cause of our political crisis, nor even the primary cause, but it reinforces every factor contributing to the crisis, and it fosters a climate in which the implementation of innovative democratic solutions is rendered all but impossible.

The closer a story gets to examining corporate power the less reliable our corporate media system is as a source of information that is useful to citizens of a democracy. Commercial indoctrination of children is crucial to corporate America.


It is at least permissible to assume that corporations such as Disney, AOL-Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, Viacom, Seagram (Universal), Sony, Liberty (AT&T), and General Electric, which rely heavily on corporate advertising revenue for their expenses and profits, are not likely to go out of their way to cover candidates who are critics of their major advertisers who are big contributors to both the Republican and Democratic parties. It's just simple business sense.

As these media giants become ever more global, along with global advertisers, their self- importance and impact become almost unreal. On the occasion of announcing Time Warner's merger with AOL, Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin declared exuberantly that the global media is "fast becoming the predominant business of the twenty-first century" and is "more important than government, it's more important than educational institutions and nonprofits."

Even with fewer and fewer key individuals controlling more and more print and broadcast media properties (one company now owns eleven hundred radio stations), much of their power to frame the agendas and confine the issues is the result of a two-party default. Twenty-one years ago, the especially perceptive Duke historian James David Barber wrote about the "emergence" of mass communication

to fill virtually the whole gap in the electoral process left by the default of other independent elites who used to help manage the choice. Their power is all the stronger because it looks, to the casual observer, like no power at all. Much as the old party bosses used to pass themselves off as mere "coordinators" and powerless arrangers, so some modern-day titans of journalism want themselves thought of as mere scorekeepers and messenger boys. Yet the signs of journalists' key role as the major advancers and retarders of presidential ambitions are all around us.


In Barber's view, the political parties failed because "their giant ossified structures, like those of the dinosaurs, could no longer adapt to the pace of political change. Journalism could adapt ... journalism took over where the parties left off."

Well, maybe some Democrats and Republicans were reading Barber, because they decided to take back from the media the management of choice in one area of crucial importance to any political challengers to them: the presidential debates. Until the late eighties, the League of Women Voters sponsored these debates. In 1980, they allowed independent candidate Congressman John Anderson to join Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, which helped Anderson considerably in national recognition and the polls. At one point he scored 21 percent in the polls, and he ended up with 7 percent on Election Day. The two parties did not like the League -- a nonpartisan civic group -- setting the rules and running the debates. So a private corporation was formed, given the official-sounding title of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) and headed by co-chairs who were the former chairmen of the Republican and Democratic National Committees, Its phony purpose was voter education. The debates cost money, so the CPD found corporations to write big checks. These firms have included Anheuser-Busch, Philip Morris, Ford Motor Co., and other companies that also gave soft money to the parties' national committees.

In 1992, Ross Perot came on the scene, and his wealth and widespread polling support led to his being allowed to join the debates. His polls went up, too. He received nineteen million votes, shaking the political establishment with his Reform Party and his paid televised lectures. Never again, vowed the two parties.. Fully ninety-two million Americans saw the. debate among Perot, Clinton, and Bush, more than double the average of the three 2000 debates. Too destabilizing for the duopoly. Perot was barred in 1996 by a series of vague criteria based on interviews with columnists, pollsters, and consultants who concurred that he could not win. He was also barred by the ,national television networks from buying the same kind of thirty-minute time slots that brought his message of deficit reduction and political reform into the living rooms of millions of households.

Speaking with him after the election, I said, "Ross, at least you've proved that the big boys can keep even a megabillionaire off the air."

In the year 2000, the CPD revised its criterion for third-party candidates: 15 percent or more as measured by the average of five private polling organizations (which just happened to be owned by several major newspaper and television conglomerates). So if their parent companies did not cover the third-party candidate, the polls would not likely move up. Without. moving up, there would be little media, and so a catch-22 was built in the CPD's entry barrier. How can a private company get away with this? By virtue of the mass media default, of course. There's absolutely nothing stopping the major networks and newspapers from sponsoring their own debates.

The televised debates are the only way presidential candidates can reach tens of millions of voters. Several polls during 2000 showed a majority of the voters wanted Pat Buchanan and me at the debates, regardless of folks' voting preferences. Larger audiences and ratings would almost certainly follow. People want a wide variety of subjects, viewpoints, forthrightness, and candidates. They do not see the presidential debates as a cure for insomnia. However, the great default is now on the shoulders of the media moguls, and the major parties are back in charge of the ticket for admission to the public.

This is all about giving small starts a chance to have a chance. This does not mean that there be only three debates. It doesn't mean there are no criteria. An Appleseed Foundation project suggested in a report for campaign 2000 that candidates be included who meet one of two tests: (1) the polls show that a majority want the candidate included; and/or (2) the candidate has at least 5 percent support in the polls (the statutory minimum for receiving federal matching funds) and is on enough state ballots to theoretically be able to win a majority in the electoral college. Law professor David Kairys, who advised us on the debate matter, wrote in the Washington Post:

The nation's broadcast media have so far been accomplices in this charade. CPD debates should at least be accurately labeled as Republican-Democratic campaign events, rather than as "presidential debates." ... [T]he rules of the debates should not be left to the major parties or their handpicked representatives, who have a history of excluding candidates and ideas the public wants -- and deserves -- to hear.


We did not take the CPD's autocratic exclusionary mission passively. Throughout the spring, summer, and early fall of the campaign, I denounced the CPD to one rally or audience after another. We encouraged citizens to communicate with the CPD, as we did, and demand the opening of its doors to competition. I sent letters to the major networks asking them to sponsor their own multicandidate debates. Two replied sympathetically but to no result. In September, I wrote the heads of the major industrial unions in the critical, ,close states of the Midwest urging that they cosponsor presidential debates with special emphasis on neglected labor agendas. No one from the Steelworkers, the Machinists, the Teamsters, or the United Auto Workers responded. I urged national civil rights organizations, including the major Hispanic civil rights association in Southern California, but to no avail. Granted, they had their reasons -- the CPD debates were already scheduled, logistics, and the risk of being turned down and viewed as powerless. Now, with plenty of time until 2004, I call on people and institutions who want robust and diverse debates to join together and form a People's Debate Commission.

***

The newspapers take elections more seriously, comparatively speaking, than the broadcast media. Television and radio have many ready-made excuses for their shrinking coverage. A twenty-two-minute national television news program, excluding advertising time, is not sprung from holy writ. The format of the local television news, with its nine minutes of ads, with several leadoff accounts from the police crime blotter, four minutes of sports, four minutes of weather, one minute of chitchat, and the prescribed animal and medical journal health story, is not carved in stone. Apart from public radio and the few nonprofit community radio stations, commercial radio and television devote about 90 percent of airtime around the clock to entertainment and advertisements. News is sparse, abbreviated, and very repetitious. When radio is not singing or selling, it is traffic, weather, and sports with headline news spots. The number of reporters and editors has been cut to the bone. No more are there FCC requirements for ascertaining the news needs of the community. Gone are the Fairness Doctrine and the Right of Reply. In 1996 there was near silence on the tube regarding the congressional fight to block the giveaway of $70 billion worth of the new spectrum to the television stations -- a giveaway opposed even by the Republican candidate that year, Robert Dole. The notorious Telecommunications Act of 1996 received the cold shoulder, notwithstanding its paving the way for a massive binge of mergers and further concentration of media power. In 2000 the FCC, under its chairman, William Kennard, started granting community radio licenses to nonprofit neighborhood associations. The formidable media lobby, led by the National Association of Broadcasters, descended on Congress. They pummeled into line a majority of Congress -- Democrats and Republicans -- to pass legislation, which Clinton reluctantly signed, that blocked the FCC from licensing these little stations, which could accept no paid advertising. A minor Hollywood celebrity's DDI received more television and radio coverage than did the FCC's attempt to give people a radio voice of a few miles' radius.

After dealing with reporters, editors, producers, and media honchos for nearly forty years, and being a reporter and columnist myself, I had few illusions about the difficulties in obtaining a fair quantity and quality of coverage for our campaign. Making any challenge to the existing two-party hegemony is akin to climbing a sheer cliff with a slippery rope. No other democracy in the world erects so many barriers and is so uncongenial to small political starts. From the starting gate, the major parties radiate the message to all the media that no one but them has a chance to make it a contest, much less to win. This easily convinces the media powers that a small-party candidate doesn't merit coverage because he or she can't possibly win. This produces the most insurmountable obstacle of all, which is the virtual lock enjoyed by the two major parties on coverage in the national media. We are left with the old chicken-egg routine. Waiting for poll risings to receive coverage means no poll activity due to little coverage.

We were quite aware of conventional media mind-sets and routines. There was, even among the more competent and experienced news reporters and columnists, what people inside the fourth estate have called "blackbird journalism." One blackbird takes off and the rest follow. This phenomenon is hardly counteracted by the smaller, community media or magazines like The Nation or The Progressive, which are so often ahead of the news curve. It is entrenched through horizontal peer dynamics. The Washington Post looks over the shoulder of the New York Times and vice versa, and the national networks read both papers every morning to see what is deemed significant. I came across a nearly perfect passage from James Barber's The Pulse of Politics: Electing Presidents in the Media Age that speaks to all of this:

Journalism's strength is not theory but fact.... A war over the facts, every four years, could help journalism break out of its losing preoccupation with the nuances of hypothetical opinion, symbolic epistemology, electoral bookie work, and the tired search for someone to quote, and do what it does best: get relevant information, quickly and accurately. Citizens, now woefully mis- and un- and under-informed on the way things work, ... might begin to see through the fog of rhetoric to the shape of reality. The drama of revelation might grip the public imagination a good deal more firmly than do the campaign gossip and ideological chit-chat that now drone through so many eminently forgettable paragraphs.


That is the point, isn't it? Journalism should give at least equal attention to the messages as it does to the carrier, if not more. Abraham Lincoln once said that if brought the "real facts," the people "can be depended upon to meet any national crisis."

Take a simple numerical hypothetical. Suppose a first-time candidate for the presidency, running as an independent, marshaled ten thousand super-energetic volunteers to work on one objective: registering at least two hundred thousand voters a week, week after week. The candidate didn't show in the polls, had no track record of successful advocacy, and never held public office. Should the media give that candidate regular coverage? Surely, the difficulty of getting any significant number of the one hundred million people who stay home from the polls has puzzled everyone. This candidate seemed to be achieving something that has eluded very experienced and well-funded people and candidacies for decades. In so doing, dozens of interesting stories about this amazing performance were there for reporters to gather. Thinking outside the box may happen in some classes in journalism school but rarely at the news and editorial desks of the news business.

This is not to say that the major media organizations failed to cover our campaign. They did. But they consistently viewed it as an occasional feature story -- a modestly colorful narrative dispatch from the trail with a marginal candidate -- rather than a news story about our agenda. During the months when I was traveling throughout the fifty states, the local press usually reported on the visits. In contrast, the national print and electronic media was capricious. It would parachute in a reporter to travel with us for a day or two and file a profile that focused on the so-called spoiler issue. We were never a news beat, even when the margins narrowed between Al Gore and George W. Bush during the last month and made our voters very consequential. A radio reporter in Washington, D.C., about a week before the election preposterously asked, "How does it feel to be the most powerful politician in America?" I demurred and returned to our fourteen-seat van for reporters, which was more than half empty.

In April, the first poll (Zogby) came out and put us at over 5 percent nationwide. Our audiences were growing and we had an exhaustive agenda -- much of which we had worked on for years -- that was of compelling concern to millions of Americans. These were topics that, over the years, many news outlets had reported on, investigated, and editorialized about. Bush and Gore were either dismissing us or taking positions opposite ours. Their poor respective records gave further credibility to our agenda. We had a long track record, and we weren't offering easy rhetoric. And, as the weeks unfolded, the Nader-LaDuke ticket was qualifying on forty-three state ballots and the District of Columbia, far exceeding any potential electoral college majority.

I paid a visit in May to Jim Roberts, the political editor of the mighty New York Times. Unlike some reporters and editors at the Times, Roberts appeared genuinely open to our requests for more regular coverage. I asked him whether the Times had any overall newsworthiness criteria for covering significant third-party candidates. He allowed that there were no specific standards, implying that Times editors made judgment calls as events unfolded. When I asked, for example, what would qualify as a newsworthy event in our case, he replied, "If you do anything with Pat Buchanan, or when you campaign in California, I'd be interested." At the time, California was considered a must-win state for Gore's campaign and favorable territory for our candidacy.

I often asked newspaper editorial boards across the country what I had to do to be more newsworthy. The responses were either noncommittal or related to our effect on the Gore- Bush competition. One would think that merely to escape the tedium, the press would declare itself some holidays from the horse-race question. Imagine their business reporters interviewing the CEO of a corporate start-up like RealNetworks' Robert Glaser in competition with Microsoft with the query, "Mr. Glaser, aren't you worried about taking dollars away from Bill Gates and Microsoft?"

***

When a candidate attempts an appraisal of the media's performance, it is important for him not to confuse his worldly agendas with the world revolving around him. Of course, there are many important topics that reporters have to cover daily. But a huge amount of time and space also are given to just about anything but serious news. And what results is a cultural abridgment of imagination, plain laziness, and self-censorship. Editors, producers, and reporters stick by their journalistic traditions, and somehow politicians who campaign against big government receive more coverage than those who are critical of big business. In the nineties, Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition was on the network Sunday news shows twenty times more than I was.

It's important to understand where the media is coming from and how its traditions and prejudices affected the coverage of my campaign. Here are a few stories that hint at what I mean.

The Washington Post was a puzzle even to some of its own people. In October we filled Madison Square Garden with donating supporters. The Post covered it with a paragraph two days later. Back in D.C., I held a news conference across the street from the Post at the Madison Hotel, which exposed the phony crisis of Social Security that Bush and Gore were peddling for different reasons. No one showed up from the Post. AP sent a story around the country. The New York Times wrote it up but did not print a story. However, unlike the Times, the Post invited me to meet with its editorial board and columnists, which I did. The next day, David Broder, their chief political writer, produced an accurate column-length article. Shortly thereafter, the paper invited me to submit an op-ed piece, which I did. It was the definition of running hot and cold.

Our press office became aware of this schizophrenic tendency early on, so when Dana Milbank called to say he wanted to travel with us and write a feature for the Post; we warily filled him in on our next California trip in late August. We started at Occidental College near Los Angeles, went to San Diego, and then went up to Santa Barbara, Salinas, Carmel, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Sacramento. The trip had great variety -- people, geography, and issues. By the afternoon of the third day, Milbank had had enough. Arriving with us at an early-evening farm labor rally in rural Salinas, he announced that he was cutting out and driving to San Francisco to spend that time with some Yale buddies.

When his long Style section feature came out, we wondered whether we had traveled with the real Dana Milbank. His piece focused on the soy cheese quesadillas served at our San Diego fundraiser, and that we stayed overnight at a wealthy volunteer's house in Santa Barbara. Milbank made no mention of our detailed session with people in San Diego working on border issues, and since he headed for the city early, he missed our electric exchange with California's migrant farmworkers and their advocates in Salinas. It seems that Milbank developed a dislike for me when, at a Latino community center, I made a sharp comment on the media's often upside-down sense of newsworthiness and in passing referred to the Washington Post as one of many culprits. Milbank reddened, waltzed over to one of our campaign staff, disputed the charge, and stalked out of the room. Oh, well, have another quesadilla (they were pretty good).

In mid-September I was campaigning in Washington, D.C., when the Post coverage saga returned. I felt that a full day at D.C. events had to get us their coverage. This was its hometown, overwhelmingly Democratic and overwhelmingly avoided by previous presidential candidates of the major parties. I started with a news conference at a community center near the Post, sponsored by Scott McLarty and Gail Dixon, local Green leaders. I spoke in some detail of the terrible conditions in the "other Washington" where the tourists do not visit. The poverty of the District, the widespread poor health, record infant mortality, air pollution, uncertain drinking water, crumbling potholed streets and underground infrastructure, and malfunctioning governmental agencies and schools form just part of the picture in the nation's capital that resists basic improvements. It is truly a tale of two cities, between the well-to-do, who can afford to escape many of the city's ills, and the majority, who cannot. I urged a much stronger drive for statehood and democratic empowerment for its disenfranchised citizenry. While the District is recovering modestly, with the new mayor, Tony Williams, and a real-estate boom, many poorer people are being pushed out by gentrification.

We then walked through the Anacostia farmers' market in one of the city's most neglected areas. This is Ward 8, with sixty-five thousand residents, mostly African Americans, and not one food supermarket. If you live in Ward 8, you go to Maryland for your groceries, or to another section of the District -- inconvenient, costly, and humiliating. There are many towns in the United States with less than a third of that population which have three or more large supermarkets. There are parts of Anacostia that look like Camden, New Jersey: abandoned buildings, debris-covered lots and structures, and schools badly in need of repair. Plenty of crime, too. The farmers' market was not doing too well. There were about five tables with some spare clusters of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, sweet potato pies, some fried foods, and a table of homemade soaps and balms. The vendors were properly proud of their enterprise, but the customers were sparse. We stopped by the Expery Barber Shop, where I picked up the friendly fatalism of the people about their community, though one man said that things were a little better than a few years ago.

Then over to Evans Middle School at 55th and East Capitol Street, N.E., where the principal, superintendent, and two eighth graders who were twins showed us what a determined level of cooperation among administrators, teachers, and parents can do to make an inner-city school sparkle. Equally promising was a visit to a large organic garden on an acre of land provided by St. Elizabeth's Hospital. The head farmer, flanked by Georgetown University student volunteers, was infectiously enthusiastic as he explained what they were growing and distributing locally. I just listened. There was nothing for me to say other than to point the accompanying writers to this thriving agrarian oasis in the middle of the city.

That evening, there was a high-energy rally for D.C. statehood in the auditorium of the University of the District of Columbia. Ambrose R. Lane Sr., journalist and radio host, and Sam Smith, publisher of the Progressive Review and District activist, were the cohosts and speakers. I noted in my remarks that while Democrats were for D.C. statehood and Republicans were against it, both parties for years have done everything they could to make sure nothing happened for D.C. statehood. I urged that sometime before Clinton left office there should be thousands of peaceful demonstrators around the White House demanding statehood and real self-government so that District residents can blame themselves for the city's deficiencies instead of having to blame Congress and the Financial Control Board that rules the disenfranchised.

Late that evening, I turned on the local TV to learn that I was the first presidential candidate ever to campaign in Anacostia. The only time the Democratic or Republican candidates appear in the uncontested D.C. on their campaigns is for fund-raisers at posh hotels or large homes of the rich and powerful. The next day, AP sent out on their national wire a photo of me talking with Malik Lloyd, who was getting his hair cut by Kevin Davis, as I toured the neighborhood promoting "community strength."

The day after, however, there was nothing in the bulging Sunday Washington Post. In fact the paper had not even bothered to send a reporter.

Still in the Post's circulation area, the next morning I attended the annual Farm Aid rally in Bristow, Virginia. This is Willie Nelson's big event on behalf of family farmers. Thousands come every year from all over the country, making it the biggest such gathering in the United States. Naturally, Willie and Carolyn Mugar, executive director of Farm Aid, invited all of the presidential candidates. The only ones to show for this long-planned event were me and Pat Buchanan.

As I had sponsored a six-hundred-page report -- The Corporate Reapers -- on big agribusiness in 1992 by Al Krebs and had campaigned in farm country earlier, it was not difficult to summarize my position.

The family farm is at greater risk now than at any time in the past century. Today the threat is not drought, locusts, or plunging cyclical prices. It is industrial, vertically integrated, concentrated agribusiness backed by Washington. Traveling through the Midwest with an associate recently out of college, I advised him to view the farms we were whizzing by in Our motorcar because someday he'd be able to tell his grandchildren that he once saw these long-gone farms with their barns, silos, and planted acreage. In 1999 Feedstuffs magazine wrote that "American agriculture must now quickly consolidate all farmers and livestock producers into about fifty production systems," citing agribusiness analysts as their sources. At Farm Aid, I called for a government policy to break up the excessive market power of the grain, meat, and poultry giants that is squeezing downward the prices paid these farmers. In addition to antitrust enforcement, there has to be a promotion of new food infrastructures to market directly farm food, provide research for family farm preservation, and prevent pollution and the degradation of natural resources through strong conservation policies. By breaking the stranglehold that agribusiness has on the small farm economy, we could increase the share of the food dollar received by the farmer and facilitate a degree of price and quality competition for consumers. For further action, I referred the farmers to a group I helped start called the Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM), which organizes family farmers and academic specialists in these directions.

The farmers present did not take kindly to Gore and Bush being absent. Instead of asking Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman to represent his views, Gore sent as his spokesmen Congressman David Obey (D-Wisconsin) and Senator Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota). This choice of emissaries reflected badly on Gore's character, because both Obey and Dorgan voted against the Clinton-Gore position on NAFTA, GATT, and the Freedom to Farm Act of 1996 -- often called the Freedom to Fail Act by farmers. Obey and Dorgan were popular with family farmers over the many years they served in Congress. When both held their breath and spoke in support of Gore, I could see they were playing the good soldiers.. Gore was obviously exploiting their goodwill among farmers for his political benefit. But the farmers were not fooled and frequently voiced their displeasure. They wanted Gore to defend his positions directly.

And all of this might have made a good election-year story by the Washington Post. But the next day, readers saw nothing about Farm Aid.

Of course, the Post was always going to endorse Gore and believed that our votes would take more from Gore than from Bush. But after speaking with a number of Post reporters and editors and the publisher, Don Graham, I still cannot explain the chasms in their coverage.

The New York Times was different. It wore its biases on its sleeves and announced them dramatically on June .30, 2000, with a 618-word lead editorial titled "Mr. Nader's Misguided Crusade." In this article, written by Steve Weissman, under instructions from his superiors, the Times declared that since there was a clear-cut choice between Gore and Bush, my running as a nominee of the Green Party was a "self-indulgent exercise" driven by ego. The paper asserted that "there is no driving logic for a third-party candidacy this year, and the public deserves to see the major-party candidates compete on an uncluttered playing field. It is especially distressing to see Mr. Nader flirt with the spoiler role." Since the editorial board did not invite me to discuss the reasons for my candidacy, they were highlighting their own ignorance and dismissing the wide divide between Democrats and the Greens. The editorial concluded that the main economic issue dividing me from the major-party candidates was trade. To learn more, couldn't they at least have logged on to our Web site, votenader.org? Once again, those poor editorial writers could know little about our objections to GATT and NAFTA as autocratic governance from reading their own newspaper coverage since 1993. In 1995 I discussed the GATT agreement with a couple of their pro-GATT editorial writers at their office. I referred them to an unpleasant reality, which was that neither their reporters nor any other members of the public would be permitted to attend the WTO's tribunals in Geneva, Switzerland. Did you know, I asked them, that these tribunal proceedings, affecting not only trade but environmental, labor, and consumer matters, are conducted behind closed doors in secret? It is worth the price, replied one writer.
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

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PART 2 OF 2

However, the Times editorial did praise my record and accomplishments over the years and how I could have "the effect of enlivening the public debate." Then came the 180- degree turn: "The only realistic role" I could play this year was to tilt swing states like California toward Bush.

This editorial astounded many readers. "So rough, unreasoned, un-Times-like," a patrician from the Upper East Side told me. Weissman reportedly was taken aback by the reader reactions that flowed into the Times during the following days. Reporters in the Washington Bureau of the Times were seen shaking their heads and laughing, according to one of them. I swore to one Times reporter that I did not pay for this editorial. In the aftermath, I expected the Times to increase its regular coverage, given its thesis of my spoiling Gore's chances. That logical and naive prediction never panned out.

John Anderson called me in high dudgeon. The Times had never treated his candidacy that way in 1980, when they must have discerned a major difference or two between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Anderson wrote an op-ed piece in the Times a few days later defending our candidacy. I was given a little space to reply in the letters column.

The Times editorial against our candidacy was just the first on that page. There followed a critical column by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., two pieces by Anthony Lewis, a diatribe by Paul Krugman, and three more editorials from the Times board. Except for Krugman's piece, which contained errors and distortions, all this commentary did not disagree with our stands or positions, just with our effect on Gore's chances. In my attempt to respond to this onslaught, I learned that the Times has a two-month rule, holding readers to no more than one published letter every two months. The editorial page can attack and can mislead as Krugman did when he suggested I opposed passage of the South African constitution, and there was no chance for me to reply. Even concise letters from South African members of parliament correcting the record and a short letter replying to Kennedy by the preeminent ecologist Professor Barry Commoner were not printed. Unlike the Washington Post, the Times prohibits "taking exception" op-eds replying to previous columns or editorials. When I discussed this lack of fair play with the page's editor (now the executive editor), Howell Raines, he noted the scarcity of space and the many letters they receive each day. I responded by urging a larger space for letters. While the paper has grown in size enormously in the past thirty years, space for letters has remained the same. Again, by comparison, the Washington Post at least devotes an entire extra page on Saturday to letters.

The Times has some rethinking to do. For $34,000 a pop, it sells a corner of its editorial op- d page mostly to corporations like Exxon Mobil or think tanks with pronounced ideological views. It then refuses to print any letters to the editor in rebuttal, thereby giving these propagandists an unchallenged access to the readers on this influential page. Again, in an earlier conversation, Raines explained that priority goes to letters responding to their reporters, editorials, and columnists as a matter of professional standards. When I suggested devoting that bottom right-hand space once a week to letters rebutting the other six days, he said they would consider this and other recommendations. That was more than three years ago. Newspapers and magazines devote too little space for printing reader feedback even though surveys show that the letters section is one of the readers' favorites.

Nonetheless, the important question is: Did the editorial position of the New York Times affect the extent (not the quality) of coverage of our campaign in the news and feature sections? No one is saying so at the Times (a newspaper well known historically for having its favorites, like Daniel P. Moynihan, and its nonfavorites, like Noam Chomsky or, earlier, George Seldes). But it certainly wasn't easy for filing reporters to receive space for our campaign. After a while, why should they even try against such odds? Suffice it to say that my many years of contact with New York Times reporters, especially in the Washington Bureau, has given me plenty of evidence of selective bias toward noncoverage, which is distinct from bias in any coverage that does occur. Once after twelve reporters over a period of many months told me that it was difficult to get their stories about our advocacy groups through the New York editors, I wrote then-boss Abe Rosenthal for an explanation. He did not think there was anything going on like that. But reporters in his Washington shop surely did.

And I can't overemphasize the influence of the New York Times and Washington Post in setting the scene for the rest of the media. They view themselves as agenda shapers for public issues, apart from any election, so it is not a big leap for them to know how important they are for candidates climbing uphill who are not anointed front-runners. After presidential elections, ambitious new candidates dream of a David Broder column in the Post touting this newcomer's attributes and chances. In addition, the television networks take their cues from what the Post or Times leads with. In this sense, the operational concentration of the media is greater than the market share ratios ever indicate.

None of this reality discouraged our small press office. Led by Texas populist and former longtime House Ranking Committee staffer Jake Lewis, it came up with a panoply of good ideas. One of them was to respond immediately to major position statements by the major candidates. In September, Gore said he would tap the strategic petroleum reserve to lower the rising gasoline and heating oil prices. I instantly issued a statement summarizing the Clinton-Gore record of surrendering to the demands of big oil companies, including rubber- stamping most giant oil industry mergers (which have concentrated markets and pricing power) and ignoring information about why the oil industry voluntarily closed down in the U.S. one hundred refineries during the past fifteen years.

Mr. Gore's too-little, too-late call for releasing the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to reduce heating-oil prices was primarily a political ploy. The reserve was established for national security/ emergency objectives, not for helping a candidate whose long record of receiving oil industry political money and caving in to Big Oil has become an embarrassment.

We issued these kinds of prompt commentaries hoping that a sentence or two would get into the lengthy articles. That almost never occurred. Didn't we realize that this was a two- arty election?

During the summer I learned that both 60 Minutes and 20/20 were considering a feature segment on our campaign. The latter never surfaced, but Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes was more interested. He wanted to know whether we were planning any trips that his camera crew could join. I pointed out a couple that I thought would have visual content for television, including the Labor Day parade in Detroit. When nothing seemed to be happening, I called him at his Martha's Vineyard summer home -- to his credit he is very accessible. He still held out the possibility of a piece but said 60 Minutes wanted to wait awhile and be sure our polls were not heading downward. When the program didn't go forward even after learning of our Madison Square Garden plans, I called Mike and asked him why. Is it Don Hewitt, I asked? He replied, "Call Don," the legendary founding producer of 60 Minutes. I got Hewitt on the phone and asked whether he was the source of the hesitation. He said yes, adding that the proposed segment was on me the candidate, not me the consumer advocate, and was he going to be expected to do similar segments on other candidates? I said he was the boss on that decision and urged him to call Mike back for one more chance at being persuaded. He said okay. Later I called Mike and asked what happened. He said it wasn't going to happen. Hewitt is the last word. I asked Mike what was the best argument he made for such a program. He replied, "I told Don that the Nader campaign was the only one that had a pulse."

Months later, in June 2001, during a public debate, Mike said that he voted for me even though he had turned me down for a 60 Minutes interview. My luck has been historically bad with 60 Minutes. Back in 1990, Ed Bradley was commissioned to do a segment. The show's camera crews traveled with me to Florida, Moscow, and other places, probably spending more than $100,000, before I was told that there would be no show. When I asked why, the producers replied that they could get no one of any visibility to come on the program and criticize me, not even Newt Gingrich. Sometimes, you just don't gotta believe. In any event, losing out on 60 Minutes meant losing out on reaching fifty times more voters than I reached in person during my fifty states campaign.

There were reporters, like Maria Recio of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Tom Squitieri of USA Today, who saw early on the significance of my campaign. They persuaded their editors to allow more regular coverage of the campaign. Similarly, Dan Harr of the Hartford Courant traveled with us in New England and New York and filed daily reports. Their sense of the campaign's news importance was preceded by Tim Russert of NBC's Meet the Press, who invited me on the show four times, and the fast-talking Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball, who extended numerous invitations, including one at a wildly raucous town meeting with students at the University of Wisconsin.

I have no complaints about press photographers whose assiduousness drew no distinctions between small- and major-party candidates. They had a job to do, and some were nonstop clickers. I often wondered whether there was a correlation between the skill of a photographer and how many times he or she snapped a picture -- as in the better the photographer, the fewer the clicks. A young newspaper photographer came with us one day and crouched in front of the podium like a big cat. I moved my chin four degrees to the left. Click. I raised my index finger three inches. Click. I looked down. Click. I arched an eyebrow. Click, click. I smiled slightly. Click, click, click. I raised my hand to my ear. Click. Moved it to my chin. Click, click. I felt a surge of power in singlehandedly increasing Kodak's sales. I had some fun with the photographers, especially the young ones who did not judiciously wait out trivial moments but ran wantonly through their inexhaustible click supply. I would tease them during the long days bi announcing at events that "a photo op was imminent."

The media handlers for Bush and Gore knew that politics is theater and entertainment, and their candidate had to get on the late-night comic shows and some of the more sane daytime talk shows. So both Bush and Gore got on, at least once and sometimes twice, the Jay Leno and David Letterman shows, where they could deliver their well-rehearsed jokes or Top Tens. In mid-September, both Gore and Bush appeared on Oprah. Bush won that round among the pundits by greeting Oprah with a kiss and discussing his giving up alcohol at age forty. He told the audience that he was not "running n Daddy's name." And he showed tears in eyes when he discussed the joyous birth of his twin daughters. That was the point of appearing on these shows -- laughs, emotion, a little self-deprecation, and very little on the issues. In previous presidential campaigns, invitations by Phil Donahue meant tough questioning by the host and by members of the audience if they so chose. Today, the main challenge is to be funny, to appear congenial, and to confess a little as if you are the interviewed celebrity on the cover of Parade magazine.

Well, I decided to make the trek and asked these shows to have me on. First was Bill Maher of Politically Incorrect, which Gore and Bush steered away from. I mean, could you imagine either of them exposing himself to Bill and three other wildcat guests? Bill is very perceptive -- he voted for me.

Then I went on Jay Lena, who does go into the green room with the guests to chat, and David Letterman, who does not. Probably the latter approach makes for more spontaneity -- at least it did for me. Both appearances went well. Then there was Saturday Night Live, my fourth visit since 1977, where I did my five-minute sketch about being excluded from the debates, with Rob Lowe and the show's originator, Canadian Lome Michaels. The impersonations of Bush and Gore by Will Perrell and Darrell Hammond were side-splitters and deserved the media's -- and the candidates' -- attention.

After learning that Bush and Gore were invited on Oprah, with its large afternoon following, our press office asked if there was a chance for me to go on too. After all, when Oprah was a lonely talk-show host in Baltimore, well before she made the big time in Chicago, I gladly appeared on her small program. So we tried to penetrate the show's iron curtain. Like most of today's daytime television shows, just getting through to a live person, much less getting a response, is next to impossible. Oprah's people were no exception. Calls, letters -- it didn't matter how or who -- there was not the courtesy of a reply. Disappointing but not surprising. Oprah never replied after I wrote and spoke in her defense when she was frivolously sued by Texas beef businesses for her famous show on the negative side of eating meat.

A new entry to daytime television, the Queen Latifah Show in New York City, offered greater promise. The staff was responsive, courteous, and professional. With the added delight of being joined by Susan Sarandon and Phil Donahue, we had a serious and enjoyable half hour with Queen Latifah.

The Charlie Rose Show -- one of the last serious national television interview programs -- told us in May that they wanted me for a full hour. When we finally found a date of mutual convenience, they promised thirty minutes. When I got to the studio, it was reduced to fifteen minutes. Charlie loves to interview actors, actresses, prominent authors, diplomats, and corporate executives, but he doesn't much like talking about corporate domination of society. Once when I prevailed on him to have Jim Hightower, William Greider, and me -- corporate critics all -- on the show, he put us all together for fifteen minutes sandwiched between two new novelists whose works he probably could no longer remember three years later. There was a great response to our segment the following day. The show's producer, in a message inadvertently sent to us, told her associates that viewer reactions were probably orchestrated. Sometimes you can't win.

But we kept trying. One terrific success came through our first political advertisement. It was a parody of the MasterCard "priceless" ad. It received widespread accolades in the media for its accuracy, its humor, and its focus on my getting included in the debates. MasterCard's foolish lawsuit for $35 million alleging copyright infringement only focused more attention on the ad and the campaign it represented. When I read the MasterCard complaint, I was overcome with laughter, for they asserted that I was trying to lunch off the goodwill and reputation of MasterCard to advance my candidacy. I savored that argument, especially since I had been criticizing and exposing credit card gouges and deceptions for years. Still chuckling, I called the president of MasterCard, Robert Sealander, who was vacationing on some tropical island, and asked whether he knew what his attorneys were getting him into with the lawsuit. He expressed disappointment, thinking that my call was fur the purpose of discussing a settlement. Settlement? The next morning I was at the National Press Club with Bill Hillsman, the producer of the ad, giving a news conference about credit card abuses and having our "priceless" ad played free over the television stations that were there. Sometimes corporate lawyers do the darndest things! Our fine pro bono attorney Anthony Fletcher from Fish and Richardson "helped to prove how frivolous the MasterCard lawsuit was in its attempt to stifle political speech.

All along through the months of June, July, August, and September, I reached the public through several cable TV shows (CNN's Crossfire, Fox cable news, MSNBC, Talk Back Live), syndicated radio shows like Pacifica Radio, Chris Lydon's Connection, and Don Imus, the Sunday-morning news shows, Business Week, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and Harper's (they ran a cover story), community weeklies in cities from Los Angeles to Boston, which, like the Village Voice and the Advocate papers in Connecticut, analyzed the campaign in welcome derail. Conservatives George Will, David Brooks, and William Safire devoted columns to our race. There was a very occasional network television news bite.

Once, on the CBS Sunday show Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer, Pat Buchanan and I followed each other, and after it was over, before the remote cameraman unhooked me, Schieffer, not knowing he was still on our audio, told his producer, "That was a good show. It was refreshing. Different viewpoints." I thought it was too bad the debate commission czars and their cooperative TV networks did not think that way.

The most intense treatment of the Nader-LaDuke campaign appeared regularly in the progressive press, especially the local weeklies like the Village Voice in New York City and the national magazines such as The Nation and The Progressive. Back and forth the discussion would rage between editorials, articles, columnists, and reader letters arguing over Gore needing liberal voters' loyalty because Bush was worse, or Gore deserving a Green Party challenge for his broken promises. This was all very fascinating to read, and I especially enjoyed writers such as Lewis Lapham, Nicholas von Hoffman, Marc Cooper, Micah Sifry, Matt Rothschild, and Alexander Cockburn for their historical, contemporary, and futuristic perspectives on our efforts. It was quite motivating. These liberal-progressive debates were also a welcome relief from the daily drumbeat focus on the horse-race question.

Interestingly enough, talk radio was far more open to hearing and questioning the candidates through audience call-ins than all the other mainstream media combined. Whether on the Lydon, Imus, Bohannon, or other local talk shows like Ron Owens in San Francisco, and Michael Jackson in Los Angeles, this was one forum where sentences and even paragraphs could be introduced over the airways without the frenzied pressure of sound-bite cutoff. Certainly, one could not languish and drone on, but what a difference thirty minutes or sometimes an hour makes from television's three-minute quickeroos.

One of the major themes that the established commentators and reporters wrote about most often was what reformers call "dirty money politics." I read with appreciation one editorial after another in the Times, the Post, and the regional papers excoriating the soft- money binges, the lavish fund-raisers, the Niagara of money pouring into both major party coffers at countless events stamped by corporate logos. The press named names of fat-cat companies and what the expected quid pro quos were from the politicians. In spite of these relentless stories, the money corruption gets bigger and seedier. So one might expect that the reporters and commentators would add to their material by highlighting the one party that did it the way they would want the major parties to behave. Yet rarely, if ever, did our campaign or that of any other Green Party candidates receive any recognition by the major media for refusing to take soft money, corporate money, PAC money. We set an example that went unnoticed.

It became clear that, as we were fluctuating in the polls between 4 and 7 percent, we were receiving less than 1 percent of the print and broadcast space and time devoted to Bush and Gore. It became more evident that even with 5 percent of that kind of coverage not much would change. If the media did not view you as inside the two-party playing field, as it did Perot in 1992, there was no dynamic to the media you received. The campaign remained sidelined. Voters had to read about and see you in the big mix, just as fans have to see the underdog team tangle in the same arena with the favorites in order to decide who is best for them. There has to be interactive contrast, which is why getting on the presidential debates is so decisive.

In October we tried one more way of persuading editors and producers to pay attention to corporate power abuses that we were regularly highlighting. Our researchers compiled nearly 200 investigative articles and television exposes on subjects that were related to our agenda. They ranged from the brilliant 1998 Time magazine cover story on corporate welfare by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele to prominent stories about environmental, consumer, investor, taxpayer, and worker injustices committed by major corporations and repotted prominently by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, 60 Minutes, the Boston Globe, and others. We pointed out to these papers and programs that their own reporters had written these articles, which went nowhere in terms of changes. The public authorities of the three branches of government at local, state, and national levels were, for the most part, not following up on these finest hours of journalism. Moreover; the policy questions they raised had not found their way into the presidential campaign dialogue. I asked one Time magazine staffer why, given their cover story, their campaign reporters didn't raise the subject of corporate welfare with Bush and Gore. His reply was, "It is hard on the trail to reach the candidates, and when you do break through, they don't answer the question."

Well, what about when Gore and Bush were on the Sunday news shows or granting long interviews to major papers and magazines or answering their questionnaires? Or at the debates? Or during the more accessible primary season? There are opportunities for a determined press corps, particularly a press corps that demands regular press conferences to force answers on these questions, either from the candidates or from their press spokespersons. Instead, too many reporters settle for exclusive snippets or asides on the campaign plane. Even when they have great daily access, such as with Senator John McCain on the "Straight Talk Express," these questions are not asked. It has become a cultural rut.

After all the pages written about Bush and Gore -- their youths, their early years in politics, their position papers, their daily sound bites, their sallies against each other -- not very much came to the public's attention about their actual records, in contrast to their highly publicized rhetoric. On July 7, 1999, the Post's David Broder wrote that Bush's "five-year record in public office is largely unexamined." He must have meant by the mass media. Certainly Molly Ivins cast a cold eye on his governorship in her book Shrub, and publications such as Mother Jones, The Nation, The Progressive, and In These Times made constant critiques. But Broder was writing about media that reaches large audiences and affects other opinion makers as well as the candidates themselves. Gore was a media escapee -- except for his sophomoric gaffes -- when it came to separating his speeches from his record on topics as varied as the environment, drug prices here and abroad, corporate subsidies, consumer protection, and his continuing daily promise to fight "big oil," big HMOs, big insurance companies, and big chemical companies. His record is rich in surrender to big-business interests, including car companies, the biotechnology industry, and the banking, agribusiness, and telecommunications goliaths. Since corporate George W. Bush, marinated in oil and gas, would not point out these failings, it was up to the media to examine repeatedly these records of both Bush and Gore, which of course they neglected to do.

There is also a self-interest on the part of the major media conglomerates. They are, after all, businesses that rely on advertising revenue and the goodwill of the surrounding business community.

We heard fear of top management expressed in the voices of the reporters and producers in television studies. They feared losing their jobs in an industry laying off while increasing profits. A rattled producer at an Austin station, owned by Time Warner, came hurtling out of her cubicle and insisted on my repeating a short interview. Why? Because, as she stated, she was unable to edit out my comment on Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin's statement about the media being more important than governments, nonprofits, and educational institutions.

There is one unsung hero in this story. Brian Lamb, the creator of C-Span, convinced the cable industry years ago that serious events deserve unedited coverage. In all of the United States, the communications supergiant of the world, only C-Span covers entire events regularly during a presidential campaign. Although its audience is relatively small, C-Span repeats presidential campaign addresses two or three times over a two- or three-day period. To reach people unedited is a political candidate's idea of heaven.

There were other efforts to get the media to open the doors for coverage. The most relentless one was Morton Mintz's series of twenty-eight cogent and concise articles for TomPaine.com on a wide range of subjects "that powerfully affect us all." They were directed to "Mr. or Mrs. Presidential, Vice Presidential, Senate or House Candidate." Besides the Web site, the series received some major visibility when one of Mintz's pieces was excerpted in an advertorial on the New York Times's op-ed page. Still, his work came largely to naught, other than reifying journalistic standards to guide future writers. "I didn't get a single reaction of any kind from any political editor or reporter involved in covering the campaigns," he told me after the election. The lesson of that silence is clear: No democracy worth its salt can rely so pervasively on the commercial media. And no seriously prodemocracy campaign will ever get an even break, or adequate coverage in or outside the mix, from that media.

It is not difficult to locate the media's own self-criticism by seasoned workers in its trenches. Even the celebrities who have benefited most from the status quo, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw, have all commented on what's wrong with political coverage. Journalism reviews like Columbia's publish pointed critiques and concrete recommendations for expanding the political debate by the press. Underneath these evaluations is the sense that the media itself is up against what Lonnie Isabel of Newsday called "Trying to Scale the Impenetrable Wall."

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Russ Baker observed that "by and large, what the public heard was what the candidates chose to talk about. Both Gore and Bush controlled the 'dialogue,' avoiding press conferences for great stretches (Gore hid out for a stunning five months) and adhering tightly to a script throughout. And thus political discussion was generally limited to the areas they believed most marketable (Social Security, taxes, public education, and the high cost of prescription drugs), and by their narrow framing of solutions." Even with these issues -- as with national health insurance -- the structural or systemic aspect was avoided and only a slice was highlighted: prescription-drug benefits but not prices. Baker went on to write, "We know that the candidates stayed to their script. But did the media do the same thing? If so, were we complicit in limiting the quadrennial national debate?" And the coup de grace: "The focus groups assembled by the candidates often reflect what people have already heard in the media." "So," says David Dreyer, a former deputy communications director for the Clinton administration, "excessive polling by the media contributes to a narrowing of the campaign. There is a shared complicity."

All these and scores of other articles and books on media and political campaigns make for important cogitations, but what did all this mean to Nader-LaDuke?

We learned more about end-running the media during our visit in July with Governor Jesse Ventura. Friday was casual wear day in the governor's office, and he was wearing jeans. How did you reach the people of Minnesota to win the election? I asked him. He replied that he was at about 10 percent in the polls and then got on ten statewide debates with the other major candidates. Second, the state provided substantial public funding of election campaigns, and third, Minnesota had same-day voter registration. In about a month, Ventura went from 10 percent to 38 percent and won the governorship in a three-way race. Same-day registration led to a last-minute surge of voters for him that helped raised the total voter turnout to about 65 percent -- almost double the national average in an off-year election. Our informal session over, we entered the press room where Ventura repeated his support for me and Buchanan being in the debates, for public financing of campaigns, and for ending many barriers that keep voter turnout down. Jesse is very plainspoken, in addition to having a flamboyant personality that gets him easy media.

***

In 1987 the veteran newspaperman and editor Martin Schram wrote The Great American Video Game, which left no doubt where he stands: "The instrument of television has taken control of the presidential election process. It is the single greatest factor in determining who gets nominated every fourth summer and who gets elected that fall." Schram, who has covered many presidential campaigns, believes that television is also the nation's greatest hope, "the only medium that can give the public what it wants most: the ability to take the measure of the candidates for president in those intangible up-close and personal ways that the newspaper can never fulfill."

Schram wants to open the public airwaves to all qualifying candidates: "Congress can -- and should -- require the networks and local stations to make available to all qualifying candidates a specific amount of airtime for commercials-free commercials. A new law should require that these ads feature the candidate talking directly to the camera -- no slick ads, no actors, no narrators. Just the candidate speaking." Fourteen years later, the major campaign finance reform legislation, McCain-Feingold, has no such media access provision. That is where political reality resides in the year 2001.

I realized one visual necessity. Future campaigns by progressives must search for greater visual communication that is true and compelling. At the start of the campaign, I replied to a reporter's question and said I would not be kissing babies. Nor did I seek out photo ops with retired coal miners suffering from black lung disease who now receive critical compensation due in part to our legislative advocacy over thirty years ago, or photos of college students in their activities working for the betterment of their states, due to our organizational efforts. Or of people saved by auto safety devices now required on cars. In retrospect, not doing this was a mistake.

***

It all started to get interesting when the media couldn't help but notice our effect. On the last day in August, I started early with Matt Lauer on The Today Show. Lauer wasted no time getting to the core scenario: "If this candidacy comes down to a tight race and we get to California, a lot of those liberals in California are going to go for you maybe and it's going to cost Al Gore the race."

I responded that none of the candidates were entitled to any votes, that we all have to earn our votes. To Matt's credit, he went on to ask about ballot access and the presidential debates, but as all Today Show guests realize, four or five minutes for back-and-forth hardly leaves time for many complete sentences.

What followed is a tribute to convenience of corporate concentration. All I had to do was walk across Rockefeller Plaza to the GE building, where I held a press conference decrying the decades-long PCB contamination of the Hudson River by General Electric. GE continues, against rising opposition from citizens and politicians, and even Bush's EPA, to delay, dodge, and obfuscate its responsibility to clean up its poisons in heavily contaminated sectors of the Hudson River bed. A cluster of New York media was there, along with the most vociferous sidewalk kibitzers in the country.

I then braved midday Manhattan traffic to speak with restaurant strikers in Chinatown, which offered a splendid opportunity to highlight some labor issues. A Chinese-American reporter asked me why I was in Chinatown, did I come here often, did I like Chinese food, and so on. I responded with a few words of Chinese from my Princeton days. She didn't seem to know any Mandarin, given her nonplussed expression.

From there we taxied over to the bastion of global capitalism, the New York Stock Exchange. For many years, my Princeton classmate Mike Robbins, an Exchange member, had been extending an invitation for me to visit and see how markets are made. He said I would never forget the experience, and he did not disappoint. After a courtesy call with William R. Johnston, vice-president of the Exchange, Mike took me and my two associates down on the floor to see this amazing mixture of chaos and order, this nexus by the split second between the human brain of the market makers and all the computers, which I learned cost a total of $3 billion.

There was George Moerler, Jr., nearly fifty years with the Exchange, which he'd gone to right out of high school, and the rapid-fire market maker for General Electric stock. Fed by a cheery sidekick forty years his junior, Moerler was so seasoned he seemed to be on automatic, barking out buys and sells while he was discussing in detail with us the workings of his craft. He clearly enjoyed our astonishment, as did a growing crowd of specialists and aides who followed us from one "stall" to another.

I was about to hold a news conference at twelve-thirty on the steps of Federal Hall facing the exchange. So I decided to do a little "field work" and asked several specialists if they believed the Stock Exchange bosses when they hinted about moving to New Jersey if they could not get a billion-dollar subsidy package from New York City to buy land nearby and build a new Exchange headquarters. If only there was a video of their reactions. One fellow was eating a bologna sandwich for lunch and almost dropped it, he was laughing so much. Move to Joisey? How would the "suits" stay close to their buddies in the securities industry, their lawyers, and their investment banker friends? Invite them on the ferry to Hoboken? With computers, members of this chorus added, there is less need for space, not more. But if they can get it free, it's a sure bet, isn't it?

Standing on the steps a few minutes later, I recounted the story of this billion-dollar boondoggle, the utter hypocrisy of this big apostle of free market and free enterprise, and suggested some dire public needs in New York City that could use $1 billion, such as the decrepit schools, deserving clinics, and libraries that are limiting their hours. Though it was a successful media day, even resulting in a New York Times Metro section article, the story did not, as would have been the case with the candidacies of Gore and Bush, move beyond New York to the national level.

There was a humorous analogy here. One day in early summer, I opened my Washington Post and saw a seven-hundred-word article with the headline "Gore, Family Taking It Easy in North Carolina."

I considered going to Vermont and really, flamboyantly relaxing. Maybe then the Post would take notice.
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:34 am

PART 1 OF 2

Eleven: The Super-Rallies: Not Your Average Garden Party

By late summer we were waiting for serendipity. Our candidacy was now solidly in third place. We had established all the major fronts -- ballot placement, a firm phalanx of documented positions, fund-raising, media placement, visits to all fifty states, and an energetic field staff. Still, running for president against a two-party duopoly is not tennis. A player can be ranked fiftieth or eightieth in the world and still find Wimbledon's gates open. Our polls were fairly static -- most ranging from 3 to 7 percent nationally. And under the present power system, the polls are a controlling process over people and not, as they purport to be, reflective of public opinion. This is so if only because of the choice of questions.

Earlier, I referred to the catch-22 between the media coverage and the polls, flowing in part from the winner-take-all system and other barriers that impede or deter the growth of small starts. Knowing this, two lawyers in Portland, Oregon, Greg Kafoury and Mark McDougal, and their friend Laird Hastay were thinking about taking the campaign to a new, higher level. They noticed that when I campaigned in Portland at the auditorium of Benson High School,. all fifteen hundred seats were easily filled on a rainy evening. The lightbulb went on: Why not launch a round of super-rallies for the last ten-week stretch to Election Day? Greg and Mark have similar personalities in one respect. They enjoy impossible challenges and love to say to doubters, "Watch us go."

When they broached their proposal, our top staff was hesitant and doubtful. Filling the Portland Memorial Coliseum with more than ten thousand paying people was daunting enough. Risking about $65,000, when the campaign's checking account was always low and other pressing expenses high, was a big risk. But we had to do something to break out and create attention and harness the enthusiasm of our many supporters.

We gave the green light and secured the Memorial Coliseum for Friday, August 25, 2000. Kafoury and McDougal had twenty days to fill this giant arena. While Theresa Amato, our campaign manager, was expressing her cautions, I was remembering how easily we filled the Santa Cruz Civic Center, which had a capacity of twenty-five hundred. Portland is a much larger city than Santa Cruz. What's more, over many years I had worked with citizen groups in Oregon, starting with the successful Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group (OSPIRG), which got going as far back as 1970. I have joined with Oregonians on numerous statewide referenda, environmental struggles, the rights of injured people, and political reforms. Throughout its history, Oregon has had more than its share of firsts in the country. with various reforms. So how could we not start the super-rallies in the Beaver State?

We came into Portland from our California tour and met Winona LaDuke, who grew up in nearby Ashland, to strategize over the Coliseum. We knew one thing for sure -- however many people showed up that night, they would have been drawn by the politics of justice. This was a rally without any organized buses or celebrity bands. Winona and I comprised the "marquee" that evening.

By the afternoon of August 25, about six thousand tickets were sold. The vast arena seemed even larger than before. Banks of empty seats stretched up toward the roofline with each section of seats painted a different color. As the seats started filling up, no one expected the highest section of red seats to be occupied. But to our amazement, a massive line was forming outside as thousands of tickets were sold at the door. Some exclaimed, "Look, the red seats are starting to fill up." Soon, none of the red seats were empty. Other super-rallies followed, but no gathering was more reactive, vigorous, and robustly loud than these Oregonians. The sheer intensity, cheerfulness, and attentiveness of the thousands of individuals and whole families of all ages took us all aback. I came onto the stage to such an enthusiastic reception that all I could say by way of an opener was, "Wow, what a rousing Oregonian welcome!"

As I scanned the people from the podium, I was overwhelmed and overjoyed. These were citizens who had many struggles for justice in their civicula vitae accompanied by young men and women who yearned for a new politics. They were fed up with props, posturing, and politicians with forked tongues. They wanted action, results, and practical solutions to chronic human needs and environmental devastations. This was an audience that left hundreds of bicycles chained up outside. Earlier that night with red, white, and blue lights beaming down on the stage, they resonated with Winona LaDuke's call for ending commercial logging in national forests and "breaching some dams to save some salmon." Winona then spoke about recovering the Great Plains, now being depopulated but in olden times the sustaining lands for the First Nations. She spoke of bringing back the buffalo and the natural ecological rhythms of the vast grasslands and turning the windswept plains into what she described as "the Saudi Arabia of wind energy." As usual, Winona's address was earnest, lyrical, and vivid. She held the audience with an intense intelligence, speaking as a leader for indigenous people's rights, a mother of three children, and a working farmer. Was there ever such a vice presidential candidate? Thunderous ovations followed her remarks.

Green candidates do not use TelePrompTers -- at least not so far. This permits more eye contact with people in the front rows and gives a different texture to one's remarks. I was intent on two goals. One was to deflate Bush and Gore in ways that they would not do to each other. The other was to set forth explicit achievable goals for a political reform movement that serves the long-range, serious interests of the American people and their democracy. This is a tall order in a crowded sports arena. But I figured that if thousands of people took the time to come, I would take the time to explain what needs to be done and why and how. This was not the time for short attention spans.

On such occasions I find it essential to run through some American history and remind the audience about their heroic forebears who raised the levels of justice against powerful odds. Brief recountings of the antislavery abolitionists, the women's suffrage drive, and how workers and farmers threw off some of the Corporate yokes on their backs -- all ordinary people producing extraordinary history. It has to motivate people. Moreover, I hastened to point out that these nineteenth-century stalwarts broke through without electricity, phones, cars, faxes, or even e-mail! Just their hearts, their minds, and their feet.

Next I made connections between the economic stagnation that surrounds a majority of workers, despite the economic boom of the past twenty years, and the chronic American poverty that plagues tens of millions of people and their children. The continual decline of our democratic promise to shape brighter futures must be reversed. These debilitating conditions are not the natural order of things. We have the resources to do much better. So who is keeping our country back? Well, look and see who is saying no every day to universal health insurance, a living wage, clean money politics, environmental cleanup, the peace dividend, enforcement of consumer protection laws, and the prosecution of corporate criminals. The Kings of No are, first and foremost, businesses. To break the hammerlock on our government and "the republic for which it stands," the present-day corporate sovereigns must yield to the sovereignty of the people "with liberty and justice for all." If millions of Americans can articulate these words when pledging allegiance to the flag, I asked, then surely we can articulate them in deeds and pledge allegiance to a more functional deliberative democracy where the people rule. Take back the government.

The two major parties, I argued, are increasingly becoming lookalikes. The differences between the Democrats and Republicans are not contested enough; they're not broad enough or deep enough. Both parties are weakening our democracy and furthering the concentration of economic and therefore political power. And if I'm telling it like it is, how can we then turn around and legitimize these look-alikes with our votes? Bush was so out of that framework that I described him as a "giant corporation running for president disguised as a person" and then provided details of his abysmal record in Texas. As for Gore, who is he on any given day? The master of regular political makeovers. Gore promised to take on "big oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the HMOs" while still taking their money.

Somehow I got it all in that night. The largest applause came when I declared that it was time to join with other nations and secure the abolition of nuclear weapons.

***

The coliseum event was a few days after the major-party national conventions -- where legalized bribery married legalized extortion. The lesson of these super-rallies is that it's important for all of us to think outside the box of narrow reform dialogues. I suggested, for example, that in considering reform of the nation's monstrous federal tax complexities, inequities, and inanities, we press for taxing what we do not like -- such as pollution emissions or financial speculation. Why should people have to pay taxes when they go to the stores to buy medicine, furniture, clothing, and often food, but a large investor who buys three hundred thousand shares of General Motors pays no sales tax at all? I recommended a tiny tax on stock and bond transactions as a way to raise large revenues that would then either fund universal health coverage, for instance, or allow reductions in sales and income taxes paid by consumers and workers. Trillions of dollars change hands through the stock and bond markets every week. The more speculative the churning becomes, the more revenues are generated. We should have debates of this kind during election seasons.

Taboos should be lifted. Topics such as legalizing industrial hemp for farmers to grow, which the Portland rally responded to with words and cheers. One of the reasons the rally was so high-energy was that the participants hadn't realized there were so many other people sharing their views.

What really brought those assembled again and again to their feet, and left them so enthusiastic as they streamed out of the arena, was my describing the goals, changing directions so we can move at last to end poverty, advance health care, in addition to health insurance, allow people who work to be able to earn enough to live on, wage peace instead of merely wallowing deeply in armaments, lead the world in renewable energy and sustainable economics, reverse the commercialism of our culture, and preserve the environment of America the Beautiful for their children and for posterity.

Late in the night, our crew drove the 150 miles to Seattle, excitedly envisioning other full arenas in other cities. Perhaps we would not have been so elated had we known that the national media gave scant notice to the rally of more than ten thousand people.

But before we plunged into more super-rallies, and the large organizing and financing efforts they represented, we had a date with Labor.

***

And where else to campaign on Labor Day than in that grand old union town -- Detroit -- home of the United Auto Workers and many other trade unions. By the time we flew to Detroit Metropolitan Airport and drove into the city, the Labor Day parade was under way. This was a traditional event and more than twenty thousand marchers were expected. We picked up our UAW friend Dan McCarthy, president of UAW Local 417, and joined the parade. Alas, it was, at that point, a parade of fewer than one thousand workers, mostly with Gore-Lieberman signs, heading for an area where the senator from Connecticut was to speak. Lieberman was no hero of labor. An opponent of the rights of injured people to have full access to the courts, a leading supporter of NAFTA, GATT-WTO, and PNTR, a defender of the HMOs, the drug companies, and continued weak labor laws, he would not seem to invite the raucous enthusiasm of the rank and file. Yet there dutifully onstage were local labor leaders, the head of the United Auto Workers, Steve Yokich, and local Democratic politicians in solidarity with my congenial home-state senator from Aetna, as I describe him.

After a few minutes of boilerplate exhortation and some quick media interviews, Mr. Lieberman was off to his next campaign stop. Steve Yokich came over and warmly welcomed me to Detroit. Three months earlier, he had shaken up the Democratic Party -- Union complex by delaying the UAW's endorsement of the Gore ticket.

Following some curbside press conferences and interviews, I went to a rally at the Magic Stick Theater, which was jam-packed with union workers and workers locked out by the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News management. This dispute was in its eighth year and was one that was very familiar to me. The workers' lawsuit was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court pro bono by the Public Citizen Litigation Group (which I started with Alan Morrison in 1972), resulting in a 4-4 decision, with one justice recusing himself. This tie gave victory to management, which won approval of its merger in the lower court. Circulation dropped precipitously and has not recovered due to the cancellations by many thousands of Detroit readers. The workers' ire was so intense that they would chase reporters from these newspapers out of their gathering rooms with loud shouts of "Scabs." Now in the Magic Stick Theater, they did just that and out went the forlorn reporter.

I began my address with a recitation of past struggles for labor in order to draw the contrast with the other major candidates. My first contact with migrant farm labor was in California during the summer of 1955, and I wrote about their plight in the late fifties. Our group's intense and continuing efforts on behalf of crucial legislation, including the Coal Mine Safety Act, the black lung compensation law for coal miners, and the establishment of OSHA in 1970, were early and crucial to their passage. (Since 1890 more coal miners have died from coal dust disease and mine collapses than all the Americans who died in World War II -- and that was the level of human destruction in just one industry.) In the ensuing years, our groups worked on pension reform and the so-called ERISA law; fought against the Taft-Hartley Act, the chokehold on American labor's ability to form trade unions; pressed the often-moribund AFL-CIO, which in the 1980s flirted with going along with the Reaganite juggernaut to weaken the federal regulatory system in their belief that it was unstoppable (we stopped it); organized the Global Trade Watch, which fought NAFTA and GATT in one labor dispute after another; and stood by workers, most recently in the work stoppages and disputes affecting members of the United Steel Workers in several states during 2000.

All these recountings were greeted with heavy applause, but none greater than when I said that interview requests by the two Detroit newspapers had been turned down on all visits to Detroit even though it meant less coverage in the state to our visits and harm to our campaign. I added that even if we received no support or votes from organized labor, we continued to fight for labor because our stands are civic ones of conviction that transcend political campaigns.

Throughout the spring and summer, the unease over the Gore endorsement -- the ranks of the UAW have been devastated by the flight of the auto industry to foreign countries -- within several UAW locals was palpable. Dan McCarthy's large local had several internal debates on who to endorse. Yokich himself appeared. torn and visited numerous locals to get soundings, and did he ever. The ranks of the UAW have been devastated by the flight of the auto industry to foreign countries. The China trade bill was the outrage of the season. Clinton-Gore pushed it, with the big-business lobbies, through Congress while expecting complete and enthusiastic fealty by the labor unions they undermined. For obviously the Republicans were always worse and labor had nowhere to go, right? Right! The AFL-CIO endorsed the Democratic ticket in late 1999 without securing any labor reform agenda in return. They at least owed their members and the cause of labor some comprehensive proclamation about advancing the economic rights of labor, organized and unorganized, together with commitments to strengthen labor's health and safety laws and enforcement. No matter (except for grumbling by George Becker of the United Steelworkers or Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters holding out smartly to exercise leverage), the big unions eventually all went into the fold and started spending their millions of dollars for Gore-Lieberman.

The only national union that endorsed me was, not surprisingly, the one I learned about from one of its longest members, Frank Rosen, the one with the most democratic tradition. After much discussion among the rank and file, the 38,000 United Electric, Radio and Machine Workers (UE) endorsed me at their convention on August 29 in Erie, Pennsylvania. I was there to receive their support and watched unionism in the finest egalitarian tradition. Meetings of different union locals in Michigan raised some hope of official support, but their deliberations did not come out that way, though some votes were close. We fared better on the West Coast with the vigorous California Nurses Association (CNA). CNA is a union's union (see Appendix G), fighting the abuses of the HMOs, putting on a statewide initiative for universal health insurance, collecting data on the harm to patients from HMO restrictive protocols upon physician and nurse judgments, investigating profiteering and waste inside corporate medicine, and taking a strong stand against deskilling hospitals (for example, replacing nurses with untrained "care buddies"). I fought with them on many of these issues in the 1990s, so our campaign was a natural for them to support. A large banner for Nader-LaDuke was placed on their headquarters balcony in Oakland, and they demonstrated for Nader-LaDuke as well. Other endorsing locals were AFSCME Local 1108 (Los Angeles) and the Postal Workers and Teamsters locals in Seattle.

There is something pathetic when a political party, knowing it cannot win without organized labor, keeps catering to corporate demands at the expense of labor justice. There is something sad about how organized labor, nonetheless, rushes to support the party without demanding a turn away from corporatism toward workers' needs. This is the logic of the "lesser of two evils." It tethers labor to a relentless slide deeper into the corporate power pits year after year. Signaling a lack of alternative options, organized labor repeatedly gets rhetoric by the Democrats in Congress and the White House about minimum wage and a ban on permanent replacement of strikers, without real expenditure of political muscle.

When John J. Sweeney and Richard Trumka, leaders of unions both, challenged and defeated the old AFL-CIO regime of Lane Kirkland in 1995, I thought, along with many others, that the new leadership would bring about a resurgence of this largest labor organization in the country. Its member unions counted over 13 million workers in their rank and file. Good things did happen. More money and organizers were committed to starting new unions -- but nowhere near the need. The AFL-CIO launched a student summer program during which several thousand college students worked with locals on organizing drives. One result of this overdue initiative was to help galvanize student activism on labor issues such as the anti-sweatshop and living-wage struggles at colleges and universities. As the new president of the AFL-CIO, Sweeney realized that no justice movement can thrive and endure, instead of decay, without appealing to the younger generation. But Sweeney did something that, incredibly, his predecessors avoided. In 1996 he issued a manifesto for working people all over the country. The book was called America Needs a Raise -- a clarion call for action on matters of economic security and social justice. But the 167-page volume was also an exercise in candor -- unheard of for decades in labor circles. His words are worth quoting verbatim:

We all share some of the blame for letting corporate America drive down our living standards and distort our democratic process. For instance, we, the institution for which I've devoted my life -- the labor movement -- contributed to the crisis by letting our guard down. Too often, we failed to organize workers in the fastest-growing industries. Too often, we let our political efforts degenerate into mere financial contributions to glad-handing candidates. Too often, we kept our heads down, our minds closed, and our mouths shut during the great debates that shaped our nation's social and economic policies. Too often, we refused to reach out to potential allies who could have helped us build a coalition for challenging corporate priorities and offering positive alternatives.... The weakness of labor and the absence of a progressive social movement has created a dangerous vacuum.


Only people who have read through the tedious writings of labor leaders and much of their self-laudatory house organ press (with a few exceptions) can appreciate the refreshing recognitions that Sweeney's electrifying words embraced.

I was so taken by Sweeney's book that I bought fifteen hundred copies on remainder and promoted it on radio talk shows around the country. With all its reach, the AFL-CIO could not turn America Needs a Raise into a bestseller. Could the problem be more than the declining reading habits of union members? Could it be that lacking a vigorous follow- through, the excellent words remained just that -- words? It will take more than new leadership to make the union movement, at its lowest level of membership by percentage of the private workforce in sixty years, into one that is fast-growing and democratically run. It will take a debureaucratization of staff at union headquarters in Washington and the encouragement of reformist activities at local levels. I once noted to Richard Trumka, former dynamic head of the United Mine Workers and presently the number-two man at the AFL-CIO, that the principal occupational hazard at many of these union headquarters was to get caught in the corridors at quarter to five. Trumka, who knows deeply what the union movement needs, smiled.

But Sweeney was not smiling at my candidacy and its "progressive social movement" objectives. When leading Democrats called him to ask what the heck was going on with some of these hesitant member unions, including Yokich's UAW and Hoffa's Teamsters, and their locals, he stepped forward and got most of them back in line. I'll always remember turning on cable TV one day and seeing John Sweeney describe my campaign as "reprehensible." His friend Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, then added the memorable comment, "This is no year for a third-party message candidate."

In May I met with steelworkers, or what is left of them, in Gary, Indiana. Ed Sadlowski, now retired, was there. In the seventies, his insurgency slate shook the complacent leadership of the United Steelworkers to their foundations before they narrowly defeated his bid for the presidency. Many of us, who saw in the burly South Chicago steelworker the beginnings of a labor renaissance, supported his widely reported efforts from the outside. I continued to visit and meet with union locals all over the country, but I found those in the Midwest and on the West Coast (Sacramento, Seattle, Los Angeles) more open-minded than those in New York or Boston. Of course, it helped to stand with the Screen Actors Guild in Los Angeles during their negotiations with the movie industry, or picket with the Verizon workers in Virginia during their difficult bargaining following the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE.

Tony Mazzochi, founder of the Labor Party, and in my judgment the most visionary, accomplished, and steadfast labor leader in the nation, has traveled the most and spoken the most with more union members in small gatherings around the country than anyone else. One of his conclusions is that without a concrete agenda of action for working people, forged, discussed, and backed by them, there will be no turnaround of organized labor. Tony and I have worked together for many years on occupational health and safety, on health insurance, on corporate globalization. This World War II veteran has brought scientists together with workers, as far back as the sixties, blazed the way for the asbestos litigation, pushed for more worker say on the shop floor, brought witnesses from the rank and file to testify before Congress in situations that led to the natural gas pipeline safety law and OSHA, and helped make the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union one of the most progressive, as OCAW's elected vice president. When Tony speaks, I listen, and someday the media may discover this honest, selfless, ever curious patriot. Someday may the leaders of the AFL-CIO listen to him. It is not that they disagree with him. It is that the times never seem ripe for doing today what should have been done forty years ago.

***

The second super-rally was on September 22 at the gigantic Target Center in downtown Minneapolis. The days before, I took part in a "nonvoter tour" of the upper Midwest. As Michael Moore started one of his celebrated e-mails to his fans: "Step aside, voters, I want to speak to the majority in this country." Like all candidates, I am perplexed by the hundred million or so nonvoters in presidential elections and the much greater number in off-year elections. Why? asked a thousand political scientists spread over half a century of research. Who are they? asked a hundred polls and surveys. How can they be drawn to vote? asked many a political consultant and good government group.

Phil Donahue was so curious about this topic that in New Hampshire's 1996 presidential primary season he had a show in the Granite State where the audience was divided in two sections, with confirmed voters on one side and confirmed nonvoters on the other. While the voters' arguments were expectedly cogent, the nonvoters' reasons were not exactly last week's oatmeal. One nonvoter after another stood and gave solid reasons: not enough of a choice, don't want to participate in a farce, not until they stop being bought, it doesn't make any difference once they're elected, been lied to too many times. With this logic, nonvoters remain the seductive electoral magnet for third-party candidates. If only one could tap into that huge aggregation of eligible voters.

***

In his abundantly cogent 1992 book, The Culture of Contentment, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that the contented classes, with their influence and their higher voting turnout, were regularly the decisive electoral force, not the lower-income masses. But he too held out a wistful hope: "It is possible that in some election, near or far, a presidential candidate will emerge in the United States determined to draw into the campaign those not now impelled to vote. Conceivably those so attracted -- those who are not threatened by higher taxes, and who are encouraged by the vision of a new governing community committed to the rescue of the cities and the impacted underclass -- could outnumber those lost because of the resulting invasion of contentment." Galbraith did not think this to be a "likely prospect."

The customary way the big parties try to reach nonvoters is by intensive get-out-the-vote registration efforts in demographically friendly areas. Far more money has been spent on these approaches than on persuading their fellow state legislators to enact same-day voter registration laws, as six states have already done. Our campaign did not have the resources for nationwide or even regional voter registration drives. This was the ulterior genius behind holding these super-rallies: They got out the vote and registered thousands of new Greens.

With limited fanfare, we announced our nonvoter tour in Madison, Milwaukee, Ann Arbor, Flint, and Minneapolis. Phil Donahue and Michael Moore accompanied us on this trip as speakers. We had an unusually good press contingent along as well, which included Eun Kim of the Associated Press, Bill Adair of the St. Petersburg Times, Jim Dao of the New York Times, Jennifer Blyer of NewsforChange.com, and, later on, Gail Collins of the New York Times, David Moberg of In These Times, Matt Rothschild of The Progressive, Kerry Lauerman of Salon.com, plus Tom Squitieri of USA Today. None of them were at all intrigued by our nonvoter theme. Their experience had taught them not to inquire into such elusive quests. They were traveling with our campaign because of the Portland superrally and the upcoming one in Minneapolis, which they all seemed eager to witness.

Our crew flew out of Washington, Donahue departed New York, Moore traveled from Flint, and we all arrived in Milwaukee at the same time. We first went to the University of Wisconsin Student Union and met with leaders of ethnic communities. Our Milwaukee friend, activist Robert Miranda, brought these dedicated mobilizers together. Each of the participants spoke about his or her priorities, and few, if any, of the dozen persons pressed for Gore as the least worst. I laid out my platform and noted, as always, the necessity of emphasizing abuses of class as well as race and their interrelationship. Apolitical activists do not believe in the political system "giving" them any power. By themselves, they had to figure ways to take it, aggregate it, and direct it toward the injustice.

From Milwaukee to Madison, we plowed through a veritable blizzard of rallies, fund- raisers, and one-on-one press interviews, all made possible by the sure guidance of our field representative, Ben Manski. Donahue and Moore preceded me on each stage, each in his distinctive manner. Moore was particularly jazzed that we would be heading the next afternoon to his job-gutted hometown of Flint. Moore liked to convulse the crowd with laughter by imagining if the revolutionaries of 1776 had been as wishy-washy as the politicians in Washington are now. Donahue more soberly stressed how voters were denied airing of key issues by my exclusion from the debates, that "the corporations have not only hijacked the presidential campaign season, but actually bought it, paid for it, and made sure that there were only two horses in the race. That way they have only two horses to bet on and can't lose."

The next day found us in Ann Arbor at the standing-room-only Michigan Theatre with seventeen hundred people taking in the progressive menu and its theme of a mobilized populace. Civic hopelessness has become a cultural trait, bred into us at an early age when we are taught to believe instead of to think, to accept rather than to reflect. I urged the crowd that day that if we all just gave ourselves some time to engage, we would surprise ourselves with the results.

We arrived in Flint about the same time as President Clinton did on Air Force One. Michigan was considered a swing state, and Flint was sore over the loss of tens of thousands of auto jobs exported abroad. Much of this happened under Clinton-Gore, whose NAFTA, WTO, and China trade enactments were bitterly resented by organized labor in Michigan. Clinton came to Flint, which his politics helped strip-mine, and tried to soften his image with an appearance at Mott Community College involving the Disability Network and Career Alliance. The press naturally hastened to his gathering, even though we drew more people (one thousand) to Whiting Auditorium. In his address, the remorseless Clinton declared that his "first objective" as president "was to give work back to the American people." That must have been news in Flint. Later that day, in Livonia, the chronically unabashed Clinton said, "I've got a record in Michigan -- if I were trying to cost you jobs, I've done a poor job of it."

Moore was a local hero in Flint, both for his film Roger and Me (recounting his frantic attempts to meet with GM's CEO Roger Smith to discuss Flint's economic plight) and for bringing Phil Donahue to Flint to do two shows that brought Flint's devastating plant closings and downsizing to a national audience. Moore was in his element -- a great mixture of serious indignation, satire, and rollicking humor. When my turn came, I went after the Democrats for their pro-corporate bias during conflicts between management and labor.

I had with me a pamphlet by Harry Kelber who, in his eighties, continues to edit The Labor Educator. A veteran unionist, Kelber, a lifelong Democrat, drew an accurate picture of the mistreatment of labor by the Democratic Party:

Significantly, in the first six years of the Clinton Administration, even during 1992- 94 when the Democrats controlled Congress, it made no effort to promote a worker rights bill or a ban on the permanent replacement of strikers. It stalled on occupational safety and health legislation and on pay equity for women workers.... The AFL-CIO must adopt a stiffer stance in its political dealings with Democratic Party leaders. It must insist on greater input into the choice of candidates and issues. The Democrats must stop assuming that organized labor is in their pocket because unions have nowhere else to go.


Not a chance of this happening, Mr. Kelber. Like knowing hostages, the AFL-CIO and its unions march in tandem to endorse the Democratic presidential nominees early in the primary season. They have given up their capacity for negotiation, so frightened are they of the Republicans. Meanwhile, the rank-and-file workers suffer their dwindling status in silence. Predictably, battered Flint went Democrat in November by a wide margin, voting for the very party that pushed policies which helped destroy its economic lifeline.

On to East Lansing, just in time for a rally at another full auditorium. A five-minute video that we made focusing on the campaign and our achievements was played before the trio of Donahue, Moore, and Nader took the stage in front of a rousing seventeen hundred people.

The next day was September 22, time to see if we could repeat our super-rally success. To ensure a better last-minute outreach to residents of the Twin Cities, I did nonstop press interviews, including live NPR and KUOM radio. At 1:30 P.M. I held a crowded press conference regarding the campaign's agricultural policy. It was decisively different from that of Bush or Gore, first by recognizing the agricultural crisis of the small farmer. Furthermore, I called for a halt to the immense merger wave of giant agribusiness firms, the creation of a farmer-owned grain reserve that could cushion commodity prices, advances in organic farming dose to markets, freeing the industrial hemp crop from its chains, and reversing the pronounced bias of the USDA toward big companies. The Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM) had just released a two-hundred-page whole-food report. I urged the reporters, many of whom were knowledgeable about farm issues, to log onto its Web site, competitivemarkets.com.

At five P.M., I joined Winona LaDuke, Phil Donahue, Michael Moore, and Green leader Ken Pentel at a suite in the Target Center for a fund-raiser and met some of the finest Minnesotans one can find. This is a state where earlier in the twentieth century the third party, known as the Democrat Farmer Labor Party, came out of the populist reservoirs to become the leading political force in the state. Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale were products of that reform movement.

The super-rally started at seven, and the signs were that the attendance would exceed that of Portland's. A new speaker delighted uS with her presence: ninety-year-old Doris Haddock, known to thousands as "Granny D" stemming from her "Believe or Not" walk from Pasadena to Washington, D.C., to publicize and press for genuine campaign finance reforms. All along the way, she met, spoke to, argued with, enthralled, and stimulated people to become more active in rescuing our elections, government, and democracy from the. auction block. It took walking with arthritis, ten miles a day -- a total of more than three thousand miles -- to become a civic celebrity and have the press cover her appearances and statements.

With about twelve thousand vocal people, it didn't do any harm to have some street theater. A couple of fellows in chicken suits pranced around flapping their wings to draw attention to Bush and Gore "chickening out" from letting me into the debates.

Donahue and Moore were no chickens, though, and were in top form· for the large, supportive audiences. Donahue, true to his legacy, was Mr. First Amendment, arguing in plain language that the people needed to have me in the debates. That day, campaign volunteers Rob Rafn and Holle Brian brought petitions with the names of eighteen thousand Minnesotans demanding my inclusion in the debates. If I were not included, as the majority of Americans polled on this question wanted, Donahue said "we'll have no real gutsy, so's-your-old-man political discourse that we deserve. Remember," he told Minnesotans, "there wasn't much resonance for Jesse Ventura's ideas until he got into the debates." A sea of LET RALPH DEBATE signs were waved vigorously by hundreds of Green supporters to punctuate Phil's words.

Moore, with his disheveled clothes and trademark baseball cap, had them rolling in their Birkenstocks. He posed uniquely angled imagery. He would bring onstage a potted plant and say that he was trying to place "Ficus" on the ballot in congressional districts where the incumbents have no opposition. He then held up Ficus and declared: "This potted plant can do better than what we've got in Congress right now. Look at it! It's giving you oxygen right now! Has any congressman ever done that?"

Donahue then introduced me. It was another great time to talk -- the arena brimming with excitement. The largest sustained applause of the evening came in response to my observations on education:

You hear a lot of talk about education. Oh, yes, education. How long have they been telling us they are going to repair our schools? How long have these two parties been telling us that they are going to have safe schools, repaired schools, with good teachers well paid? Well, the most important educational reform relates to what the students are learning, wouldn't you think? And what they're learning more and more is commercialized education. They're learning memorization. They're not learning how to be independent, critical thinkers who know how to practice democracy.

The Green Party campaign is determined to build the civics for democracy curriculum in elementary school, in high school, and moving on to higher education. If we do not know the community we live in, if we are moving more and more into virtual reality, looking at computer screens, if we don't connect with real people and real communities to understand the politics and the economics and geography and the environment and the arts and the culture and the city hall, if we do not know how to develop our civic skills, if we do not know how to build a deep democracy, how are we ever going to deal with the problems of today and tomorrow, here and around the world?


Fortunately, this time my remarks were reaching far beyond the arena. Not only were the reporters accompanying our tour there, but C-Span had set up its camera. "The most important control system the power brokers have established in our country," I told those who were there and watching on television, "is that we the people will settle for less, that we will settle for the least worst. We have to raise our expectation level. In this resourceful period of American history, we settle for too little." The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that those in attendance were "wildly cheering," something I never take for granted.
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:34 am

PART 2 OF 2

I continued on that tack:

Every vote we get is a vote of rebuke of the corrupt politics of the two-party system and a positive vote for public financing of political campaigns, a clean environment, full Medicare for all, an end to corporate welfare, a crackdown on business outlaws and freeing workers to bargain collectively for better working conditions. And I think these issues resonate all over the Country. One's vote is a lasting message to the parties to shape up or shrink down as more votes are denied them in forthcoming elections. That is one reason why we have to build a new political party that comes from the minds and hearts of people and their wishes for a better world.


I then quoted Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who in the 1930s said, "We can have a democratic society or we can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both."

I raised high the September 11 edition of Business Week with its cover story "Too Much Corporate Power?" and observed that even Business Week was more progressive than either the Democratic or Republican party, despite being loaded with big-business advertisements. In several detailed pages, Business Week answered yes, editorialized that "corporations should get out of politics," and published a poll saying that more than 70 percent of Americans agreed that there was too much corporate power over their lives. The roar of thousands that met this magazine display must either have gratified or horrified Business Week editor Steve Shepard if he happened to tune in that evening.

If there was any beseeching that evening, it was to ask our backers to leave the Center determined to persuade their friends, relatives, neighbors, and coworkers to think strategically about what they wanted their vote to mean. Did they want to vote for a candidate they do not believe in just because he is not as bad as the other major candidate? Did they want their vote to be taken for granted, ensuring that they would be too? Or did they want to vote for the issues espoused by the Greens and for building a new party? The only message politicians understand is losing an election. Abstaining by staying home may signify a vague rejection, bur it does not foster another political pathway. "We will not be taken for granted and we will vote," Winona LaDuke declared to the eager crowd.

This is why I was so pleased the next day to read in the Tribune the comment by Peggy Heffner who, with her ten-year-old son, Chris, had come to her first political event in more than three decades. "If my one vote can get ·some campaign funding into some worthwhile coffers for the next presidential election year, and encourage new individuals to step forward to run for office, then I'll feel that this vote in this election year was the most important that I have ever cast." Ms. Heffner was thinking strategically, knowing that like Rome, a political party cannot be built in a day, and that winning at least 5 percent of the vote nationwide would qualify the Green Party for federal campaign funds in 2004.

Two additional excerpts from the Tribune illustrate the different approaches that brought people to our voting column. Joe Horkey, from south Minneapolis, while handing out campaign materials was asked the reason he was supporting my candidacy. "Because he's fun," Horkey reflected. "I enjoy how he's anti-corporate." Then there was Michael Kelly, a onetime DFL activist from St. Paul who told reporter Bob von Sternberg, "I used to support the other guys, but 1 got tired of wasting my vote on a status quo that keeps the same thing going election after election. And you know this guy can't be bought off -- that's a good enough reason alone to vote for him." Mr. Kelly zeroed in on what thousands that night in Minnesota had come together to celebrate.

***

The next morning, our group split. Donahue headed for Notre Dame to continue his efforts to persuade his alma mater to be tolerant of gays and lesbians. 1 flew to Seattle for another super-rally that evening at the Key Arena. There was never any time for much contemplation or discussion, and never enough time to thank all the unsung volunteer citizens who did the immense detail work to make these giant Chautauquas happen. This is perhaps the one common experience of all presidential candidates during that Labor Day to Election Day drive. What is uncommon is learning how to keep this frenetic pace from robotizing you into mind-numbing staccato repetition at stop after stop -- an affliction that further robotized AI Gore in his last seventy-two hours of campaigning. All imagination, innovation, and intuition can come into a cryogenic freeze as the tempo makes eighteen- hour days seem like a flurry of minutes.

When we arrived in Seattle, our part of town was hopping. The uproar from the Seattle protests against the WTO in November and December 1999 was still reverberating. The Green Party campaign headquarters caught the scrutiny of reporters who wrote about the "Green Forest" toilet paper in the bathroom and the sign on the wall behind the new toilet: "Bush and Gore make me wanna Ralph." Kim Barker of the Seattle Times seemed amused by "the little red brick building that appears to be sagging in the middle, between Ms. Helen's Soul Kitchen and Virgie's Beauty Salon." He sensed the momentum. The state party, officially under way just last May, has organizations in thirty-three of Washington's thirty-nine counties.

Something else was happening in Seattle that was almost unheard of for many decades. Two large union locals, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 174 and the Greater Seattle American Postal Workers, separated from their national union endorsements of Gore and instead supported Nader-LaDuke. Postal Workers spokesman Lou Truskoff explained: "On the issues alone, when you compare what the candidates will do for working people, there is no contest."

That evening I met Eddie Vedder for the first time. He had been touring for weeks, saying more nice things about our efforts, and had voter registration tables at all Pearl Jam concerts. Sitting in a small room at the arena, Eddie was still mourning the loss of life in a crowd stampede at their outdoor concert in Copenhagen. He calls the bereaved parents and stays in touch in other ways. Today, he wanted to .step out on that stage, tell the people how he felt about our campaign, and playa couple of songs. Eddie is an unassuming and reflective person, which is part of his appeal to his many fans. He is also very sensitive to not having his music overshadow the political purpose of the gathering. He looked out at the crowd and in his terse, tight way told them that they had a "certain look," like "people who give a shit." They loved it. He played a ukulele rendition of "Soon Forget," dedicating the song to Paul Allen and Bill Gates, the cofounders of Microsoft.

He counts his money every morning,
It's the only thing that keeps him horny.


Vedder acknowledged that he had never been to one of these rallies because he had never had "anyone he could believe in before." We did not miss the deep alienation from politicians that lay behind these sentiments.

Jim Hightower, the former elected Texas secretary of agriculture, flew in from Austin and roused the vast crowd with his folksy, factual, and fresh take on the politico-corporate rot in the realm. Jim cannot be paraphrased, so take a moment and enjoy his rendition:

Senator Harry Reid recently came out -- apparently had an extra helping of Froot Loops -- and said, "Ralph Nader is a selfish person. He has no respect for the process." Well, neither did Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine have respect for the process. Neither did Sojournet Truth and Frederick Douglass. Neithet did the Populists and the Wobblies and the abolitionists and the suffragists. Neither did Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez.

We've got an old saying in Texas, "If you've found that you've dug yourself in a hole, the first thing you do is to quit digging." If we don't quit digging in 2000, we're going to be in a hole in 2004, 2008, 2012. We're going to dig deeper and deeper. Let's get out of the hole.

Gore and his corporate Democrats say to us that we're the spoilers. We're in Al's way. But wait a minute. We didn't spoil the Democratic Party with millions of corrupt corporate cash. We didn't spoil the Democratic Party by downsizing the middle class and shutting out more than one thousand farmers a week off the land in this country. We're not the ones who kicked one million low-income moms into the streets saying get a job when we knew there were no jobs with a living wage, no jobs with health care benefits for their children.

I come to you as a Democrat -- been elected as such in the state of Texas. They're still laughing about it down there. But I now look up at my party, at the national level, the corporate Democrats, and I see that my party has taken off the old Sears Roebuck work shoes and strapped on the same Guccis and Poochies that the Republicans are running around in.


Some in the Seattle crowd must have given a thought or two to how money made its mark in the Democratic primary race for the U.S. Senate between Deborah Senn and Maria Cantwell. For years, Senn was the best insurance commissioner in the country, with reels of successful consumer protections against overreaching insurance companies. She received good press too. Cantwell, who served one term in the House of Representatives before becoming wealthy as an executive in a computer software company, heavily outspent Senn on television. Because of her money, Cantwell had the support of the Democratic Party apparatus. Senn lost. She was the Greens' favorite. Cantwell then squeaked by Republican Senator Slade Gorton by only 2,300 votes. Our Green turnout in Washington of 103,000 votes in November gave Cantwell the seat (there was no Green senatorial candidate), and her election brought the Democrats to fifty-fifty with the Republicans in the Senate. This set the stage for Republican Senator Jim Jeffords's switch to independent and the resultant takeover of the Senate by the Democrats in June 2001. At a meeting a few weeks later, Senator Harry Reid, Democratic Majority Whip, told me that both he and Senator Cantwell were "well aware" of the Green voters' impact on her election.

***

Boston, October 1, was a beautiful autumn day for our rally at the Fleet Center. The organizers of the event, led by Jason Kafoury, had just two weeks to meet or break the Minneapolis record. The Boston Globe reported that twelve thousand people showed up to "revel in ticker-tape raining down from the ceiling, the giant flashing screens leading the audience in loud chants of 'Let Ralph Debate!' -- all of which was decidedly un-Nader-like."

That is correct; I was as overwhelmed by the hoopla as anyone else. If the balloons and ticker tape reminded the reporter of the style of the large parties, any further resemblance came to an abrupt halt as the program of speakers got under way. Donahue was steaming: "The two major political parties, in cooperation with the millions of dollars of contributions by Fortune Five Hundred companies, have formed a company to put on a show and exclude all the folks who would have something to say on this stage except the major-party candidates. This is not what the founders intended. We want a real campaign."

He then listed some major subjects that wouldn't be debated under the auspices of the debate commission: universal health insurance, public financing and free media time on the public airwaves for all ballot-qualified candidates, the prison-industrial complex and the war on drugs, the death penalty and corporate globalization, sovereignty, democracy, and jobs. On this Sunday, a cartoon appeared in the Washington Post: There was Gore saying, "Tap the surplus. Burn the oil." And Bush says, "Tear up Alaska. Burn the oil." Nader says, "Conserve oil. Find alternatives." And then the other two say, "That's why no one ever invites you to a debate."

The debate exclusion was a hot-button topic that night for many people at the Fleet Center, who took umbrage with a tight clique of a dozen or so men deciding how many debates, where, when, and who transmits them, through the okay of network television executives, to the general public. As I noted, the keys to the gate are held by the very two parties we were trying to challenge.

Donahue was kind enough that night to introduce my mother, Rose, who was sitting in the front row. He told the story of her meeting Senator Prescott Bush (George W.'s grandfather) when the esteemed patriarch was touring his state of Connecticut forty-five years ago. She held his handshake firmly and would not let go until he promised her that he'd push through Congress funds for construction of a simple dry dam a few miles north of our hometown of Winsted, to protect against devastating floods that previously destroyed lives, homes, and buildings along that waterway. He promised. She let go of his hand. Prescott Bush delivered. My mom won, and thousands of people roared with delight all these decades later.

A great favorite in Boston, especially among the many young people in the audience, strode onto the stage. Howard Zinn, former Boston University political science professor, antiwar leader, and author of the bestselling A People's History of the United States, laid the essence on the line: "They can give me all the arguments they want about the lesser evils, about being realistic, about being practical, but I refuse to surrender my conscience to the moneyed interests.... It seems to me that an election where the candidate needs 150 million dollars or 200 million dollars to run is not a free election." Zinn, a World War II veteran, showed what a vote should not support: "Every month a million children die in the world for lack of food and medicine while these candidates and their parties support this obscene military budget and more and more money for jet bombers and jet fighters and nuclear weapons. They have supported a class war against the poor here and in the rest of the world. And I cannot bear to pull a lever on Election Day in support of that."

Patti Smith at previous rallies had sung her trademark "People Have the Power." This led me to ask the people of Boston, "Do you want more power as a voter, consumer, worker, and taxpayer?" This is not a question that people are accustomed to being asked. But isn't the central question relating to civic motivation for taking power back from the corporate- run political establishment whether the people really want more power, enough to expend some time, talent, and money in that direction?

It is difficult to recall major advances in fairness or living conditions in our country's history that were not struggled over or wrenched from the avaricious grasp of the rulers by the ruled. 1 am not speaking of charity here. As 1 said repeatedly at rallies all over the country, a society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.

A nice aspect of these mega-rallies is that they gave a few minutes to local Green Party candidates and local civic leaders who expressed their concerns and objectives before a mass of media and citizenry that is mostly denied them throughout their years of striving for better communities.

That night 1kept coming back to the critical medium called word of mouth which, by the way, made this major outpouring of Bostonians and college students possible. "Replace some of the small talk with exciting political talk about the future of this country," 1 urged at the end of the rally. And the people streamed out of the Garden in an inspired and reflective mood, judging by the exit interviews. One woman, Carla Herwitz of Fall River, hit the perfect electoral note that we hoped -- in vain as it turned out -- millions of people would do also, when she said, "1 like Ralph Nader a lot, 1 like what he stands for. 1 don't want to see the world run by corporations. 1 think if it seems clear that Al Gore will take Massachusetts, I'll vote for Ralph Nader." There were forty states where either Gore or Bush was the foregone victor. But few voters thought like Ms. Herwitz.

***

Chicago, October 10, following a labor rally at the Teamsters' 705 Auditorium, we were at the University of Illinois Circle Pavilion rally with ninety-five hundred people. These mega-events were starting to pay dividends in the media. Here was the Chicago Tribune's take:

Political rallies seldom require the use of earplugs. But when Ralph Nader came to the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois on Tuesday night, with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam fame in tow, more than a few civics-minded Americans who have been following Nader's consumer crusade for more than a generation wondered what they had gotten themselves into.


It was a big place with a small-place atmosphere, which was perfect for hearing that heroic bestselling chronicler of ordinary heroes, eighty-eight-year-old Studs Terkel, tell one of his vintage zingers: "I ride the bus. I was on a bus a few days ago. On this bus, a fellow passenger turned to me and said, 'Studs, Gore or Bush, what's your choice?' And I said, 'Influenza or pneumonia, what's your choice?' Now, there is a difference. Influenza is the lesser of the two ailments." And more from America's great raconteur:

All of a sudden Gore said something un-Gore-like -- he took after the malefactors of great wealth. And he spoke of the powerful few getting more powerful at the expense of the many. It was Nader-like. But the fact is that turned the campaign around. I know good, dear friends of mine are worried that Ralph will be taking votes away from Gore. It's precisely the opposite: Ralph put some [guts] in the guy for a moment or two.


Then there was the former Illinois congressman and independent candidate for president in 1980, John Anderson, still a reformist to the bone: "I stood in the streets of Washington, D.C., three weeks ago in front of the office of the so-called Commission on Presidential Debates and said the time has come to give the American people what they want to hear: a new voice in American politics. If we want a new domestic political order that is truly representative, we've got to move to new rules and a new system."

Calling for world peace under law and, at home, for proportional representation and instant runoff voting, Anderson was recalling his own experience. Starting in the 1980 Republican primary with 1 percent voter recognition, he got on the televised primary debates, then on one of the presidential debates with Reagan (Carter boycotted it), and his polls zoomed to 21 percent before settling back on Election Day to a still creditable 7 percent. By contrast, the same year, environmentalist-scientist Barry Commoner, who started out better known than Anderson, was the candidate of the new Citizens Party, got on no debates, and was shut out by the media.

Young Dan Johnson-Weinberger, a recent University of Chicago law graduate and our field rep in Chicago, made sure that a number of local bands played and several local citizen leaders spoke on behalf of minority and elderly communities. The Chicago medical legend Dr. Quentin Young of Physicians for a National Health Program, told the story of a nation that spends much more per person on health care than other full-coverage nations, excludes tens of millions from coverage, and turns doctor medicine into corporate profiteering medicine. His was a call for universal health care coverage now!

Michael Moore reviewed the recent debates between Gore and Bush and listed the many issues on which they agreed, then made a passionate plea to the students there to vote for the person they believed in;, "If you start now, caving in your conscience and not doing what you know is right, you're going to have a miserable life. Because it starts in little tiny increments, doing things that you don't really want to be doing, like voting for Gore instead of who you know you should vote for. And you start chipping away at your conscience and you start settling for less and less and less and less." I had a variation on Michael's point. I asked members of the audience to raise their hands if they wanted their representatives in Washington to vote their conscience. Most put their hands high. Then I asked, "Are you going to vote your conscience?" Thoughtful murmurs of agreement followed.

Jello Biafra dropped by. The musician speaks with few inhibitions. That night he declared, "Look, how many people would rather be part of history than sit on their butts and watch it on TV? The corporations owning the media are not really going to admit we exist. They don't want the rest of America to know that we are everywhere, and we won't go away."

Eddie Vedder strummed on solo guitar. In his low-key way, he told the audience how he'd intended to compose a Nader-specific song but realized he couldn't improve on his second song of the evening, Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'." The crowd went wild.

That day, James Warren, the thoughtful Washington Bureau Chief of the Chicago Tribune, wrote a lengthy feature on Phil Donahue, where he drew Phil out on his views over the years of journalism, local television news, and shows such as Entertainment Tonight. Phil, in his noncensorious way, is a perceptive critic of the mass media's trivialism, cowardliness, commercialism, conceit, and proprietary sense (of the presidential campaign). Donahue's standard of what a journalist could be is Chicago's famous Mike Royko, the late columnist. This night Donahue hammered home his theme of media concentration and abdication.

I pledged to the people of Chicago that we would not forget what the bipartisan debate commission did in 2000. I promised to sue and expose them until their reputation in this country was lower than that of used-car salesmen. I called for a nonpartisan People's Debate Commission to be formed for 2004 and beyond. The present commission must be put out of its authoritarian business. The audience's response, it must be said, was deafening.

The next morning the Chicago Tribune printed a huge picture of the rally and a lead front- page story. Reading it on the way to Midway Airport, I had a three-second tinge of concurrence with old Robert R. McCormick, who modestly coined the front-page mantra of his Tribune creation as the "World's Greatest Newspaper."

***

New York City, October 13, the Big One -- Madison Square Garden, which costs a bundle to rent. At first, even our most ambitious rally-maker hesitated. Filling 15,500 seats at twenty dollars each was a tall order, especially when there were only seven days to sell the tickets. Eddie Vedder was the early driving force to do it. Jim Musselman, a public-interest music producer from Philadelphia, and the irrepressible Kafoury-McDougal team then said it could be done. Having received limited media outside the cities where the other rallies were held, they believed that planting our campaign in the Garden in the Big Apple would surely be a big story attracting all the media.

We gave the final go just nine days before the date. The amount of detail and preparation was mind-boggling. We had to arrange for the speakers and entertainers, decide which of the New York Greens would speak, deal with all the Garden's work rules, prepare the promotional materials, get them distributed, respond to the press calls, and much more. Everybody pitched in and worked together with minimal friction. In what had to be record time, Ani DeFranco (who assented with the phrase "Inaction is not my forte"), Phil Donahue, Professor Troy Duster, Ben Harper, Michael Moore, Bill Murray, Susan Sarandon, Patti Smith, the performers of Company Flo, Tim Robbins, and Eddie Vedder were on board. Two hundred thousand handbills were put up in New York City's five boroughs, especially around the major universities. Radio and TV talk shows relayed the upcoming rally through interviews with the above longtime activists.

It was a magical evening beginning at a raucous six P.M. press conference featuring our entire cast and packed with reporters and cameras. My agent, Jay Acton, told us he'd never seen anything like it -- "not even for Ali fights." We were to learn again that having many reporters in attendance does not mean anything close to a multimedia national story the next day or two. The publishers, editors, and producers make the final decisions.

The audience at the rally was, as Salon.com wrote, a "thoughtful" one. This was a progressive political festival. People used to Garden extravaganzas for public crusades of one kind or another told us there was nothing comparable to the good spirit, cheerfulness, and optimism. It was as if a drought over such politics for years had been suspended by a good spring rain and the flowers were sprouting. The deep sense of loss of control of just about everything that mattered was driven back for a few hours by a surge of possibilities about the future of America.

Rolling Stone captured the moment:

Bill Murray's speech reflected the emotional spirit of the rally. Responding to the idea that a vote for Nader essentially will not count, he said, "You tell the candidate that you're going to vote for to come up to me and tell me, to my face, that my vote is a wasted vote. I don't think anyone who could say that, to my face, or to your face, should be in charge." When he concluded with "I'm going to cry now. I've gotta go," it was clear that the comedian was only partly joking.


Eddie Vedder gazed over the massive assembly, which the New York Times's David Chen described as "fairly diverse in age and ethnicity" and political backgrounds, and called the scene "the most beautiful thing I have ever seen." When master of ceremonies Phil Donahue announced that the Garden was sold out, the crowd thundered. Imagine, people paying twenty dollars to attend a political rally.

Organic farmer and New Yorker Mark Dunau, frustrated by the media ignoring his statewide run as the Green Party senatorial candidate, contrasted his commitments and background with those of the "corporate lawyers -- Rick Lazio and Hillary Clinton." Michael Moore counted up the many times that Bush and Gore agreed with each other at the second presidential debate in Winston-Salem. "Where's the debate?" he asked. "All that was missing -- other than Ralph Nader -- was, at the end, for Gore to go over there and plant one of those Tipper tongue kisses on George Bush.... With the lesser of two evils, you still end up with evil. What if we'd said, 'I'm afraid of King George~ If we have a revolution, we might get a worse king'? Have some courage and some hope. Follow your conscience. Do the right thing."

Susan Sarandon came on and asked the Garden to turn up the house lights. She then gazed over the crowd and told them, "Look at yourselves. Nobody talks about this." The cheering audience took an exuberant bow.

It was amazing that fifteen thousand people had any lung power left by the time I made the stage. I have a visceral aversion to addressing very large audiences as if they were a crowd. In college, I read books on crowd psychology, how speakers mesmerize masses with tested propaganda cant, verbal incitations, and the more silent language of gestures and voice modulations. I dislike these methods. To address a crowd as if it were one mass with one set of congealed emotions ready to be shaped repels me. It is the antithesis of what my parents and teachers had taught -- that reason, fact, context, reflection, challenge, judgment, some satire and humor, and openness of mind are pretty good ways to communicate, while respecting your audience as individuals. Whether I am before a largely supportive or largely adversarial assemblage makes no difference -- there has to be a factual predicate to my attempted persuasions and recommendations. That is the only way I can remain true to myself and respect my fellow human beings.

A modified version of crowd manipulation is the pandering by politicians before audiences composed of people already very much behind them. Many Democrats have this pandering down to a science -- especially before ethnic or labor groups. It is a way of escaping on the cheap -- tell them generally what they want to hear and you won't have to tell them how you are selling them out or how you should be telling them what they don't want to hear but must. I was tired of do-little white politicians like Clinton and Gore pandering in black churches with that rhythmic cadence and told the Garden audience as much.

It was my second time at the Garden. The first time was in 1979, at a No Nukes concert with leaders of the anti-nuclear power movement. There hasn't been a single nuclear plant ordered in the United States since then -- the time of the nearly catastrophic Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania, when people in New York City were wondering whether a radioactive cloud could be heading their way. This time at the Garden I was at the point in the campaign where I had to go beyond the usual explanations of how the two parties are letting Americans down. I made my own pleas:

• To the 51 percent of adults who do not vote: Realize your power. Don't drop out of democracy. We need you -- we even need your skepticism.
• To corporations: You were designed to be our servants, not our masters.
• To the media: Your best exposes of corporate abuses are not resulting in change and you're not asking why.
• For the poor: The major public housing project in this country is building prison cells. The Democrats and Republicans give only lip service to raising the minimum wage. They ignore the crushing burden on ghettos from the corporate crime wave and don't even talk about health insurance for all.
• To the young: You need a party that shuns the cheap rhetoric and replaces it with reality.

After my speech, all the speakers and performers came back on the stage. Led by Patti Smith, and joined by the many in the Gar den, we sang "People Have the Power." As Ani DeFranco had looked around and said a little earlier, "How surreal is this? We have a huge American flag, we have a bunch of guys in suits, and it's good. It's good."

During these politically euphoric few minutes, I wondered how to extend the talent, drive, and sensitivity that existed in this largely anonymous assembly. Inside the Garden that night were veterans of many battles for justice in the peace and civil rights movements, in the environmental and political reform drives, in the workplace initiatives for safety, living wages, and the right to organize. Here also were youngsters absorbing speeches about the grave risks and awesome benefits that could loom on the global horizon. There were the high school and college students of immigrant families breathing the fresh air of democratic possibilities as they learned about the grim contradictions and greed of the established powers.

Yes, the people have the power, but would the inspiration of this and many other evenings over the months of this campaign nourish the civic energies that are required in the work of a just society? One of my favorite questions to engaged citizens is how they came to their chosen passion. I am impressed to hear over and over again that when they were young they joined a march or attended a large rally with parents or friends or participated in a losing but honorable political campaign.

There should be so many more super-rallies, not only for the Greens but for all the just causes of our country. More than a few sports fans who came to our rallies commented that people cheered just as loudly as did the fans for the Knicks or the Celtics. People want to gather and show their support for a better society.

A post-election survey of our volunteers from the greater Chicago area conducted by University of Chicago senior Katie Selenski found that even these already motivated people often cited the Chicago super-rally as an important event that helped keep them going on the campaign in the face of denunciation.

In my opinion, the best thing to happen that evening occurred after it was over. About thirty-five hundred people registered to vote and carried their registration cards across Eighth Avenue to the U.S. Post Office just an hour or so before the midnight deadline under New York law.

The Times's David Chen scurried around to interview as many as he could. He told his readers that "in conversation after Conversation, many of those interviewed offered not a staccato of sound bites and cliches, but rambling and passionate discourses about the issues." That is an important definition of success coming out of a huge audience that could think and cheer at the same time. Syndicated columnist and NewsHour TV commentator Mark Shields said that "the Nader super-rallies are the most exciting development of the campaign year."

But Chen, like just about every reporter who covered these super-rallies, took note of the paradox: "For all of the enthusiasm of the adoring crowd, Mr. Nader has not exactly rocked the presidential race, having been stalled for months at about 4 percent in the national polls." Obviously, this disappointed us, as that stall continued during our subsequent successful mega-rallies in Austin; Texas, and in Oakland and Long Beach, California. It also did not help us that the Los Angeles Times failed to report the largest area rally of any of the campaigns in their pages the next day.

What's the explanation? In a Country without campaign polls -- as, say, in the nineteenth century -- rallies such as these, if reported, would have led to many more votes than they do now. Political gatherings, conveyed by newspapers and posters, generated the word of mouth. Today, the two major parties start their campaigns by splitting the polls between them, and the two big horses are already far down the track with their tens of millions of hereditary voters.

Our rallies generally received good local print coverage, brief local radio and television coverage, and very little national coverage beyond a few wire service stories. However, and this is crucial, the national television networks did not lead, highlight, or emphasize Our rallies in their political coverage. Even the big Garden event did not .make major television news.

So we did not have a carrier of any magnitude for these record-setting paid events, featuring prominent speakers, to get word of mouth going among the many millions of voters who never heard of what we brought together. The mass media was our only practical substitute for the major candidates' polls, debates, and massive television ad campaigns. But it did not happen. As large as our arena audiences were, they were precious drops in the bucket, even among the eligible voters in the cities where they took place.

Consider how small is the pool or first-level persuadable voters. Nearly two-thirds of people who actually vote are down-the-line or party-line Republicans or Democrats. Their minds are usually made up before the outset of the campaign. The rest of the voters are either voters of conscience, who vote for the particular candidates or issues they believe in, regardless of the polls, or "practical" voters, who want to be with a winner and look to align themselves with what many other voters are going to do. Voters of conscience are the smallest category. They don't care about polls or pundits, but you still have to reach them with your record and message. Undecided voters looking for a winner are reached by polls and media. No polls, no media: Polls favor party dynasties who receive mass media.

Given the straitjacket enforced by the two-party winner-take-all system, a third party faces exclusion signs everywhere, and this futility gets into the minds of the people themselves. Many people, including political figures such as Clinton's former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, told us before and after the election that based on our issues and record of seriousness about them, he would have liked to be supportive. But who thinks a third party can break through in our country? There is little elbow room for the underdog party, for the fresh start, for the seeds to flower, for the small innovator to take a large "market share." Any regeneration of politics from a state of decay is difficult under these circumstances.

Nonetheless, the super-rallies are a tremendous start. Someday enough Americans will prove wrong the conventional platitudes, the a priori abdications. These citizens will rise to the challenge of that exhortation: "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." They will overcome the biggest obstacles to help level the political playing field. They will reject barriers that deny challengers a fair chance to have a chance.
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:36 am

Twelve: The Commission on Presidential Debates -- Dictacrats for the Republicrats

On the night of October 3, I was with Tarek Milleron and some reporters on a shuttle bus speeding past thousands of vociferous protesters and supporters behind barricades, flanked by hundreds of state police, on our way to the University of Massachusetts. Our eventual destination was a Fox News interview after the completion of the first ninety-minute presidential debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush at the Clark Athletic Center. As the bus slowed, I was spotted by some supporters, and a great rolling cheer preceded us. The bus stopped in what seemed to be a parking lot, and we disembarked thinking that a representative or two from Fox News would be waiting. I had a ticket to get inside not the debate hall itself but the nearby Lipke Auditorium, which was reserved for people to watch the debate on closed-circuit television. On the bus with us was a family heading for the actual debate at the Clark Center, and we marveled at how elaborate and numbered each of their credentials were for that live event. Our plainly printed ticket was one of hundreds distributed by the University of Massachusetts to students in the Boston area to encourage them or their transferees to fill Lipke.

Instead of Fox News reps, we were met by a man who, escorted by a state trooper and two other men in police uniforms, claimed to be representing the Commission on Presidential Debates. He said he had been instructed by the Commission that regardless of whether I had a ticket, I was not welcome and would have to leave. I asked him first to identify himself and reveal who at the Commission instructed him. He said he was John Vezeris, a security consultant to the Commission, and repeated his charge. I asked him what was the reason, and during our exchange of words -- some in Greek -- State Trooper Sergeant McPhail stepped forward and stated that if I did not leave, he would have to arrest me. A few reporters were right there. I told the sergeant that he was being given an unlawful political order and that I had every right with my ticket in hand to sit in a public university hall to watch the debate on TV. The trooper became more impatient to get me back on the shuttle bus, and the sergeant said, "Mr. Nader, is it your intention to be arrested here?" My immediate thought was: What the hell? In the United States of America, I have a ticket to a public function at a public university, and without any cause or disruption, the authorities are throwing me out of the place. A private corporate power is using the state's police for its partisan political ends. Sounds like a definition of the corporate state. See you in court, man.

But as I always prefer to be a plaintiff rather than a defendant, my associate and I instead repaired to the shuttle and returned to a Metro train stop several miles away. There, the campaign's deputy press secretary, Laura Jones, contacted the Fox producer, who said that he'd meet us if we came back to the press entrance. I did a quick interview with Bloomberg Radio at the bus stop shelter, then got back onto the shuttle and went back once again past the barricades and the cheering crowd. No sooner did we get off the shuttle than we were met again by state troopers. But this time NBC's Today Show had a big camera with a bright light right there and did an interview with me while we looked for the elusive Fox people, who, it seems, were intimidated by the CPD and did not come from their trailer to bring us back for their post-debate interview. All the while, Sergeant McPhail was threatening me with arrest "for trespass" if I did not leave within three minutes. Nearby, two Secret Servicemen from the Boston office were observing. They said they had no role regarding this situation, but they wanted to be helpful, escorting us onto the shuttle and riding with us back to the T stop. On the bus I had a good conversation with one of them, Chief Boston Agent John O'Hara, regarding the abuse of authority without cause that we had just experienced. He couldn't have been more understanding and at the T stop arranged for a police cruiser to take us down to a Boston office building where, though late, we watched the end of the debate and gave Fox its interview. Although Mr. O'Hara can speak for himself, I received the impression he wouldn't have recommended handling this situation the way the Commission did.

In the following days, there was some public criticism around the country of the Commission's rude and arbitrary exclusion of me strictly for political reasons. Did this diminish the arrogance of the CPD? Paul Kirk, the Democratic co-chair, told a newspaper reporter that the ejection was ordered because I "was the point man for the protest." And this man is an attorney! The Commission must have been gratified at the absence of any expressions of outrage by leading civil liberty advocates in Congress or in the media. The ACLU, which has defended vigorously the constitutional rights of neo-Nazis to demonstrate and the right of tobacco companies to advertise, did not see fit to issue a protest. It was left to Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal, who pronounced my expulsion in Boston as the "outrage of the week" on his weekend panel television program.

Two weeks later, I campaigned in St. Louis, Missouri, and was invited by the student television station (WUTV) for an interview at Washington University, where the third and final presidential debate (one wag called it the "Anheuser-Busch-Gore debate") was to be held. Our advance man had secured perimeter passes to do the interview at the TV studio far from the actual building where the debate was to take place. Arriving at the principal entrance to the university with my associates and a large number of reporters, photographers, and some television cameras, I met the student from the television studio. I was also met by police officers at the outermost checkpoint. Earlier that day, I had called up my former associate and coauthor, Joel Seligman, now dean of the university's School of Law, and asked if there was any time available for a short address to the students -- remembering his standing invitation for such a visit. He sighed and said that he had no control over who could enter his law school.

The campus was like an armed fort with the private corporate-funded CPD having the power to use university and city police not only for security but also to enforce its political prejudices. There was no disruption and no indication of any disruption whatsoever associated with our small group. Yet the police were pressed into a highly selective political maneuver. Two of my associates and I each had around our necks the green-and- white perimeter passes as we followed the student through the campus entrance. My path was blocked by a policeman who gripped my arm and pressed me back several yards to the main sidewalk, saying I would not be allowed entry. Meanwhile, my two associates were allowed to go through the guarded checkpoint several times back and forth showing the same perimeter passes. I asked to speak to the officer's superior, who came forward, followed by a snarling public relations representative of the Commission. He shouted that I did not have the proper credentials and had to get out, before quickly slithering back to where he came from. During this back-and-forth, as we were surrounded by reporters and tried to understand how the CPD could sequester the entire campus and use police to exclude anyone with differing political views, two police officers told my associates that they had been given specific orders to bar me, and no one else, from crossing the perimeter.

That day I filed a lawsuit against the CPD in federal district court in Boston for violating my civil rights. The case is pending and at the deposition stage at this writing. No one, candidate or not, should be treated this way in our country. Dictatorial behavior, by a private, partisan, two-party-controlled corporation, using public police power arbitrarily, shouldn't be tolerated in the land of the free and home of the brave. But it has been up to now.

How did this cancer in our democracy get started? How did it become an instrument of the two major parties, which have received millions in taxpayer dollars, to assure that only their candidates reach tens of millions of voters, not any of their challengers, even those whose participation is wanted by a majority of Americans polled?

The nonprofit private corporation that became the CPD was born in 1987, a creation of Republican and Democratic leaders who saw the presidential debate sponsor, the League of Women Voters, as too uppity. The League had a modest mind of its own but the two major parties wanted complete control for their nominated candidates. There would be no, more negotiations with the league over having John Anderson-type independents on the debates. No more having to abide by the rules of the League's managers. The dictacrats took over for the republicrats. In retrospect, this amazing coup was overshadowed by the equally amazing lack of vigorous protest from all kinds of groups -- the media, political scientists, political reform groups, and at least some members of Congress. It was treated as if it were a housekeeping detail.

Republican Frank Fahrenkopf, the co-chair of the CPD, held a press conference in 1987, and described his new organization as "a bipartisan, nonprofit, tax-exempt organization formed to implement joint sponsorship of general election presidential and vice presidential debates, starting in 1988, by the national Republican and Democratic committees between their respective nominees." The CPD took over from the League when it refused to participate in what its president, Nancy Newman, called "a fraud on the American voter." She was referring to excessive demands made by Dukakis and Bush negotiators regarding the format, the type of questions, and other intrusions into the league's arm's-length stance. Another example of men seizing what little power women assembled in the electoral process.

From then on to the present, the Debate Commission's co-chairs, still Frank Fahrenkopf and Paul Kirk, still serving corporate clients at their law firms, have maintained that the CPD's sole mission is educational, as befits its 501(c)(3) tax exemption from the Treasury Department. Let's examine that assertion. Simply said, bipartisan is not nonpartisan, particularly since the avowed goal, stated in the initial memorandum of agreement between Fahrenkopf and Kirk, was to "strengthen the two major parties." Concentrated power congeals, sustains, defends, and rationalizes itself to a fine point. The CPD has taken this motivation to the level of instinct-a marvelously modulated cabal. Notice how this malignant species has methodically covered its flanks so as to monopolize the simultaneous access by any competitors to the overall electorate. They have the recipe down pat.

First, make sure that the major elements of the two parties are in on the deal. Fahrenkopf, former head of the Republican National Committee and current president of the largest gambling lobby, took no risks. Together with Kirk, former head of the Democratic National Committee and current chairman of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, he chose in 1987 a list of who's who in the two parties for the CPD's initial Board of Directors. Former Senator John Culver; Ambassador Pamela Harriman, later to become a veteran Clinton adviser; Vernon Jordan; former assistant to Walter Mondale, Richard Moe; the general counsel to the Republican Party, David Norcross; Governor Kay Orr; Representative Barbara Vucanovich; and Senator Pete Wilson. Two of these board members were replaced later by Representative John Lewis and Senator Paul Coverdale. Of the nine other board members, five are Democratic Party loyalists: Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, Howard Buffet, Clifford Alexander, Newton Minow, and Antonia Hernandez. Three are Republican Party loyalists: former Senator john Danforth, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, and Representative Jennifer Dunn. To ward off accusations of partisanship following the exclusion of Perot in 1996, the CPD invited Dorothy Ridings as the lone independent board member in 1998. Executive director Janet Brown is a registered Republican.

Second, connect with the corporate money to fund your operations. It helps that eight of the eleven CPD board members serve on major corporate boards. But really that type of overlap is not necessary, just facilitative. Corporations know a good tax deduction when they see it. The CPD spends more than half a million dollars to sponsor a single debate, and for-profit businesses cover most of that bill. Companies like Anheuser-Busch, Philip Morris, AT&T, Ford Motor Co., and Atlantic Richfield relish the opportunity to contribute to this proxy for both major parties and have their top executives rub shoulders with leading politicians at the festive occasions surrounding the debates. They believe that this participation can enhance their civic image and also can provide hospitality to six hundred journalists, many of whom are already predisposed to view these events as entertainment. Dana Milbank, White House correspondent for the Washington Post, wrote in his book Smashmouth of the Boston presidential debate:

The whole campus is closed -- ostensibly to thwart terrorists, more likely to thwart Nader and Buchanan. Nader gets kicked out of the debate audience, even though he got himself a ticket from a student. He's threatening lawsuits.... But I'm not worried about such things. I am inside the debate area, and I am delighted to find an Anheuser-Busch refreshment tent, where there is beer flowing, snacks, Budweiser girls in red sweater (sic), the baseball playoffs on television, ping pong and fusbol.


(Actually, Milbank erred -- my ticket was to a nearby auditorium with closed-circuit television.)

If the people at the CPD worried about appearances, they were not showing it. Their stunted sense of propriety" can easily overlook the fact that the three candidates excluded by the Commission -- Perot, Buchanan, and Nader -- all had definite critiques of the very multinational corporations funding the debates. All three had support of the polls to be on the debates. However, these were not the polls that the CPD corporation had in mind.

Third, keep competitors off the debates under the guise of objective criteria. They automatically invited themselves, of course, and from 1988 to 1996 the CPD established the following subjective criteria, the absence of which would justify the exclusion of any competing presidential candidate: evidence of national organization, signs of newsworthiness and competitiveness, and indicators of national enthusiasm and concern. The CPD set up an advisory committee that would determine if any other candidate had these attractions in sufficient density -- get this -- to have a "realistic chance of winning" the election.

In 1996, Perot, having garnered nineteen million votes four years earlier, was just under 10 percent in the polls and therefore was deemed not to have a chance. So he was cut off at the pass. Since the basic data came down to the standing in the polls, Fahrenkopf and Kirk, after consulting their respective party bosses, decided to establish simple poll-based criteria for the 2000 campaign. In a January 2000 news conference at the National Press Club, these two longtime corporate attorneys dictated the barrier for the next campaign. As I've said before, it would be an average of five major commercial polls in September, which would have to meet or exceed 15 percent voting support for the candidate, along with meeting the constitutional requirements of age, citizenship, and being on enough state ballots to make up a majority of electoral college votes.

In one stroke, the CPD implicated the mass media in the decision. Although we could never obtain the documents to show what exchanges, if any, occurred with these polling organizations, we did know who owned or contracted with them (CNN/USA Today, ABC News/Washington Post, CBS News/New York Times, NBC News/Wall Street Journal, Fox News). These news organizations were placed, willingly or unwillingly, in a position of significantly determining much of what the polls would register.

How is it that taxpayers can finance millions of dollars for a candidate's campaign for president if the candidate meets the Federal Election Commission's standard of garnering 5 percent of the popular vote four years earlier, and yet not see or hear him or her on the debates? Simple. The CPD and the two major parties have the power to say nyet because, through their corporations, they fund and dictate the rules. What do you think the privatization and corporatization of the presidential debates means? Certainly not to give seeds a chance to grow and nurture the barren landscape of our eroded democracy. Degenerating big parties are naturally not interested in regenerative open procedures.

The weakest defense of this extraordinary high threshold comes with CPD spokespersons raising the tired excuse that "hundreds of candidates run for president every election.." Although Bill Joe Clegg did run for president in 1996, along with 160 others, he was on the ballot in just one state. In 1988 only four candidates, in 1992 only five candidates, in 1996 only six candidates, and in 2000 only seven candidates were on enough state ballots to theoretically be able to win the White House. Canada seemed to have ·no trouble in November 2000 having its two national debates include five candidates for the office of prime minister. Nor do the major parties believe that it is unwieldy to have seven or more candidates debating one another on the same stage during the primaries.

During 1992, when the criterion was "a chance to win," Ross Perot was included in the debates because both Clinton and Bush, each believing that Perot's presence would help his respective campaign, told the CPD to let him on. Four years later, according to Clinton aide George Stephanopolous, Bob Dole feared that Perot would take votes away from him, and the incumbent Clinton wanted the debates to be nonevents. Presto, the CPD excluded Perot. Further, the two major-party campaign officials, not the Commission, decide who will ask the questions, which gives the candidates a fairly good idea of the possible range of questions asked.

A majority of voters polled in 1999 wanted a viable third party in America to keep the other two parties honest. Independents make up a plurality of voters -- reflecting in part the increasing convergence of the two major parties. Historically, third-party candidates introduce new or neglected salient subjects and proposals that both major-party candidates either agree on and don't discuss or avoid so as not to alienate interest groups. All this conformity, self-censorship, protective imitation, and restrictive debate rules make for a gigantic turnoff on the television audience. One reason so many Americans wanted Buchanan and me on the debates was that they wanted to stay awake. Audience levels surged to over 90 million when Perot was on board in 1992. It was through his presidential debate appearances, together with his paid thirty-minute network television presentations, that he thrust the federal deficit, the proposed NAFTA, and the influence of special- interest lobbyists into the forefront of political discourse that year. He also did not talk like a politician -- an important sonic spice to the conventional droning between the drab and the dreary.

Some members of Congress have proposed various forms of legislation to broaden the presidential debate process. You probably never heard of them because they received almost no news or editorial notice. Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Illinois) proposed lowering the criterion from 15 to 5 percent voter support in the polls or a majority of those polled wanting the candidate's participation in such debates. Congressman Bill McCollum (R-Florida) recommended holding a preliminary debate with candidates on the ballot in all fifty states and then restricting the remaining three debates to candidates polling above 5 percent. Another model, by Congressman James Traficant Jr. (D-Ohio), would invite all candidates who qualify for federal matching funds. Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) would prohibit candidates who accept federal matching funds from attending presidential debates that exclude candidates who are on forty or more state ballots. These proposals expose the paucity of imagination in our national discourse when, in the light of so many potential variations of how debates can be structured, scheduled, and covered, we allow ourselves to be cramped inside the CPD's narrow-minded strategic dictates. It is like allowing a corset to define the meaning of underwear.

Fourth, secure the full and exclusive cooperation of the television networks. Getting the networks to play follow-the-leader is simple. The debate negotiations between the two major campaigns are so unpredictable, dilatory, and minute, as they jockey for position, that the networks avoid playing an initiatory role like the plague. Since the two major candidates are the "talent," they can pretty much, given the passivity of the network, write their own ticket with the media -- except if they collide with preexisting contractual agreements where, for instance, a network has the exclusive contract to show the World Series. In fact, it did take Gore and Bush a long time to get together on the number of debates and the format.

Throughout 2000, Gore kept saying he would debate Governor Bush every week or more anywhere in the United States. After all, didn't Jim Fallows write a lead story in the Atlantic Monthly on how devastating a debater he was? How Gore crushed his primary opponents with rare ruthlessness, such as the job he did on Michael Dukakis in 1988, to set the stage for the Republicans' Willie Horton attack later that year? Bush, on the other hand, was playing coy. In late June, he was not even committing to the proposed three debates, suggesting that he and Gore wait to decide until after their parties' presidential nominating conventions. His candor inadvertently made the point that the debates were subject to tactical considerations, when he was asked whether he would support my presence in the debates. He told Reuters on his campaign plane from New York to Detroit, "I don't know. I haven't figured out the impact yet." The reporter followed up, noting that Bush's answer sounded as if he would be willing to let Nader in only if he believed it would help his own White House bid. Bush replied with a grin, "I am trying to win, aren't I?"

All this didn't sound like the CPD was either nonpartisan or just educational. Instead, it sounded like what the CPD has always been -- a servant of duopoly in the high-stakes game of Republican and Democratic presidential politicking. The candidates knew that thinking out loud, as Bush did, was not the appropriate response. At other times when Bush and Gore were asked about minor-party candidates getting on the debates, their standard reply was that they were ~imply following the CPD's gateway standard of 15 percent poll support. It was not up to them -- no, of course not.

Fifth, make sure that you cover your rear with the Federal Election Commission. In 1998, the FEC's chief lawyer, Lawrence Noble, issued a blistering report. He took note of strict FEC regulations that (1) bar corporate contributions to organizations sponsoring debates that do not have pre-established objective criteria that determine candidate participation and (2) prohibit nomination by a particular party as the sole objective criterion to determine whether to include a candidate in a debate.

Noble concluded that the CPD's 1996 criteria for third-party inclusion in the presidential debates were subjective, rather than "pre-established objective." He argued that relying on the "professional opinions of the Washington bureau chiefs of the major newspapers, news magazines, and broadcast networks" and "the opinions of representative political scientists specializing in electoral politics at major universities" was inherently subjective. Moreover, in his legal opinion, the CPD criteria violated FEC debate regulations because major-party candidates were automatically invited to the presidential debates, regardless of their position in the polls.

Then came the blockbuster. Longtime general counsel Noble questioned whether the criteria were applied at all. He suspected that the major-party candidates, not the CPD, had determined Perot's exclusion. Consequently, he requested a full-blown investigation, complete with depositions and subpoenas, of the selection process.

Noble's recommendation was unanimously rejected by all six members of the FEC. It was a considerable convenience to the CPD that by statutory-inspired custom the FEC is made up of three Democrats and three Republicans. The regulatory flank was protected. The cabal was completed. Our year 2000 lawsuit in Boston's federal court to invoke the 1911 law banning corporate contributions to federal candidates was rejected.

As the debate over the debates continued, a surprising number of newspapers and public figures urged my presence on at least one of the debates. In mid-June, the Christian Science Monitor denounced the 15 percent hurdle:

Media which conduct polls that influence the eligibility for the debates also let themselves be influenced by those polls in the amount of coverage given to candidates.... A couple of trends argue for giving third parties a guaranteed platform. The media are covering politics less, forcing candidates to rely on TV ads more. And the cost of buying more ads has pushed the two major parties to become more beholden to well-heeled donors, be they corporations or rich individuals. A pre-election debate that brings in a wide range of views can only strengthen the vibrant dialogue that's needed to inform voters.


The paper argued that any candidate who gets, or whose poll figures indicate he or she will get, public monies should be given room at the debate table.

The Seattle Times, also in June, editorialized that Buchanan and I should be allowed on at least one debate. If after the first debate a third party's nominee's polls go up to 8 or 10 percent, the door to the second debate is opened. In the third round, the paper argued, the threshold should go up again, to 15 or 20 percent. "It would add a note of excitement," the editorial concluded, adding that the" 15 percent threshold suits the two parties. It unduly restricts the American people." That latter point is the essential one. The prime consideration is the right and need of the American people to have a wide array of information and viewpoints. Perot, noted the editorial, "went into the debates with 7 percent support. He went on to win 19 percent of the vote."

In mid-July, the St. Paul Pioneer Press weighed in, calling me a "substantial candidate, one whose issues and priorities are different from Al Gore and George W. Bush" and one who "should be included in this fall's presidential debates." Taking a swing at the CPD, the paper declared that "there must be more reasonable rules for third-party participation." On September 1, the San Jose Mercury News urged my inclusion on the first debate and let the subsequent poll numbers decide whether I would be on the next debates. The paper's main argument, however, was not numerical.

He expresses a long and articulate voice of dissent from Republicans and Democrats on important issues that [Bush and Gore] are minimizing or ignoring.... Nader takes contrary positions on trade and the North American Free Trade Agreement, corporate "greed" and influence on politics, universal health care and the role of the Federal Reserve.... Nader's presence would guarantee that the debate would be lively, with more focus on substance than, for lack of disagreement, on style.... The dialogue this fall would be richer and the differences between all of the candidates made sharper and clearer by his presence.


Apart from these editorials boosting our campaign's office morale, they all have a subtext to their judgments. The CPD's presidential debates are not really debates; they are extended, managed press conferences involving highly predictable or bland questions to two candidates whose principal objectives are to avoid slipups, gaffes, and stylistic offenses that can turn off large numbers of undecided voters, and to reiterate, regardless of the question, the well-practiced paragraphs from the rhetoric throughout the campaign. All this bores people. Dan Rather expressed these sentiments right after the second Bush-Gore meeting when he was impelled to describe their debate as "narcolepsy-inducing."

It is telling that when people are asked to remember past presidential debates, what they call up are phrases like "Where's the beef?" (Mondale v. Hart), "I won't hold your youthful age against you" (Reagan v. Mondale), "I paid for this mike" (Reagan v. Republican primary opponents), or "You're no Jack Kennedy" (Bentsen v. Quayle).

Perhaps a yearning for forthrightness, for coming to grips with central matters too long unspoken, and for highlighting solutions upsetting to power structures were some of the reasons why prominent political commentators and figures said publicly or privately that they wanted me in on the debates. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) and Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin), House Budget Chairman John Kasich (R-Ohio), White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, and Mark Shields were among those who favored inclusion. Mr. Shields came in late with his October 26 column in quite touching words: "My apology to Ralph Nader for not demanding he be included in the presidential debates. Nader does not let us forget all we owe to our community, our country and to each other. He deserves to be heard beyond the arenas he, alone, can fill."

Many more such expressions by influential people would not have changed the CPD's intransigence. As Temple University law professor David Kairys wrote: "The corporate- funded major parties, which have for many years alienated or bored most of the populace, are literally excluding their principled opposition from the debates.... The CPD ... is completely dominated by the same corporations and two parties and is unaccountable to the government or the people." The Constitution, Professor Kairys might have added, does not apply to such private governments.

And, predictably, the debates were awful -- each worse than the one before. Audiences shrank, ranging from sixty-some million to forty-some million. Some of the criticisms for the sheer drowsiness of the events were directed toward Jim Lehrer, the choice by both candidates to ask the questions in the first two debates and manage the audience's questions in the third. If I were Lehrer, I would reply to my critics with a sports metaphor. What if a boxing promoter hired a referee, placed him in a straitjacket, and sent him into a ring where the boxers banged on each other in the corner? Lehrer had to play by the rules the candidates themselves had set forth, as he himself pointed out a couple of times during the debates. Granted those parameters, Richard Berke of the New York Times reported on the day of the third debate in St. Louis, there is "intensifying criticism from partisans and analysts who complain that he did not sufficiently probe the candidates in the first two debates and was not particularly aggressive in following up his questions. The result, these critics say, is that the nominees were left off the hook on vital matters and the debates meandered to the point where they verged on being downright tedious." Lehrer told Berke that his job was to foster give-and-take and that "if somebody wants to be entertained, they ought to go to the circus. Or they ought to go to the ballgame. I didn't sign on to entertain people for ninety minutes three times. These have been tremendous exercises for democracy." Tremendous exercises for democracy? Thank you, Pericles.

This is a debate? When Gore and Bush lay down a rule that prohibits them from asking each other direct questions! The two candidates also stipulated that the questions and subjects for the first two debates had to be chosen by Mr. Lehrer. He relayed these and other formats to the television audience at the outset. Then came a terrible downer, and a patronizing one at that, which generated exactly the wrong kind of ambience for what was to follow. Mr. Lehrer stated: "There is a small audience in the hall tonight. They are not here to participate, only to listen. I have asked, and they have agreed, to remain silent for the next ninety minutes. Except for right now, when they will applaud as we welcome the two candidates, Governor Bush and Vice President Gore." How inappropriate. Why bother with an audience at all? Answer? To provide a prop for the instructed applause and a graphic for the television. Unworthy of all involved.

I retrieved a twenty-year-old New York Times editorial asking Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to agree to a debate that "enhances face-to-face discussion. Get rid of the clock and the fussy 'Time's up' warnings and get the reporters out of the way. Keep it simple, flexible and open -- a moderator, two chairs and maybe a coffee pot. Sparks should fly."

In Boston, Winston-Salem, and St. Louis, the debates were very repetitive; the candidates often brushed aside Lehrer's questions so as to repeat their campaign mantras. From Gore's lockbox and paying off the debt to Bush's educational testing and tax cut ("You can spend your money more wisely than the federal government can"). In the second debate, the two candidates agreed so often that it became the stuff of comedians. It reached authentic hilarity when Bush said and Gore dittoed that he also was not "for command and control techniques either." Gore parroted this two minutes after he rejected the idea that "pollution controls should be voluntary."

It is easy for an onlooker to criticize any political debate and the participants, if one does not empathize with the time limitations, the pressure on the candidates, and the questions they would like to get asked but don't. But because this was their own show and their format, the candidates have no one to blame but themselves. They set the rules whereby they could not ask questions of each other, and Lehrer was severely restricted from asking the searching follow-up questions because he saw himself as a moderator, not an interviewer. For example, Lehrer allowed far too many repetitions over the three debates, which dulled the tempo and content of the event. One way to have dealt with these repetitions would have been to ask Bush, for example, why is giving back tax monies to America as a community (repairing clinics, schools, public transit, drinking water systems, etc.) any less of a return to the people of the alleged surplus than sending out rebate checks to individuals? Or if "testing is the cornerstone" of Bush's education plan, what kinds of tests and standards would he apply and how would he administer and enforce such a top- down structure from Washington to thousands of local school districts? This is an immense logistical undertaking by Bush, and he was allowed to get away with generalities like "accountability" and "consequences."

The role of money in elections and how it affects politicians was -- surprise -- largely ignored. So were the subjects of corporate welfare, globalization WTO and NAFTA style, the criminal justice system, the drug war, a living wage, universal health care, consumer protection, unions and union building, military budget cuts, housing, energy, public transit, biotechnology, and the civil justice tort system. Wherever Bush and Gore agreed, there were no challenging questions. For example, both nominees claimed that capital punishment deters homicides when studies for more than two generations have contradicted that assertion. Both wanted to increase the military budget, so there were no questions on the perfectly legitimate topic of cutting the military budget in a post-Cold War period.

Anybody can ask his or her favorite questions. But what I am suggesting with these few illustrations is that no moderator should allow such tidal waves of practiced speeches that reflect converging two-party politics and close out windows of information and insight for voters to evaluate the candidates. In response to a reporter's question, I called the Winston-Salem debate "an interminable tedium of platitudinous dittos" -- in other words, Bush and Gore became a cure for insomnia.

There was considerable discussion in the second debate, at Wake Forest, about the use of U.S. power overseas. But there was not one fresh proposal from either candidate, such as in launching a major assault on global infectious diseases, which our country is uniquely positioned to lead. In that same debate, Bush said, "We're going to go after all crime." Think what he would have said if Mr. Lehrer asked him whether that includes heavily neglected corporate crime whose widely reported practices take far more lives and produce far more injuries and diseases than does street crime.

During and after the debates there were many comments about which Gore persona appeared at any given debate. He seemed to be into makeovers -- a classic example of how hard it is to be all things to all people. Clearly, the Gore who wrote in the book Earth in the Balance (1992) that the internal combustion engine was a major threat to the world's environment was different from the Vice President Gore who helped combine a billion- dollar taxpayer subsidy to GM, Ford, and Chrysler over a clean engine project that produced nothing in eight years other than federal regulatory abdication of fuel efficiency improvements. Given the legendary opposition by the auto industry to any regulatory standards or upgrades, why did Al Gore have to say once that "Detroit is itching to build" the new kinds of clean trucks and cars and again that "Detroit is raring to go on that"? This transparent pandering could have invited a penetrating question.

It was not that there were too few subjects mentioned or touched on -- I counted about thirty in the three debates, albeit within very conventional ranges. It's how superficial the handling of these subjects was and, most important, how removed they were from the actual record of Bush and Gore in office. The moderator did not see fit to "accentuate the differences," as Senator Bob Kerrey observed. Lehrer left himself with an occasional plea to the candidates to please tell the audience about their differences. The rate of agreement between the major-party candidates in presidential debates increased from 14 percent in 1976 to a whopping 37 percent in 2000.

With the third debate, in St. Louis, came the citizens' turn to present their questions in advance, get selected, and then stand and ask them. Not spontaneous, but more concise. The subjects were the conventional ones -- HMOs, price of prescription drugs, national health care, family farms and agricultural policy, paying attention to youth, affirmative action, and others. But they were often asked with an edge that jolted the candidates a little and sharpened their replies.

The last question persuaded me once again that schoolchildren often ask the clearest, most direct questions. Thomas Fischer got up and asked: "My sixth-grade class at St. Claire's School wanted to ask of all these promises you guys are making and all the pledges, will you keep them when you're in office?" There was laughter. Then Gore said "yes," and there was more laughter. Although the question was treated like a softball down the middle by Gore and Bush, the schoolboy was serious. We should be too.

Part of the failure of "sparks to fly" rested squarely on Gore's shoulders. Bush was by far the more testy person. When he wasn't agreeing, he referred to Gore as "he" or "him" or "the man" and came forth with taunts and false figures. Gore must have decided he wasn't going to tangle at those points of interaction. This may have been a mistake, as far as avoiding potentially dramatic moments in your favor. Bush seemed to gain confidence from Gore's aversions and became more folksy and colloquial. He actually had Gore's number with a few simple techniques: "The man is practicing fuzzy math again," "That's totally false for him to stand up here and say that," or ideological bell ringers like, "He'll put liberal activist justices who will use their bench to subvert the legislature, that's what he'll do." When Gore got around to rebutting Bush, he did so in such a cumbersome, patronizing fashion that it was like he was imitating Darrell Hammond on Saturday Night Live.

When the debates were over, the pundits rendered their various verdicts, but the polls did not change dramatically. This was really a win for Bush, who exceeded expectations and came across as a regular genial fellow while managing to cuff Gore around a bit. On the other hand, Gore received criticism for his body language and his tone -- not trivial matters for a television audience.

During all this focus on the question of presidential debates, I noticed increasing frustration and a touch of melancholy among our campaign staff as the absence of any alternatives to the CPD's debates became clear. My letters and calls in early September to major labor unions to sponsor debates in critical midwestern states and to the major networks to invite the four major candidates for a series of debates produced no results. The inevitability of the done deal had afflicted these institutions as well. One former vice president of a large union told me that labor leaders did not want to see Gore challenged by me because they feared Bush more. It gets worse. After the election, Robert Kuttner, the co-editor of The American Prospect, told me that he invited an influential labor union chief to write a lengthy article on what labor wants from the Democratic Party and was turned down. He did not want to embarrass Gore by putting him on the spot.

In many ways the debates phenomenon was a critical litmus test for our society's accelerating surrender to the commodification of our elections. The white-gloved managers and consultants have taken over and put the whole election on the tube, and if you don't like it, there is always the "off" button. That's the definition of freedom -- if you don't like it, grab the remote control. Under this lifeless, plastic system where you don't have a say, you're going to continue to pay.

In a post-election article in the New York Observer, Nicholas von Hoffman saw Janet Brown, the CPD's executive director, as the sour personification of the rigid, passionless

emptiness of this now thankfully concluded election.... As the years have passed ... all the secondary characteristics of jubilant, out-in-the-open electioneering have shriveled up and gone away. Campaign songs, campaign slogans, displays, barbecues, ox roasts, clambakes, uniformed marching bands-all vanished and gone, and with them the great mass meetings, the parades and processions for party and candidate. No more will there be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight. These changes have not made it easy for a candidate to find an audience. If we see them on those low-brow afternoon talk shows and the no-brow late-night comedy hours making mild asses of themselves, it's because the choice is between being seen on Oprah or not being seen at all.


Our society has been given its Khyber Pass by the two parties' CPD. It is not surprising that only two candidates can pass through it to the people. It is probably best to view all these dictacrats as an authoritarian result of a serious default among all of us as disserved citizens. In order to break the grip of the Commission there needs first to be a reassertion of civic activity knocking early on the doors of the foundations, the civil society groups, the trade unions, and the media to establish a nonpartisan People's Debate Commission.

By planning now for 2004, before tactical considerations associated with preferred candidates undermine a fundamental strategy of open, numerous, and varied debates with true vigorous formats, an alternative plan that is broadly based and supported can be launched. Why ration debates? Before the primary season, the probable contenders are much more vulnerable to just and fair procedures. If candidates are asked for early commitments and faced with substantial media agreements to carry the debates, a new tradition could start to take hold -- a tradition that keeps its options open for fresh ideas and energies from the citizenry.

The Green Party and other reform groups will be working to heighten the demand for a moral reciprocity that flows from the parties and the media to the public. For it is taxpayers' dollars that fund primaries, elections, and conventions, and it is the people's asset called the public airwaves that the television and radio broadcasters use, free of charge, when they receive their very profitable licenses from the Federal Communications Commission. The parties and the media should be expected to contribute to a more open and accessible democratic process.

Millions of Americans who have a close interest or stake in one major public policy issue after another should not be told by a private company, controlled by the duopoly, that they will not have these subjects discussed because candidates who would do so are excluded from nationally televised debates.

The Gore-Bush debates were laced with self-censorship and latent taboos against these issues, or their respective records, being raised or debated or challenged vigorously. We need more straightforward questions, such as that asked by the Business Week cover story in September 2000: Mr. Gore, Mr. Bush, do large corporations -- banks, insurance companies, HMOs, chemical, drug, food, auto, biotech firms, real estate, agribusiness, the prison industries, and military contractors -- have too much power in Washington, D.C.? Now, there is the mother of many healthy provocations, the likes of which an experienced Marron Mintz-type interviewer could have engrossed millions of viewers and listeners for one entire debate theme. (See www.Tompaine.com for a sampling of questions Mintz would ask.)

One thing is for sure: After such a debate, in the minds of millions, Gore and Bush would have both shrunk from this red-hot immersion in the crucible of political reality.
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:38 am

PART 1 OF 2

Thirteen: With Cold Feet and Big Hearts

On October 17, the third and final debate was over without disturbing the drowsy equilibrium between Bush and Gore. Three weeks to November 7, and all that was accelerating was the number of takeoffs and landings of their private jets, as they dashed from one state to another repeating their mantras: "I'm for the people, they're for the powerful," "I trust the people, not the government," "I'll fight for you," and "I'll restore honor and dignity to the White House."

Back in our campaign office, staff members were working around the clock, coordinating with our field staff on getting out the vote in areas where we had Green representatives. Jake Lewis, Laura Jones, Stacy Malkan, and Tom Adkins in our press office were booking me for events around the country and preparing for three days in Washington, D.C., of continuous interviews with the national press, television, and radio. The versatile Theresa Amato, with her associates, the unflappable "no problem" Monica Wilson and a cool Jeanna Penn, kept the whirlwind schedule from dissolving into chaos. Jonathan Dushoff was burning the midnight oil managing our steady stream of position papers.

The morning after the St. Louis debates we flew to Texas, where in two days we visited Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. The largest assembly was the rally in Austin at the Tony Berger Center, which we filled with five thousand people. This was, we were told, one of the largest political rallies Austin had seen in many years. And it sure was a memorable one. It opened at 6:15 P.M. with Bill Oliver and His Band, followed by Bill Passalacqua singing "Election Blues." Other musicians sang songs by Dylan and Guthrie. Then came civic action leaders Charlotte Flynn of the Gray Panthers, Clint Smith, followed by Gary Dugger, son of the populist writer-activist Ronnie Dugger, who along with his ally, Charlie Mauch, was running for the powerful job of Texas railroad commissioner. Doug Sandage spoke on behalf of his Green candidacy for the U.S. Senate. Jim Hightower introduced me, and, as always, he had the ralliers jazzed up. After I spoke, the Jimmy LaFave Band dosed with everyone singing "This Land Is Our Land."

California was next, and did we ever cover that sprawling state again! In four days we campaigned through fourteen towns and cities from Southern California all the way to Chico State, where we met the California Nurses Association for a news conference and spoke to a full house at the El Rey Theatre. Other highlights included a super-rally with seventy-five hundred people in Oakland, and boisterous assemblies at UC Davis and Stanford. When you travel in California to places like Riverside, Santa Monica, Bakersfield, and Fresno, there is not likely to be any television coverage. Fortunately, Bill Rosendahl had a regular cable program throughout the state that was devoted to red-hot political discussion. Bill had me on his program several times in 2000.

The paucity of California television coverage -- sound bite or segment -- made reaching people very difficult. When Democrats and Republicans run for the Senate in California these days, they spend almost all their time raising money for television ads that make TV stations richer while using the public's airwaves for free. No matter that we spent more time in California, which from the get-go was going for Gore, not Bush, than all the swing states put together. That, in retrospect, was a mistake. No matter how large the audiences and how many interviews we gave, reaching more than a small fraction of thirty-five million people was a herculean task beyond our resources. Most Californians did not even know we were running. The vote total on November 7 showed we received only 418,707 votes, or 4 percent of the total turnout. Because Gore was so far ahead of Bush, we had expected twice that number, and some early polls indicated that sum was possible. As a volunteer in Los Angeles told us: "You would have gotten more television coverage if you led the LAPD with one hot pursuit at high noon down the Santa Monica Freeway."

On October 22, our campaign staff got a sense of what it means to be overwhelmed. The New York Daily News reported that the Republican National Committee (RNC) was set to spend, in just the two weeks leading up to the election, $40 million to $50 million on phoning, leaflets, and door-to-door canvassing, while the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was planning to payout $10 million to $15 million on similar activities. The DNC's ally, the AFL-CIO, pledged $30 million to $40 million on GOTV (get out the vote) efforts for union workers and their families. Al Gore spent more than $120 million on his campaign efforts and George Bush spent $186 million. We spent about $8 million. The soft-money expenditures by the Democrats and Republicans for the 1999-2000 election cycle are even more staggering. The Democratic Party spent $244 million in soft money and the Republican Party spent $252 million. This up-against-the-big-boys challenge did not discourage our campaign staff but rather served to motivate them even further. Full public financing of public elections was our platform -- and someday I hope all campaigns will have the chance to run on their merits rather than on their money.

That the Democrats and Gore possessed very large advantages over us in almost every quantitative category was not enough. Having never faced a challenge for the presidential votes of progressive Americans since the Henry Wallace campaign of 1948, the Democrats had developed a deep sense of entitlement. (See Appendix H.) Those were their votes every four years because where else could they go -- not to the dreaded Republicans. The "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" drumbeat started. Such a strategy was to be expected from the Democrats, but their obvious smugness did not advance their cause. Indeed, through the spring and summer of 2000, the party's line was that it was not losing any sleep over the Green Party candidacy. Ho-hum, wake us when it's over. Inside, though, the party needed to establish a persuasive tactic toward the progressive wing and press its loyal proxies into action. Early on, Toby Moffett, former Nader Raider, former four-term congressman from Connecticut, and former Monsanto lobbyist, counseled the Democrats against direct confrontation. Work both publicly and behind the scenes, he said, to convince voters that Nader will undermine Gore, who, regardless, shares many of the same positions.

Someday I hope someone will conduct a postmortem on the Gore campaign and how it got so many closely affiliated political and citizen leaders all singing on cue -- "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush." The Democratic Party was not saying vote for Gore because we are throwing off our corporate shackles and embracing Green Party policies (most of which were old Democratic Party positions) such as universal health insurance, a living wage as a minimum wage, selective military demobilization in a post-Soviet era, strong health and safety regulations, progressive taxation, consumer protection, or expanding workers' rights to form unions. Instead, the Democratic Party sent out its scary message about how bad the Republicans would be, which is another way of saying that the Democrats are not as bad. Wouldn't it have been better to define the party by its best potential? However, to have gone the high road would have collapsed the similarities between the parties that overwhelmed the shrinking real differences.

The "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" bandwagon (one cartoonist pictured Bush looking at such signs and concluding that therefore he should vote for Nader) attracted a variety of adherents. Some were old friends and coworkers now working in government, business, or law firms. One of the more bizarre recruits was Gary Sellers, who worked with me more than thirty years ago to lobby through Congress the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA). He was a delight to work with, in part because he and our ally on the Hill, California Congressman Phil Burton, were very good at sizing up the assets, vulnerabilities, and vanities of various legislators. For more than twenty years, Sellers has operated cherry and apple orchards, volunteered for some bar groups, and generally stayed out of any sustained civic advocacy or political activity. From time to time, recognizing his personal difficulties, his friends, including me, would try to get him going on some project or another, but to little avail. Sellers came. to my announcement back in February at the Madison Hotel and in a later telephone conversation was laudatory. Then, at an August fundraiser at Nora Pouillon's famous organically certified restaurant in Washington, D.C., he stood up and said he was worried about the Greens undermining Gore. I told him we were running a fifty-state campaign to maximize our votes and were not going out of our way to target swing states.

A few weeks later, Sellers started showing up on television representing something oxymoronically called "Nader's Raiders for Gore." But Sellers was one of just a dozen former associates from twenty-plus years ago. Despite extensive calling by Moffett, Sellers, Gore adviser Katie McGinty (who spent a long time on the telephone trying to persuade Peter Gruenstein in Anchorage, Alaska), Harrison Wellford, and the rest of the dozen, well over one thousand former Nader's Raiders did not budge. In the last month or so, Sellers became a Gore servant possessed -- mischaracterizing what I had said at Nora's about Gore's record and my fifty-state campaign. He was having a ball, debating Phil Donahue on national television and getting on other media with the expert help of the Democrats. I was more amused than indignant, hoping that such exposure would help relieve the affluent Gary of his stresses and possibly return him later to working in the public interest.

The split between liberals of similar backgrounds and philosophies that occurred over my Green Party candidacy was very revealing for the future of progressive politics in America. The chasm that deepened in the last few weeks of the election to the point of bitterness was not so much over differing policy positions or the preferred direction of the country. What, then, were the differences?

First: expectation levels. Many voters see a very imperfect politics with a choice between a party they are dissatisfied with and another party they abhor. This perception is given further edge by a sharp campaign focus on one or two issues -- such as abortion or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- where there truly is a distinct difference between the two parties. Attachment to some genuinely progressive Democrats such as Representative Henry Waxman (California) and Senator Paul Wellstone (Minnesota) gives a voter the sense that a few are better than none. Finally, there are friendships and history between these people and elected Democrats that are forged over common issues, get-togethers, political conventions, fund-raisers, and constituent service.

The pro-Green candidacy Democrats are basically saying that the Democratic Party is sick, is decaying, and rejects its internal reformers. These people realize that the party has performed in ways that seriously contradict its progressive past and further entrench the power of corporations and concentrated wealth. Nobody has articulated this condition better than former Secretary of Labor under Clinton, Robert Reich, who was not pro-Green and remains a steadfast Democrat. He is a different kind of realist. As he wrote in the March 11, 2001, issue of the Washington Post:

I know a dead party when I see one, and I'm looking at a dead party right now. Just consider the past eight years: lost the presidency, both houses of Congress, almost all its majorities in state legislatures, most governorships. Will lose additional House seats in the next redistricting. Most of the current justices of the Supreme Court appointed by Republicans, also most current federal judges. And the interminable Bill Clinton scandals. The Democratic Party is stone dead. Dead as a doornail.

If the Democratic Party's alive, then why doesn't it insist that the budget surplus be spent on health care for the 44 million Americans without it? And child care for the millions who lack it? And good schools for all kids? Why doesn't the party say it's plain absurd to spend $300 billion on the military when the Cold War is over, and tens of billions more on a missile-defense shield that won't work? Why isn't it outraged that most of the benefits of President Bush's tax cut will go to people at the top? Why does it play dead on the environment? Because it's not playing dead. It is dead!


Reich, you will notice, kept emphasizing the party. He knows there are a few individual Democrats who have been fighting for all these objectives, but the party and its fat cat patrons determine the result at the end.

Second: the weighing of rhetoric versus record. Political speech can be mesmerizing, and Clinton-Gore were out front in their conscious ability to have the word confused with the deed. On October 5, President Clinton went to Princeton University and unabashedly proclaimed that he and Al Gore for eight years had been carrying on the progressive tradition of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. In those eight years, the very corporations that Roosevelt and Wilson repeatedly warned about greatly strengthened their grip on America in manifold ways with the encouragement and active support of Clinton- Gore. So, they both spoke for civil rights, the environment, the small farmer, consumer protection, fair trade. Yet their record belied their speech.

Third: American third-party history. Well-read Democrats would no doubt recognize the pivotal roles played by the little parties that fought early and hard for slavery's abolition, women's right to vote, labor justice, and the small farmers' survival in the nineteenth century. But many believe that today the Democrats can't risk a progressive small party upsetting their claim on the electoral college. It is possible that the Greens may press some better policies onto the Democrats who hold on to their votes and avoid losing more elections. There needs to be some progressive force pulling or jolting the Democrats to counteract to some degree, at least, the opposite pull by the corporations.

What political choice does for galvanizing the citizenry is an important difference as well. Clinton-Gore opened up large areas for drilling in the northern slope of Alaska and proposed six million acres for exploration off the coast of Florida to little vocal opposition from environmental groups. When Bush proposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and off Florida, there was persistent vociferous outrage from those same organizations, among others, and Bush pulled back and proposed offshore Florida exploration of "only" 1.5 million acres while environmental allies in Congress said they would block ANWR with a filibuster. That's one difference between a do-little anesthetist and a do-nothing provocateur in the White House. Citizen groups slumber with the former and awaken with the latter.

The Gore campaign enlisted as their proxies against the Nader-LaDuke people with a record of progressive commitments who are usually ignored by the Democratic Leadership Council, which spawned Clinton, Gore, and Lieberman. It must have been a delight for these proxies to be so wanted, so often called and beseeched -- for a few weeks at least. Off they went on their tours without ever receiving any commitments for their progressive agendas from the Gore people.

***

Before the October tours by Gore's anti-Nader brigade, columnists and editorial writers were laying the groundwork. Anthony Lewis weighed in on July 8 with an open letter to me in his New York Times column. I'll leave it to you to see his distortion of my words in one charming paragraph: "What is puzzling to some of your old admirers is what you stand for. You say the two major parties are practically Tweedledum and Tweedledee -- there are 'few major differences' between them. Sure, they are both awash in campaign money that keeps them close to business. But no major differences? Are you serious?"

From "few major differences" to "no major differences" became the spin. Not only is this an inaccurate transposition, but it takes the public's attention away from the shocking similarities between the two parties. Lewis then went on to draw a legitimate difference between recent and prospective Supreme Court nominees of Democratic and Republican presidents (once again, earlier nominees by Republican presidents were Warren, Brennan, Blackmun, Stevens, and Souter -- largely admired by Lewis) but failed to note that the Democrats could have stopped both Scalia and Thomas (confirmed 52-48 with eleven Democratic senators voting for him). Isn't there a similarity of result when one party sends up bad nominees and the other party declines to use its power to defeat them? Lewis then rightly cites the convergence between President Clinton and the Republican Congress on an "abysmal" civil liberties record. He wrongly chides me for paying "little or no attention" to this area. As I told him afterward, I have gone all over the country, making exactly this point dozens of times and specifically referring to his and Nat Hentoff's many articles on the subject. (Lewis printed a correction in a later column.) He included other misstatements, including an erroneous allegation from the New Republic, which became a puff sheet for AI Gore. Lewis could have avoided these quality-control problems simply by calling me before he wrote his column -- having known me since he was a journalism fellow at Harvard Law School in the mid-fifties.

On August 10 came a Times op-ed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who leaped into the fray with his "no difference" premise. He is a very forgiving person when it comes to Democrats. Anyone who has heard his earlier tough criticisms of Clinton-Gore on environmental matters has to believe that appraisal. But for his op-ed, Mr. Kennedy did not check his facts. He quoted an erroneous statement attributed to me that, if forced to choose, I would vote for Bush over Gore in order to cause a backlash in the environment's favor. Again, had he phoned (he called me a friend and mentor in his own column), he might have gotten the record straight. It is always easier to rely on clips.

The anonymous editorial writers of the the New York Times resumed their attack with three pieces dated August 20, October 26, and November 3, each escalating in a hysteria that would have been humorous were it not so embarrassing to that paper's history. In 1980, by sober comparison, the earlier editorial writers for the Times had a different, more democratic philosophy regarding Carter, Reagan, and Anderson. Here are their words:

The question is not whether debates are good for the country but how to make them better. There are at least two ways: Let qualified mavericks in. Get media middlemen out. The maverick point is, of course, the political debate question of the campaign. Even the Carter campaigners may not be sure which hurts more, letting John Anderson in or being blamed for keeping him out. But this is not only a political question of Anderson in, Anderson out. It is first a question of principle.

If the United States wants third parties and maverick candidates, and it should, they must have at least a theoretical chance of winning elections. The public will not take seriously Presidential candidates who do not appear in televised debates. To limit participation unreasonably to the two major parties is to eviscerate independents, mavericks and new parties.


All this high road came from a newspaper that favored Carter, believed Reagan to have reactionary views, and thought the election presented a crucial choice.

Now fast-forward twenty years. While conceding that "both parties" were "tranquilizing their activists," the year 2000 Times editorial writer asserted that the "biggest difference, perhaps the defining difference, lies in how the two men would distribute the lion's share of a projected budget surplus of $4.6 trillion over the next 10 years. Mr. Bush ... would use about $1.3 trillion to. cut taxes, mainly for affluent families. Al Gore would cut taxes by only $500 billion, mostly subsidies of one sort of another for middle-income families."

So what happens in June 2001, with the Democrats taking over the Senate? The Democrats call a $1.3 trillion Bush tax cut a victory for their side, as indeed numerous Democrats voted with the Republicans. This is just another example of how little skepticism the Times displayed, even after eight years of Clinton-Gore casuistry. The October 26 editorial titled "Mr. Nader's Electoral Mischief" hardened into name-calling. Unlike John Anderson, I was on "a self-indulgent crusade," I had "an ego run amok," and my "willful prankishness" would be "a disservice to the electorate no matter whose campaign [I] was hurting." Well, well, that flight into duopolyism comes very close to saying that the Greens had no right to keep the country from "a clear up-or-down vote between Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore." Whatever happened to "mavericks and third parties" in the New York Times of 1980? This turn-of-the-century Times has the air of inevitability about American politics: "The spectrum has shifted and Mr. Nader cannot jerk it back by demolishing Democratic chances." Then it adds an air of naivete unbecoming to such worldly editors when it admits that "certainly the candidates and their parties have parallel histories in regard to seeking corporate contributions," but "their approaches to systemic reform of the electoral system are very different." As -different as eight years of paying lip service while engulfing all the cash that corporations proferred the Clinton-Gore team for eight years? Take the dough, but say no, no, no -- sounds like a display of political prostitution.

The last Times diatribe against me came out four days before the election, urging "Mr. Gore to get tougher on. Mr. Nader." Setting the standard, the editorial writers got down and dirty. Accusing me of wanting to throw the election to Mr. Bush and damage the Democratic Party, the paper proceeded to charge me with insensitivity to the poor because of my net worth (which has been used to advance our various civic justice projects), to women because the Republicans would overturn Roe v. Wade, and, astonishingly, to the makeup of the Supreme Court. What the Times ignored was that the Democratic Party, even when it is in the Senate majority, no longer has the will to defeat nominees like Scalia and Thomas the way the Democrats had the mettle to block nominees Haynesworth, Carswell, and Bark years earlier. What troubled me was the scare tactics used by the Times on Roe v. Wade and other established policies in our Country that breed a clinging defensive attitude instead of a tough self-confidence intent on preserving past gains while going on the offensive toward new realms of well-being for the people.

I dwell on these Times editorials because they not only provided the polemical background for the Gore proxies as they spread throughout the country in October to counter not Bush but Green Party candidates. They also helped orient, as the Times often does, much of the other major media's, which followed in a similar groove. Whenever I recall the Times's stand, Phil Donahue's response to shock academic Alan Dershowitz's Orwellian comment calling our campaign "antidemocratic" comes to mind: "We've got the free speecher from Harvard, Alan Dershowitz, saying, 'Shut up, already, don't make trouble. This is undemocratic what we're doing.' So I guess that means we should put our hat in our hands, whimper a little bit and wait four years, and then go to these same people and say, 'Can we run this year? Is it okay if we run this year?'" The Times editorial opened by praising Marlo Thomas for, as the paper put it, reprimanding her husband, Phil Donahue, on national television and giving him "a civics lesson." It looked like it was Phil Donahue who was giving the Times a civics lesson.

Good people who settle for less and less get very upset when reminded of that trait. Unfortunately, it leads them to focus on fear of the Republicans instead of the derelict Democrats and their refusal to heed the pleas of their Own reformers. It was late in 1998 at a large, annual Irish-American dinner that Jesse Jackson turned to me and, unprovoked, said, "I'm gonna run. We can't leave the party in the hands of Gore and Gephardt." Jesse certainly has paid his dues. No one has brought out more African-American votes for Democratic candidates at all levels. No one has stimulated more voter registration drives. No one has done more to show that political parties need to go where the anguish and injustices reign. He has logged hundreds of thousands of miles of effort. However, his self- restraint toward the manipulative elements of his party is now so extensive that it is affecting him. While he quietly moderated a few of the Clinton administration's calculating moves against principle, his counseling on the Lewinsky affair to the contrary, he no longer sees himself as a singular public force to push the party toward progressive actions. His son, Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Illinois), already has assumed a more assertive role in this respect. Jesse Sr. now also sees himself as using entrenched corporate power to open doors to African-American businesses. But getting too close to Citigroup and CEO Sandy Weill has made him vulnerable to being used, as when he endorsed prematurely the Clinton-favored bank consolidation legislation in Congress that was very unfriendly to minorities and the poor.

Anyone who has spoken privately to Jackson, or read his writings, knows the difference between what he believes and what he has conceded to the party's rulers. Jackson was not mincing words when, a week after his National Rainbow Coalition meeting in Atlanta, he published an article in the June 4, 1995, edition of the Los Angeles Times titled "A Third Party May Be Needed for Progressives." Jackson was clearly very upset with the Democrats' loss of Congress to the Gingrich forces in the previous November elections. "It is not enough," he wrote, "to throw out the conservatives and re-elect traditional Democrats. We need a new direction." He announced that the Rainbow Coalition would explore independent ballot access to run candidates who would stand for a progressive agenda. Citing falling real wages, growing inequality, spreading poverty even for working families, Jackson laid it on the line:

Why talk about new political options now? Because it is clear that reelecting Democrats to Congress is not enough. We've done that. We registered people and helped bring out the vote. We delivered -- and too often we were then ignored.

We don't intend to be exploited anymore. The days of asking us to sow the seeds, cultivate the ground, pick the cotton and then turn it over to others to sell are over.


From his two presidential runs, Jackson knew better than anyone else what it felt like being wooed in the primaries and forgotten in the general election. But the crux of his article came with this unforgettable denunciation of the two-party convergence, which he described as a "bipartisan conservative majority in the Congress":

A bipartisan majority endorsed the supply-side, trickledown economics of the early 1980s. The rich got richer and working people got stuck with the bill for the massive deficits and S&L bailout. A bipartisan conservative majority blocked efforts to change priorities at the end of the Cold War. A bipartisan conservative majority enforced a trade policy that served Wall Street and multinationals, not Main Street and American workers.


Jackson was thinking like this before the shredding of the federal safety net for the poor, set for 2002, by the phony welfare reform legislation championed by Clinton and especially Gore in 1996. So shocked by the White House's callousness was Clinton's trusted adviser on this subject, Peter Edelman, a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services, that he resigned in protest. The year 1996 brought forth other enacted laws empowering corporations further at the expense of small farmers and telecommunications consumers. If anything, the second Clinton term was even more upsetting to Jackson since he, like many others who share his public philosophy, thought things would get better for a progressive agenda because Clinton would be free from running for reelection. Yet Jackson's support for Clinton-Gore rarely wavered.

So it was with all this background in mind that I accepted Jackson's invitation to appear on his CNN television show One on One in late August after the political conventions. Jackson was a very precise interviewer, asking question after question about which team -- Democrats or Republicans -- would do better on a variety of issues. He could have been Gore interviewing me, except that Jackson does it better. I responded as specifically as he questioned -- essentially making the point that one is bad, the other is worse, and the Democrats are much better with the rhetoric that leads to nowhere. Jackson kept saying that the votes we were getting would strengthen Bush. And I countered that supporting the least of the worst, without putting heat on the least of the worst, ends up worsening all every four years -- a slide both of us have felt when going up to Congress only to be told no, that we have nowhere to go.

It was to no avail. Jackson portrayed the issue as a choice between the "Gore-Lieberman- Daschle team," or the "Bush-Cheney-Trent Lott-Orrin Hatch team." After the last commercial break, I noted a skeptical twinkle in Jackson's eyes when he heard me say that the Democratic Party used to tell him the same things -- that he couldn't win and was only damaging the expected Democratic primary winners with his challenges. The party has even marginalized him, I added. I suggested that Gore was perfectly free to take away the Green Party issues and their voters if he wanted to win. Gore was not entitled to any votes any more than was Bush or 1. Jackson, having done his part for the Gore ticket, stressed the "need to democratize the process" and ended by urging everyone to vote, in an ironic twist, "your dreams and not your fears."

Our interview was not in the same room but was remote, with Jackson in Los Angeles and me in Washington, D.C. So I did not have a chance to chat after the program and remind him of the many leading intellectual liberals and politicians who counseled gradualism in the struggle for civil rights. People like Reinhold Niebuhr, William Faulkner, and Hannah Arendt. The great civil rights attorney and later Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall said that when these advisers said, "Go slow," they meant, "Don't go," and Martin Luther King Jr. repeated his belief that "now is the time" for justice. These were more than differences in tactics -- they were also a different reading of the public pulse and of their own expectation levels. So it was and so it will be for social justice movements everywhere. For our times, there is no justification for continuing to postpone changes that should have been accomplished in the 1940s and 1950s and were urged on our leaders at that time by leading public figures.

Besides Jackson, Al Gore enlisted the help of Gloria Steinem. Gore, who was part of an administration that sat for years on the FDA and RU-486, who never mentioned the Equal Rights Amendment in his campaign, who voted for Antonin Scalia, who never lifted a finger in the direction of ending scores of economic discriminations against women as consumers of goods and services, called on Steinem to travel from state to state on his behalf. This proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America signed on to coax progressive voters like herself to vote for the hero of corporate globalization and some of the sleaziest big capitalist lobbyists in the nation's capital. During her weeks on the trail for Gore, Steinem became a study in contradictions. Having done many national television talk shows on feminism, including a couple with me, she spent much of her time deprecating and, sad to say, distorting my record on women's rights.

I have known Gloria for many years, attended her fiftieth birthday party at the Waldorf- Astoria, crossed paths with her on subjects ranging from advertising and energy to GATT/WTO, and urged her in vain to have Ms. make a bigger deal of how women pay more in the marketplace to their economic and health detriment. At lectures, I must have defended her a hundred times from the mindless slurs of male and some female chauvinists. We were both on the cover of McCall's in 1972 -- she with her picture as Woman of the Year and me as author of an article on discrimination against women as consumers. In turn, she has made many generous public comments about my work. In a note to me five years ago, thanking me for sending her an article where I lauded her very courageous jettisoning of commercial advertising from Ms., she wrote "how grateful I am for your wisdom, clarity, and refusal ever to be still -- victory belongs to the long-distance runner." It was dismaying then to see Gloria, without her ever calling me beforehand to discuss what was on her mind, hit the road as a short-distance runner, pushing for Gore by undermining me.

People and reporters who attended her lectures and press conferences heard her say that I have little understanding of feminist issues and then give an example: "The only time that I ever heard from him on an issue concerning women was when he called me about platform shoes. Nader told me, 'They're dangerous; Corporations are selling platform shoes and women are buying them.' " This is a truly desperate distortion. I spoke to her about two books-the first in an important field -- called Women Take Charge (1983), by Nina Easton, and Women Pay More (1995), by Frances Cerra Whittelsey, which documented many ways women are ripped off, overcharged, and harmed in the marketplace because of their gender. From millions of unnecessary surgical operations and tranquilizer prescriptions, to discriminatory treatment by car dealers and home-repair firms and credit providers, women were fair game under an obtuse legal system. The tyrannies of fashion and hurtful beauty regimes and diet fads, together with social sanctions that flow from a male-dominated society and economy, were the subject of our articles, books, and national television shows, like Phil Donahue's show, over the years. Gloria was not the only full-time feminist who was not very interested, but she was one of the most prominent ones unresponsive .to my pleas to really take on this deep pattern of sexism. Our Health Research Group has published studies on harm to women from medical and prescription practices. A testing group we inspired documented the bias against female students taking standardized multiple-choice tests some years ago. Had she called me, I would have informed her of my attention to this array of issues as well as my attempts to persuade Democratic senators to vote against the Scalia and Thomas nominations.

Furthermore, had she desired more reassurance, I would have walked her through my efforts at law school, while writing for the law school newspaper in the fifties, to question the deans about their admissions policy, which admitted only about fifteen women in a class of 550 students. (One professor told me that women who take male seats will go on to give birth to babies, not briefs.) I wrote about other issues, including the outrageous laws in several states prohibiting women from serving on juries. In the early sixties I started collecting materials for a book on discrimination against women in the United States only to open the newspaper one day to see that Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique did it better than I ever could. All this was years before Gloria came upon her life's mission. In the early seventies I urged and initially funded a women's policy institute that is active to this day. So here is Gloria telling people in California, Oregon, and other Pacific Coast states about my belittling Roe v. Wade, which I see as so well established and so deeply supported (by polls, media, and a very well-connected feminist movement) and which she sees as hanging by one bad judicial nomination.

Well, the Supreme Court justices viewed as antiabortion had three chances to overturn Roe v. Wade and did not. Republican Party operatives tell people in Washington all the time that they are not about to destroy the Republican Party on this issue but have to promote the rhetoric to keep the support of the party's antiabortion wing. When Tim Russert on Meet the Press asked George W. Bush whether as president he would seek to overturn Roe, Bush, much like his father and like Ronald Reagan, said, "Not until lots of people in America change their minds."

One of Steinem's forensic forays centered on her "ten top reasons I'm not voting for Nader." It is too easy to take this list at face value and ridicule it. But, to give a flavor, the tenth reason was, "He's not running for president, he's running for federal matching funds for the Green Party." As if there is any conflict among running for president, building a third party and a progressive political movement, and receiving federal matching funds during the primary season-part of a policy for overall public funding of elections that the Greens and I advocate. She treated Winona LaDuke's agreeing to run for vice president as if she were a dupe, unaware of both parties' policies regarding the First Nations. Steinem's third reason was, "If I were to run for president in the same symbolic way, I would hope my friends and colleagues would have the sense to vote against me, too." Building a viable third party, in the American political tradition of major contributions by such parties, including early woman's suffrage, requires long-distance runners, not symbolic gestures, Gloria, through and beyond November 7. (For a detailed rebuttal by feminist Juliana Huegues of Steinem's Ten Reasons, see www.zmag.org/replysteinem.htm.)

My last communication with Gloria was in 1998, when I sent her a draft article for Ms. magazine on the agony young pregnant mothers in West Africa go through after they come down with malaria. She replied with sympathy, but the magazine was not receptive.

During special bus trips in numerous mostly Western and Midwestern states, Steinem made the ludicrous charge that our rallies were "disproportionately male." Another falsehood. Countering her friend, Susan Sarandon urged: "I would ask Gloria to go back to her roots in the sixties and remember how things work ... to stop being so frightened."
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:38 am

PART 2 OF 2

In the closing hours of the campaign, the Chicago Sun Times reported, Steinem "will be telephoning about 200,000 households with a tape-recorded message on Gore's behalf. Steinem deleted a line from her original script in which she said that she admired Nader but was voting Gore."

After such a confidence-stricken, mean, and mawkish campaign, against Nader-LaDuke and the Greens, she finally did me a favor.

***

It was at the completion of my four-day trip through California that I realized how extensive the Gore smear campaign had become. I picked up the October 24 edition of the New York Times and read a front-page article by James Dao headlined "Democrats Hear Thunder on Left, and Try to Steal Some of Nader's." The Times described a party dispatching its "allies in labor, environmental and women's movements" to the swing states. The roll call for Gore's anti-Nader campaign was quite impressive and included Senator Paul Wellstone (who assured me that while dutifully praising Gore, he never bad-mouthed us); Robert Redford; Elizabeth Birch, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, who overlooked Gore's anemic stance on gay and lesbian rights; Robert Cox, president of the Sierra Club, who ignored the biting Dorsey memorandum taking Gore apart on fourteen categories of anti-environmental positions or inactions, written by a member of the club's board; Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth, who was second to none in denouncing Clinton-Gore during their eight years of abdication or rejection of environmental causes; and former Senator Bill Bradley, whose private contempt for Gore's dirty campaigning was submerged by his party fealty. So terrified were they of the Republican hordes that they did not negotiate any solemn commitments from Gore for their own chosen causes.

Our astute adviser, Steve Cobble, a veteran of many progressive election campaigns, sent a memo titled "'Pragmatic' Politics" (see Appendix I) to the Sierra Club's Board of Directors just before its meeting to decide on their presidential endorsement in July 2000. He predicted the following Sunday's headline, "As Expected, Sierra Club Endorses Gore," and argued as follows:

The political result: the Sierra Club will be ignored the rest of the campaign; key environmental issues will be left off the agenda and out of the presidential debates, as Vice President Gore seeks to mollify and attract swing voters, while taking the "base" for granted....

This is not the way to play even the insider game on behalf of the environment, much less the long-term, mass movement to change the anti-environment- orporate-structure-game. After all, in American politics, it's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, not the go-along-to-get-along liberal interest group -- quiet politics only works for those with the big, big corporate money, behind closed doors.


Gore always viewed the Sierra Club endorsement as the most important for his environmental image. In 1996, he went so far as to place personal calls to members of the Sierra board. The club's leaders knew this and still didn't make themselves harder to get. Given the long list in Michael Dorsey's memorandum of Gore's bad moves and the outcry from its members upset with him regarding the Everglades/airport issue, the East Liverpool, Ohio, incinerator reversal (see Appendix K for the details), the salmon-saving dam-breaching indecision, and the coal barons blowing off mountaintops in the Appalachian coal fields -- to name a few dives he took -- there was ample reason to hold back. Cobble presented an analysis of when Clinton-Gore invoked the Antiquities Act of 1996 in regions where there are special Green Party goals that could swing the result in several western states. Remember also that Clinton was deeply worried about this prospect in conversations with Dick Morris. In June 2000, after polls showed we were running above expectations in the West, Cobble wrote:

The Clinton/Gore administration invoked the Antiquities Act once again for the Ironwood Forest in Arizona, Hanford Reach in Washington, the Canyons of the Ancients in Colorado, and the Cascade-Sisikyou in Oregon. Notice the pattern: environmental conservation in swing states.... Notice the other, more basic pattern: years in which Nader is running, millions of acres saved; years in which Nader is not running, zero acres are saved.


Driving his point home, Cobble summarized it this way: "This is not an accident. Presidential politics in America is not about being nice and polite ... it's about independent action, swing votes, and leverage. It's also about strength, not weakness."

He recommended several endorsement options -- endorsing Nader-LaDuke, or a dual endorsement by targeted state, or deferring an endorsement with a strong urging to have "Nader be included in the presidential debates so that key environmental issues such as the globalization of trade will be heard." Indeed, nothing prevents the Sierra Club from sponsoring its own pre-endorsement presidential debate, Cobble urged. Together with other leading environmental organizations, this could be more than a flight of fancy. As he concluded, "This option would show strength, and force the political system to deal with the environmental issues that the major party candidates would rather just talk about."

Regardless of this clear thinking, the Sierra Club met, endorsed Gore, made no demands, sharply denounced Bush's dismal record, with the help of a chastened Dorsey, and prepared for the thank you call from the vice president to his buddy, Carl Pope, the club's executive director.

Knowing that they have the enviros in their political pocket, Democrats can ignore them and provide the Wall Street Journal with material for an article titled "Democratic Leaders Turn Up as Unlikely Allies for Nuclear Power." The Journal, on July 27, 2001, listed Senator Jeff Bingaman, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, Senators Joe Lieberman and John Kerry, and former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who ignorantly called the case for expanding atomic power plants "absolutely rock solid." The article went on to say that "Al Gore's support for developing safer new reactors went largely unnoticed."

"I don't know what to make of Bruce Babbitt," lamented the Sierra Club's Debbie Bonger. The Greens do. It is not nuclear power versus fossil fuels. Babbitt and the senators failed to contrast nuclear power's liabilities and long-range costs against the truly massive potential of existing technologies and practices for energy efficiency. Every thousand megawatts you save is a thousand-megawatt nuclear power plant you can forgo or close down. But then the many years' work of Arthur Rosenfeld, Amory Lovins, and David Freeman regarding energy efficiencies and renewables does not have the weight with most Democrats that the omnipresent atomic power lobbyists and their campaign cash disbursers do.

But most regrettable for tens of millions of American workers that campaign fall were what the Times called "a list of heavyweight labor leaders" organized by the Democratic Party. These included John J. Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, and Andrew Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union. For labor, long bearing the brunt of the anti- Union Democratic Leadership Council, it was all about avoiding Bush rather than relishing Gore. Though crucial for Gore's chances of winning, the leaders of organized labor received no adequate protections for the working classes. For example, the minimum wage was more than two dollars lower in purchasing power than it was in 1968! This upset one former official in a large union so much that he exclaimed, "It's all about [labor leaders'] visits to the Rose Garden and trips on Air Force One." Would it were that simple. It is also about not having the verve to bargain hard for their workers. That is why the Democrats know that no matter how many GATTs, NAFTAs, empty OSHAs, and other betrayals, how many false promises and excuses they heap on these labor leaders, they can be had because, once again, the Republicans are deemed worse. There is no way out of that long tunnel except not to enter it, so that labor can be sought rather than dispatched by an uninspired campaign.

The slams grew stronger and more direct. The Times reported that "the Democratic Party has also been asking Gore supporters to flood the Nader campaign with e-mail messages urging him to drop out of the race." As for Gore himself, he was advised to stay aloof from these roadshows; instead, he invited people to look at his record. Bur he did provide a touch of vintage Gore-the-pendulum when he told KIRO-TV in Seattle, "I don't want to use the argument that a vote for him is a vote for Bush -- that may be true."

The most flailing performance was that of Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), who, like Gloria Steinem, questioned my stands on women's rights. Had she checked our Web site, she would have seen my adoption of the entire NOW program, backed by initiatives that started long before she entered this important field. And had she checked NOW's own files, she would have come across a highly publicized letter from her predecessor, Molly Yard, sent to advocates of women's rights, including me, in 1990, announcing an exploratory commission "to examine the failings of our political parties, as well as of our political leadership, and to consider the possibility of a new political party."

What the press did not report was that the Democrats were also making these drives against my candidacy in the states where they were comfortably ahead, such as New York, to drive the Green Party under 5 percent and preclude federal funds in the next election. One can only guess at the price the Democrats paid by diverting millions of dollars in advertisements, both directly and through their proxy organizations, like the League of Conservation Voters, NARAL, and Planned Parenthood, away from use against the Bush- Cheney corporate machine. Their view was that it was better to focus their resources on taking away votes from a small party of conscience than applying their efforts to depress the votes of a large party of contrivance.

There were a number of operational assumptions behind this strategy. One was that the great bulk of Green votes would otherwise be Gore votes. Not true. Exit polls by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg showed that 25 percent of our voters would have voted for Bush, 38 percent would have voted for Gore, and the rest would not have voted at all. Another was that the conniptions over the Green vote were not stimulating -- rather deterring -- the Democrats into getting out more of their own votes. This did not happen, as Senator Paul Wellstone concurred when he said that the Green Party was stimulating a greater GOTV by the Democrats. A further assumption -- this one correct -- was that Gore would not try to take away the Green issues more explicitly so as to deflate the latter's voter turnout. A fourth and final premise under their "sky is falling" alarms was that a Bush election would end "a woman's constitutional right to choose," as Kate Michelman, president of NARAL, stated in its $500,000 ad buy in late October. (Footnote here: Confronted with this charge on ABC's This Week, I technically answered like a lawyer that the states would have the jurisdiction in the unlikely even that this occurred. Gore partisans desperately used this to charge that I was belittling Roe v. Wade.)

George Becker, president of the United Steel Workers of America, wrote me in October saying, "I can say with certainty that as President, George W. Bush would sacrifice the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and would sign legislation to bring back company unions through a Team Act and wipe out workers' rights to overtime pay through passage of a Comp Time bill -- not to mention championing National Right to Work, gutting OSHA, and pushing for Paycheck Deception laws." Was there no confidence that the Democrats, even before they took control of the Senate (due in part to the Green Party spillover vote), could block all these proposals? I wonder whether Mr. Becker also thought that as an outspoken "free trader," President George W. Bush would never impose antidumping tariffs on foreign steel imports? But in June 2001, he did. Bush and his fellow Republicans will always place the party's survival ahead of any embedded ideology.

The point is this: It is incumbent on all these liberal groups to stop their "all will be lost" mentality if they are ever to go on the offensive and strengthen their political muscles among an aroused citizenry. Instead, the underlying unspoken premise of their assertions is: Don't you run at all, progressive third parties. We Democrats are entitled to all such votes.

The last to join the "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" caboose were the prime vested interests against corporate violence and fraud -- the trial lawyers. On October 27, 2000, Fred Baron, a friend for thirty years and president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA), sent an e-mail to their tens of thousands of members urging them and their family, friends, and clients not to vote for me. Baron, who credits an address by me at his law school in Austin, Texas, for changing his mind as a student from becoming a tax attorney to becoming a pioneering trial lawyer of today, now fabulously wealthy, warned his membership that voting for me would help enact Bush's "draconian programs of federal tort 'reforms' that will severely limit every American's legal rights and the authority of citizen juries."

Baron was right on one point -- Bush is a mindless pusher for laws that shield corporations from being held accountable. I call this position "tort deform," and for at least fifteen years the trial lawyers and my consumer allies have been fighting a defensive battle with the corporate "tortfeasors" lobby in all fifty states. Not just Republican but often Democratic state legislators and governors have sided with the corporations and insurance industry to slice away again and again portions of this civil justice protective and deterrent system. Their lurid propaganda about out-of-control verdicts contradicts the facts. Civil lawsuits for harm from product defects and medical malpractice have been level or declining in the past decade, and total upheld verdicts and settlements are less than what we as a country spend on feeding and caring for dogs and cats. According to the RAND Institute for Civil Justice, 90 percent of people injured don't even file a claim for compensation. Moreover, 98 percent don't file a lawsuit. And according to the Ernst and Young accounting giant, total liability costs for all businesses are less than $5.20 for every $1,000 in sales and have been declining yearly. Nonetheless, companies are relentlessly pressing to avoid what Bush wants for individuals -- "consequences" and "responsibility.

It is, of course, natural for these incorporated giants to make sure they are free to litigate to the skies and, indeed, corporations suing corporations is the fastest-growing form of civil litigation. There have been many defeats and few victories in both state legislatures and Congress for defenders of the civil justice rights of the American people.

For a Democrat to stand on the floor of any legislature, including Congress, and extol the best tort law system (despite its flaws) in the world, honed by thousands of court decisions over a century, is as rare as a sighting of the Australian dodo. Although trial lawyers are their most clinging loyalists, most Democratic politicians think too visible an association with their cause leads to a taint in the minds of business contributors and power players. But having nowhere to go, the trial lawyers have become very forgiving of their national Democrats, while continuing to pour money into their coffers. Eleven times, Bill Clinton signed mini-tort deform bills (e.g., on biomaterials immunity and general aviation planes) into law. In 1998 he was openly prepared to sign the first across-the-board federal preemption of state tort law in several areas, but a fortuitous sharp dispute between two industrial lobbies stalled the bill in the Senate.

In 2000, ATLA received more bad news. AI Gore chose their nemesis, Senator Joseph Lieberman, as his vice presidential running mate over Senator John Edwards, who was a successful trial lawyer from North Carolina. In addition, Gore surrounded himself with an inner circle of longtime advisers and speechwriters right out of a tort deform nightmare. There was Carter Eskew, a lobbyist for tobacco and drug companies, Peter Knight, a lobbyist for the drug industry, Jack Quinn, who after leaving Clinton's White House became a lobbyist for the corporate tortfeasors, and Gore's brother-in-law, Frank Hunger, who had given trial lawyers and consumer advocates fits when as a high official at the Justice Department he helped to preside over the weakening of tort law. There were no environmental or consumer advocates anywhere near Gore's inner circle. And it was significant that Gore insisted that Lieberman change his tune on school vouchers and other neoliberal detours, with one exception. Lieberman was allowed to remain defiant in his view that tort law was a "lottery" and out of control. In public statements and letters, I tried hard to get Gore and Lieberman to go after Bush for his mindless attacks on lawyers, judges, and juries, but to no avail.

Obviously, trial lawyers, when cornered, are a very compliant lot. The Democrats would only have had to remind them that they could be Bushwhacked if their support faltered. So it was natural for Baron and his colleagues to transfer this fear to the Green Party's voters. A few trial attorneys have become immensely wealthy in the past decade, owing to some creative breakthroughs against the asbestos, tobacco, prescription drug, automobile, and chemical industries. With the legislatures and executive branches (the regulatory agencies) pretty much inactive in that period on health and safety enforcement, the courts were the only outlet left for justice. Even with that door still open, it was no mean feat to persuade a mostly conservative judiciary at trial and appellate levels to recognize the ancient principle: For every wrongful injury there must be a remedy.

These lawyers are risk-takers. They invest a great deal of their money in these cases without a guarantee of any recompense, because their fee is contingent on securing compensation for their clients. Losing these cases brings the lawyers nothing. Indeed, it might even backfire. Over the history of American common law, attorneys have brought cases that on appeal produced a wholly unexpected decision that established a precedent damaging to the rights of the aggrieved across the board. Further, attorneys sometimes miscalculate, to the detriment of their clients, by urging rejection of a settlement offer and then losing everything in court. So it was surprising that these regular risk-takers with other people's legal fates, and that of the law generally, would not understand that a progressive political movement, at a time when their preferred candidate, Al Gore, was running against a bumbling governor from Texas with a horrible record and should have defeated him handily, was a sensible way to give the Democrats a wake-up call.

A political jolt was needed on behalf of millions of Americans who lose life, limb, or their health to reckless or worse misbehavior. Unfortunately, that was not the way many prominent trial lawyers saw the scene. Along with the rest of them, ATLA would not only settle for less from the Democrats as long as the Republicans were worse (with few exceptions), but had developed a bad habit over the years of almost never fighting back whenever they lost a legislative battle to recover their clients' rights. This signaled to the industry bosses that they did not have a second-strike capability. Instead, the ablest, most experienced attorneys were usually able to readjust their practices to new fields of litigation as they were driven away from previous areas of practice.

Letters from several other attorneys urged me to drop out before Election Day. Interestingly, none of them ever suggested that Gore-Lieberman be asked to stand strong against tort deform. Not that Gore-Lieberman would ever have made. such a commitment. Nor would I have believed them had they done so. But it did reflect just how depleted the bargaining power of the trial lawyers had become.

After the election, a number of trial lawyers decided to inflict collective punishment on several citizen action groups, which I founded but no longer ran, by ceasing their charitable contributions. It wasn't the amount that did damage -- their entire donations did hot reach much more than 1 percent of all these groups' budgets. It was the stupidity of rupturing their relationships with consumer groups that the arch tort-deform corporate attorney Victor Schwartz believed saved them from more than a few defeats. To a reporter for Legal Times, Schwartz figuratively rubbed his hands with glee and said he was looking forward to attacking "the turtle without its shell on it. That's Nader. They're abandoning a man who stood with them for thirty-two years through thick and thin."

I have yet to hear any of these indignant trial lawyers, who were so quick to blame us for Gore's defeat, credit us for making it possible for the Democrats to reach fifty-fifty with the Republicans, which set the stage for the Republican Senator Jim Jeffords's switch to Independent and the control of the Senate and its committees to the Democrats. They can now stop any Bush tort deform.

Finally, I would contend that for their issues, trial lawyers, as I write this, are better off with a Democratic Senate than with a wobbly Gore and a defiant Lieberman in the White House facing a Republican-dominated Congress. And as for judicial nominees, if Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, chooses to exert as much influence over Bush's proposed nominations as Senator Orrin Hatch, his predecessor, did over Clinton's, the results should not be anywhere near as troubling as some Democrats fear.

***

The fissure opened by this modest Green Party campaign proved to be a much deeper fault line between liberals who believed there were no alternatives and liberals who had endured enough of the commercialized politics of concessions and broken promises in election cycle after election cycle. There is little disagreement on major policy issues, only on different kinds of urgency and expectations for the country. This schism was illustrated by the different approaches of two businessmen and two distinct constituencies.

For years, Sol Price, the founder of Price Clubs, and Bernard Rapoport, founder of the American Income Life Insurance Company, have been supporters of our projects. They are both in their eighties, major donors to Democratic Party candidates, often critical of the Democratic leadership, very liberal, and active philanthropists. Mr. Price believes in a tax on wealth, including his own large fortune. Mr. Rapoport is a stickler on breaking up big business under our antitrust laws. They are humane people with a similar worldview of "liberty and justice for all." When it came to the Nader-LaDuke campaign, however, they had distinctly different opinions. Sol Price was so upset that he placed a quarter-page open letter to me in the Los Angeles Times listing about a dozen differences he saw between the Democratic and Republican parties. After some words of praise for my past work, he ended with the message, "A vote for you is a vote for the Republican position on these issues." Alone among all my friends who publicly took this position, he made a courtesy call telling me what he was about to do. I responded by pointing out major similarities and antidemocratic positions adopted by both parties. I noted that his list did not weigh the difference between rhetoric and action. He would hear none of it.

Mr. Rapoport, on the other hand, could not have been more pleased with our campaign. His explanation was simple. "My father," he related, "used to tell me that he voted for Norman Thomas for president every time because every vote for Thomas was a push for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats to be more progressive." By denying FDR his vote, he was sending his signal that the president must stand for the people's needs.

Then the ads against me .started to run. One was printed November 6, released to avoid rebuttal just one day before the election, by a self-described collection of thirty-four "concerned scholars, writers, artists, and activists 2000." This ad won the prize for 100 percent false or wildly distorted charges. It erroneously accused me, among other examples, of saying, "If given a choice between Bush and Gore, I would vote for Bush," that "the repeal of Roe v. Wade would be of little consequence," that I was "never a champion of women's rights," and on and on. It is one thing for the signers themselves to make the charges. It is more disreputable for these professors and writers to attribute to me these false statements. I pity their students and TAs.

Among the signers were Professor Benjamin Barber (Rutgers University), John B. Judis (The New Republic), Harold Meyerson (Los Angeles Weekly), Sean Wilentz (Princeton University), and, of course, Gloria Steinem. These and other signers must have treated this advertisement as a standard form contract -- don't even check the large print, just sign on the dotted line. Intellectuals becoming lemmings for a day. Possibly the most surprising name as Barber's, as he was known to be an independent thinker. Here is a man who, sitting next to me on a plane trip, made an incisive critique of the Clinton-Gore administration. Mentioning that he was a friend and sometime adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barber was slated to be appointed director of the National Endowment for the Humanities shortly after the 1996 election. At least he thought so. But the man who cut and ran from his nominees Lani Guinier (Justice Department Civil Rights Division) and Peter Edelman (for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals) the moment Senator Orrin Hatch and some right-wing "think tanks" bellowed decided to buckle to political pressure and nominate someone else to that post.

Compare this fallacious eleventh-hour tirade to a political statement released on October 25, 2000, titled "Labor for Nader," endorsed by some 250 union activists and leaders. Our candidacy, it stated, would "present voters with clear policy alternatives and would offer the possibility for working people to register their disgust with the way in which money determines the choice of candidates." The Green ticket, the unionists wrote, presented "the most comprehensive and reasoned critique of the continuing inequities in our society and offered a humane alternative direction for our country." Moreover, they viewed our candidacy as the only one that was "talking about how unrestrained corporate power affects our political institutions, economy, media, culture and democracy." They followed these general observations with a lengthy list of our positions that were "of critical importance to working people and for the quality of life for all of our people." The final words address the "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" argument: "A strong showing by Ralph Nader will have a positive effect long past November. We have a chance to break with the past and raise the standard of political debate and decision-making in our country. A vote for Ralph Nader is not a vote for anyone else. It's a vote for the best candidate in the race. It's a vote against big-money politics as usual. It's a vote for our future." The political statement was paid for by the California Nurses Association, which had earlier endorsed our candidacy, and was signed by members of about twenty-four unions. Most of their union leaders already had endorsed the Gore-Lieberman ticket.

There you have it: good people on both sides, coming from different backgrounds and incomes, to be sure, and seeing the politics of their country from different perspectives. One is a politics of fear, the other is a politics of hope and democratic renewal. There is another difference in consequence. The liberal reverters or apologists for Gore were regaled and praised by the party establishment. The progressives who supported our ticket had much more to lose -- risking ostracism, isolation, friendships cut off, loss of opportunities, cessation of grants or contracts, and a general closing of doors. Sometimes these rejections materialized, sometimes they did not. Who were some of these people?

I thought of the courageous Ralf Hotchkiss, a paraplegic from a motorcycle accident as a teenager and now, in his fifties, a leader in teaching Third World peoples how to build flexible, durable wheelchairs with local resources. He was with us at the Oakland rally, knowing that some grantors to his center at the University of San Francisco might look askance.

I thought of Nicholas Johnson, the former very young chief of the National Maritime Administration and a federal communications commissioner under Lyndon Johnson, who introduced me to fifteen hundred people at the University of Iowa with a short history of progressive politics and his own personal rationale:

I have worked for the election of Democratic presidents since Harry Truman in 1948. I have received three presidential appointments from two Democratic presidents. I have run for Congress from Iowa as a Democrat. I have served the Democratic Party at every level, from local precinct chair to a emocratic National Committee task force. So it's not easy for me, this endorsement of a Green Party candidate. But the corporate corruption that engulfs both major parties has now reached the stage when we cannot afford to wait any longer.


You don't think he took brickbats after that declaration?

Or I thought of author Jeff Gates, a former staff director for Democratic Senator Russell Long, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, who ran on the Green Party ticket for the Senate from Georgia. He not only burned his political bridges but also had to endure being physically thrown out by a TV station manager from a debate between Zell Miller and Mack Mattingly for standing up in the audience and politely asking why he had been excluded.

The uncensorable Jim Hightower found his small progressive media operation, which relentlessly and colorfully spoke for America's working families ("Dave Jones instead of Dow Jones"), cut off from funding by Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Questioned about this at a public session after the election, Stern murmured, "Hightower is my friend. We'll be talking soon." Even Tony Mazzochi, founder of the Labor Party, who stayed neutral, soon saw his group's funding cut by the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Engineering Workers (PACE). Why? Because in his newsletter to blue-collar workers he displayed the precise positions on health care of Bush, Gore, and Nader. PACE's leaders were upset because on the comparisons Gore did not come out very well.

Life is full of the least worst choices or options. But politically there is no discernable end to that logic -- it just goes on and on for one election cycle after another, as automatic fealty induces endemic manipulation. For Nick Johnson, the United Electrical Workers, and others who drew a line, there is a depth to the party's sinkhole that will no longer be tolerated. There comes a tipping point at which the probability of past established gains being weakened or rolled back by Republicans is far less likely than the probability of the Democrats continuing to adhere to policies and alliances that ignore or worsen mounting injustices and devastations, here and around the world. Most Democratic and independent critics of the party have displayed for many years extraordinary patience, but in 2000 some could no longer abide being taken for yet another cycle made by a party that shows no remorse for its decay and no promise for its resurrection.

There will be more citizens coming to this tipping point in future elections, if the Democrats don't wake up. The widespread feeling among younger Americans that politics is irrelevant to them cannot always be assumed to be immutable. It could transform itself into a political mobilization that leaves the Democrats behind, as the apathy of the 1950s turned into the activism of the 1960s. Seattle and its successors portend a challenge to the politics of corporatism, oligarchy, and exclusion that will not be content to remain on the streets protesting. The tired whine of "But the Republicans are worse" will fall flat as more young Americans take charge of their future and move, with their reenergized elders, toward the Green Party and parallel civic and political movements.

Back at our campaign headquarters, these contrasts between the proxies and the protesters were being mirrored in letters, calls, and e-mails that were streaming in. There was little time to handle this influx, so much was there to do in the closing days of the campaign. What our campaigners enjoyed were stories from around the countryside, and none more than schoolchildren persuading their churns about the Greens through debates and mock elections. We learned of a grizzled World War II veteran in New Jersey telling his neighbor half jokingly that he wouldn't fix the latter's leaking roof unless he voted for Nader-LaDuke. Youngsters and adults created poems and songs and designed clever buttons and postcards. Artists fashioned posters and colorful T-shirts ("Don't waste your vote on the wasters") with pithy exhortations about voting one's conscience.

And what further galvanized our campaign workers were the spontaneous initiatives of support from hometown USA. John Nichols, a writer for the Madison Capital Times and The Nation, told his readers about one event that warmed our hearts:

In the crucial swing state of Wisconsin, the village of Belleville took a pre-election break for its UFO parade, an annual commemoration of a supposed Halloween visit by aliens some years back. Bush and Gore backers were no-shows. But there, between the Brownies and the Belleville Dairy Queen, were forty Nader supporters, almost all of them from nearby farm towns. They carried a banner reading RALPH NADER IS OUT OF THIS WORLD and handed out packets of seeds with a reminder to "plant a seed for democracy on November 7."


Better than all the pithy phrases of our cooperative minds in Washington, from rural Wisconsin carne the quintessential point of the Nader-LaDuke campaign: "Plant a seed for democracy."
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Re: Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader

Postby admin » Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:40 am

Fourteen: The Election Stretch Drive

For all the experience that the Republicans and Democrats had in previous campaigns, the last four weeks before Election Day were dull boilerplate. With the polls as their dim searchlight, the standard operating procedure was to increase the number of stops per day, repeat the few sentences that your consultants say are hitting the bells, also don't try anything new or impromptu that may result in gaffes, be alert to any surprises or dirty tricks from the other side, and as the days become fewer, step up the pace to somewhere between frantic and frenzied. The final days are a whirligig heading for the final thirty-six- hour roller coaster. To the millions of people casually watching these rapid peregrinations and the thousands who showed up at airports or city squares to see the candidates, it must have had all the political substance of a beauty pageant. After all, didn't Gore appear on Oprah and discuss the "big kiss" between him and Tipper at the Democratic National Convention? Gore did try to speak about health care and education, but Oprah cut him off. This had to be up close and personal.

Eight days later, an anticipating Bush meshed with Oprah's motif and embraced her with a kiss. Observers thought Bush scored points over Gore's visit, because he discussed giving up alcohol at age forty, told viewers that he wasn't running on his father's name, and brought tears to his eyes when he remembered the birth of his twin daughters. Bush perfected this regular-guy image -- a fellow you'd like to have a beer with -- with his practiced statements that warded off potentially damaging criticisms. In answering charges of drunkenness and drug use, he would say, "When I was young and irresponsible" and "I made mistakes and I'm proud to say that I've learned from them." The latter response worked, even when on November 2, 2000, the story broke that he had been arrested in 1976 for driving under the influence of alcohol near his parents' house in Kennebunkport, Maine. It worked like a charm, even obscuring the more damaging point: that he kept it secret all these years and might not have answered any questions about any prior record accurately. The disclosure, thought at the outset to be a last-minute disaster, had no legs and petered out with a shrug of Bush's shoulders.

Appearing with Gore on Saturday Night Live on November 4, Bush made much fun of his verbal stumbles. He referred to himself as initially "ambilavent" when he was first invited on the show, since he considered some of its comedy "offensible." Sometime in the middle of the year 2000, George W. Bush had become Teflon-Reagan redux. Nothing that Gore hurled against him stuck, but the vice president used little of the devastating contents of Shrub, Molly Ivins's bestselling book on Bush's business and political deficiencies.

Gore did not make more of Bush's dismal record in Texas, so ably depicted in Ivins's report, because doing so would have required him to be specific, naming company names and offending his own contributors in the business community. It would have also exposed his own administration's lackluster performance, such as its weak antipollution enforcement and the toxic border mess in the state of Texas, among other jurisdictions. So Gore, ever the policy wonk, hewed to the arcane assault on Bush's proposals. The elder Bush succeeded in 1988 by taking apart, however distortedly, Michael Dukakis's boast of the "Massachusetts Miracle." People reme1nber Bush charging that Dukakis allowed the pollution of Boston Harbor. This is a memorable image that people can relate to in their own community. In contrast, watching Gore on television, in that flat voice; say that his plan on prescription drugs does this, but Bush's plan does not do that, simply does not connect well, given that Bush blurred the issue just by having any plan at all.

The nonpartisan Rand research group released a report on October 24, which declared that "student gains on standardized tests may overstate educational progress in Texas," adding that "the immense test-score gains by black and Latino students in Texas appear to be the result of intensive drilling (i.e., teaching to the test) in order to pass the tests" and that the "massive" number of Texas dropouts "misleadingly shrinks the test score gap." One might have expected this nationally publicized report to expose both the educational record of Bush's governorship and his plan to take this intensive testing to the rest of America. "Shrub" shrugged it off, saying the timing of the report was "suspect." Massive television advertising by the Gore campaign against Bush's positions on Social Security, his tax cut that will lead to deficits again and jeopardize Medicare, and his unreadiness to lead the country did not score with many undecided voters.

Bush, on the other hand, really got under Gore's skin with his "values" attack ads. Two new ads on television in twenty swing states said that Gore could not be trusted and reminded the voters of improprieties, sexual and fund-raising, of the Clinton-Gore regime. Bush also made much of Gore's frequent exaggerations. This message was coming from a man who admitted being a wastrel until the age of forty, who was renowned for fumbling the facts beyond "young and irresponsible," and who sold his entire primary campaign to corporate-interest contributors by rejecting federal matching funds.

In late October, Gore allowed Bush to put him on the defensive. Campaigning at a rally in Little Rock, Gore denied Bush's' accusation that he was a "big-spending, big-government candidate." Instead, Gore promised to "promote choice and change, while making government smaller and smarter than ever before." On the defense again. How much better it would have been to remind his audience of what the federal government had succeeded in doing for this country over the past century -- from public works in their communities to Medicare, from safer cars and drugs to lifesaving medical breakthroughs. The conservative Brookings Institution had recently released a report documenting fifty major contributions that have improved our country from the federal government in the twentieth century-in case Gore did not have the research.

On November 2, the Gore campaign bought television time for a spot that went after Bush's record in Texas in a general way (pollution, poverty, etc.) and ended with the line, "Is he ready to lead America?" I wonder which Gore adviser found historical precedent to persuade them that the "readiness" charge ever worked. George Will was overheard on Sunday in ABC's This Week Green Room saying, "Hell, I don't think he's [Bush] prepared, and I'm voting for him." On the same day, Clinton went on the Tom Joyner nationwide radio show and, in a comment that must have chilled the Gore crowd, said that by electing Gore, Americans "can get the next best thing" to a third Clinton term.

In late October, Pat Buchanan, on the Reform Party ticket, captured the conservative populist sentiment with a new ad titled "Auction." It showed George W. Bush and Al Gore being auctioned off to the wealthiest bidder, including a Buddhist monk, a Chinese general, a Hollywood couple, and a Texas oilman. Even Washington Post cartoonist Herblock couldn't resist conveying his sense of how unpersuasive Gore and Bush were. He drew two men, one with a "For Bush" button and one with a "For Gore" button, saying to each other, "I [the Bush button man] made my decision after listening to Gore" and "I [the Gore button man] made mine after listening to Bush."

Political advertisements on television have been studied by many academics and consultants for their effects. Books have also been written about "how political advertisements shrink and polarize the electorate" (the actual subtitle of the 1995 book Going Negative by Stephen Ansolabehere and Shinto Iyengar). In my opinion, these wall- to-wall television buys can lull the candidates away from the need to engage the citizenry so they can participate in elections instead of being spectators at the passive political parade.

On a trip to South Florida to support the many Floridians striving to preserve what was left of the great Everglades, I met many activists who had been begging Gore for months to come out against the real-estate interests bent on converting Homestead Air Force Base into a commercial airport. They had strong arguments. The proposed new airport would be located in an environmentally sensitive area, eight miles from the Everglades, two miles from Biscayne National Park, and ten miles from the Florida Marine Sanctuary. The airport would be expected to handle 230,000 flights per year and emit tons of air pollutants daily. In March 2000, the EPA announced that it had "serious environmental objections" to the airport. The Interior Department found that it "could have a series of negative consequences" on the fragile coral reefs and waterways of nearby parks. Even with his own administration's two pertinent agencies warning about this development, Gore repeatedly refused either to support or oppose the airport conversion, claiming that he was waiting for the Air Force's environmental study.

The Everglades were not remote from Gore's knowledge. He spoke often about the need to rehabilitate them with large infusions of federal money. In 1992, Gore wrote in his book Earth in the Balance that "the destruction of the Everglades is being actively subsidized by taxpayers and consumers through artificial price supports for sugarcane, a crop that otherwise would never be grown in that area." Nevertheless, when the chips were down, he typically threw indecision and procrastination at the large numbers of South Floridians who wanted more than a Green Party candidate to support their prudent conservation of the Everglades, a critical ecological oasis in the midst of gigantic sprawl. Gore could have drawn a bright line between him and Bush. This was another "what if" that might have brought Gore the state of Florida and the White House. And this is a rather small example of how people who wanted responses to their participation were ignored. This is the way campaigns often incite cynicism and turn off voters.

***

I had my own misgivings about buying television spots. First, we had so little money that whatever we could buy would reach only a fraction of the population. Bill Hillsman, who came up with the Priceless Truth ad, naturally differed. He believed if the ad was really fresh and compelling, the news media would pick it up as a news story and reach far more people than the original ad could. That was really the only rationale for trying to break through the blizzard of commercials by the major parties and their candidates, from the national to the local, that were flooding the airwaves. So the Hillsman team came up with a message portrayed by child actors who were paid union scale, with the permission of their parents.

At first I rejected the ad, clever as it was. It was October and I went down the list. Why couldn't we use the money instead for campaign vans visiting communities? Too late to find and train the people to staff them, and we have several on the road already, was the answer. Why can't we find a thousand people and pay them for a week to get out the vote in selected precincts? An enormous undertaking given the shortness of time and staff was the reply. So the children's ad played on television and radio in a few markets such as California and New York. It received some news coverage, but nothing like the MasterCard parody.

The Internet ushered in a vote-swapping network in October designed to encourage Gore voters in Gore landslide states such as New York to promise to vote for Nader if a Nader voter in a swing state such as Wisconsin would agree to vote for Gore. As one entry touting this idea said: "This is legal, and has the advantage of letting both candidates end up with the same totals.... It depends of course on personal honesty to be successful." In a few states it may not be technically legal, but who would know about any violations? Indeed, who would know whether this swapping occurred much at all? There is a secret ballot in the country. When asked about this suggestion, I described such exchanges as diverting people from voting for the person they believe in and urging others to do the same. The polls will prejudge outcomes; vote swapping shouldn't turn such predictions into practice. Nonetheless, there were well-intentioned people, like law professor Jamin Raskin, supporting vote swapping who wanted both Gore to win and Nader-LaDuke to receive as many votes as possible.

During the last ten days before November 7, I had to decide how to divide my time between field campaigning and mass media in Washington. Unlike Gore and Bush, who had private jets, I couldn't do fifteen cities in thirty hours. The experts told us that only 15 percent of those who voted would make up their minds in the last week. So it made sense to spend time in Washington, D.C., to appear on This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts, followed by a very well-attended news conference at the National Press Club on October 30 for the foreign media. Reporters from other lands where Americans work and vote absentee showed a keen interest in my campaign, in part because of growing and established Green Parties in their countries.

My opening remarks at the Press Club focused on the successful propaganda of U.S. multinationals peddling their ideology in Western Europe and elsewhere -- that the preconditions for the booming U.S. economy were deregulation, selling public assets to companies, less corporate taxes, and reducing public services. It was axiomatic then that these were also prerequisites for these countries, if they wished to be on the road to greater prosperity. I pointed out that this was a trap that should be uncovered and avoided.

That afternoon was spent on telephone conference calls with our field constituencies, covering culture and gender diversity, globalization, labor, environment, youth vote, agriculture, health care, senior citizens, and independent voters. That night I was picked up for an interview with Larry King. Larry King's media career is a textbook study of the differences between radio and television when it comes to discussions of issues and selections of guests. Larry had the largest late-night syndicated radio show in the country. They were feasts of vigorous dialogue and arguments between authors, politicians, civic leaders, actors, athletes, and other achievers with Larry's many callers. The sessions would go on for three hours. Then Larry switched to CNN television. Celebrities and the scandal of the week took over. If you were Hollywood, you were on. Flash, glitz, fluff, and personalities. I felt sorry for Larry, an old acquaintance, although he seemed to be having a great time and was making great money. However, apart from a few news coups, as with Ross Perot, he was not often astride the significant debates of our times, as he had been on radio. This evening, however, I was part of the pre-election cliffhanger.

Arriving at the studio, I met some of the other guests. Paul Begala was somber, saying only that if the Greens "get five percent, Gore loses." Senator John Kerry, who visited me right after he came back from Vietnam in the late sixties as an articulate protester against the war, mentioned the Supreme Court issue, and then explained the Scalia vote as senatorial deference to the president. And Larry's interview centered on how the Green Party candidacy would take votes away from Gore and help Bush. How did I feel about that possibility, should Bush become the next president?

As usual, I replied that we were building a long-term reform movement and that takes time. I noted briefly a number of our positions that neither Bush nor Gore would touch: renegotiating NAFTA and GAIT into pull-up, rather than pull-down, international trade agreements, repealing the antiworker Taft-Hartley law, and reducing the influence of the munitions companies that are shaping defense policies in a post-Cold War period. When asked the same question about our campaign run, Senator Kerry and Paul Begala said it was unfortunate because the differences between Gore and Bush on the environment, women's rights, civil rights, foreign policy, campaign finance reform, and the Supreme Court were clear. Of course, there was no time for any of us to discuss whether there were actually sufficient differences or too many similarities or to talk more about the Greens' differences from both parties. Welcome to television, where the sound bite dominates.

The next day, after events in Dearborn and Minneapolis, I taped Ted Koppel's Nightline in the Twin Cities with Jesse Ventura. Koppel started out auspiciously by asking, "How important can third-party candidates be, since they rarely ever seem to win any elections?" I said to myself, Great, this program will be about what subjects we are advancing. Koppel then answered his own question by continuing, "Well, let's take the issue of Social Security. You don't win the White House without supporting Social Security -- not these days, anyway. But when the issue first appeared as a major plan in the political platform of a presidential candidate, it was denounced as pure socialism, which was fair enough, since Norman Thomas was, after all, the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party. That was back in 1928. Thomas would run in every subsequent election through 1948. While he never came close to winning the presidency, he had an enormous impact on someone who did: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who later made the notion of Social Security his own. So, there's one third-party candidate who never won an election but who changed our political landscape forever."

By this time, I have to say I was smiling. Imagine, a national television audience and a readiness by the esteemed host to entertain "major planks" in our platform. The large audience at the University of Minnesota was visibly stirring -- no yawns. So then Koppel's first question was to Governor Ventura, and it was whether he thought I was going to cost Gore the ten electoral votes in Minnesota. Here we go again. Ventura astutely brought his answer back to how he came from nowhere to win the governorship in 1998. Turning to me, Koppel recited the polls on my candidacy and asked whether I thought they were accurate. We sparred a little, and before long it was time for questions from the audience A local high school teacher asked whether after "women are con fined to back-alley abortions, our tax money is diverted to parochial school vouchers, our Bill of Rights perhaps replaced by a police state-all because President George W. Bush has appointed a few more Clarence Thomases, a few more Scalias to the U.S. Supreme Court-would [I] look back with pride in what [I] have accomplished this election?"

After informing her about the Democrats letting Scalia and Thomas through the Senate -- nominations that I strenuously opposed at the time -- I cautioned against turning George W. Bush into a Genghis Khan and asked what good is Gore if he can't beat Bush's terrible record. I could have added, had there been time, that last I heard the Republican Party didn't want to commit political suicide. The teacher, whether she was a plant or a concerned citizen, showed just how successful the Democrats' scare tactics were.

Jesse Ventura was becoming upset with Koppel's questioning and he told the host so during the commercial break. Back on the air, sensing a little drama, Koppel asked him to repeat his complaint about how tough Koppel and other interviewers are on third-party candidates compared to their interviews with the major-party candidates. Koppel took amused exception in the exchange with Ventura, and then time ran out. So much for the promising Norman Thomas/Franklin Delano Roosevelt opening. The audience was left with Koppel emitting the words "often from the fringe ... but sometimes the spoilers" while the background pictures showed me and our supporters. How bizarre! Most of our stands and positions are supported by most Americans. Moreover, the majority in this country support having more than two political parties and for me to be part of the presidential debates. Some fringe, some spoiler. As one woman nonchalantly told me while we were boarding an airplane together, "You're trying to improve the country and they call you a spoiler." Clearly, political astigmatism sees things through different lenses.

We started November with a rousing gathering on the capital steps in Madison and a super- rally in Milwaukee. The Madison trip was memorable for being one of the two (the other at historic Cooper Union in New York City) most intense and exciting audiences -- mostly University of Wisconsin students attending an hour-long taping of Hardball by Chris Matthews. The pace of the repartee was supersonic and the sheer sound level of the students' reaction even stunned Matthews himself.

November 2 began at O'Hare and ended in Denver with a rally at the Paramount Theater. Phone interviews with local and distant talk radio were conducted all day long. The interviewers were going ballistic on Gore and the Green factor. The next day we flew to Los Angeles, where we were organizing the next-to-last super-rally, this one to be held at the Long Beach Arena. If you ask anyone who attended the Long Beach rally what they most remember from the event, it would probably be the stirring remarks of Ron Kovic, the Vietnam War veteran who returned home as a paraplegic and became a peace activist (remember the movie Born on the Fourth of July?).

To thunderous cheers, Ron Kovic drove his wheelchair to the microphone. "Thank you for coming to this historic gathering tonight," he started.

We are going to change America. Never doubt for a moment that you are part of an important turning point in the history of this country. Not only does your vote count in this election, but because you have decided to have the courage to step forward and to tell America what you really feel, you have begun the process like a gigantic wave that is going to sweep this country into an entirely new time and era.

Thirty-two years ago I was paralyzed in the Vietnam War. Millions were wounded and hurt on both sides, both American and Vietnamese. We learned about a policy that did not care about lives. We are gathered here tonight to say that we believe in the preciousness of life. We believe that this country can be more caring, more compassionate, more beautiful, more sensitive. We know ... I want to know someday that the sacrifice I made in Vietnam was not in vain.


Ron Kovic's words only begin to convey the intense passion and gravity of his presentation and what the thousands of people knew he had endured during and long after the Vietnam War -- the pain, the torment by others for crossing over to help lead the antiwar movement, the personal agony of his paraplegia, the immense inner drive to make his life one of meaning, inspiration, and a lasting focus on humanity, his capacity for love and caring. His introduction was both prologue and Promethean. He reflected those precious intangibles of character that float into the minds of those who listen to him.

Leaving California we were on our way to Florida -- our most neglected large state. We had spent only two and a half days there since February, and our supporters were not happy, especially in the Miami area where this would be our first visit.

We arrived around four P.M. and went quickly to a series of one-on-one interviews with newspaper and television reporters, including one by a ten- or eleven-year-old boy whose questions, predictably, were the most thoughtful of all. The rally afterward at the Radisson Center was for only one hour, but that was time enough to hear two additional issues on people's minds: the Homestead Air Force Base conversion and the compulsory uprooting of citrus trees due to a citrus canker. During this quick trip people kept asking us why Gore wouldn't take a stand on Homestead -- "he would receive so many more votes," one middle-aged woman kept repeating. Little did we know how razor-thin the result would be.

We landed back in Baltimore just after ten o'clock that night. The next day -- Sunday -- I appeared on Meet the Press with John McCain and Ross Perot. Perot took the occasion to repeat his very recent support of George W. Bush. We chatted briefly in the Green Room. When asked by Tim Russert about me, Perot said a kind word but declared, "This horse isn't in the race." McCain, fresh from his losing battle over the proposed criminal penalties amendment, in the aftermath of the many Ford Explorer/Firestone tire crash fatalities, said, with some revulsion, that the vote was made into a "litmus test" for members of Congress by the auto industry.

The event that evening was the last super-rally, at the cavernous and very expensive MCI Center. It was also a subject of controversy inside our campaign. The previous ten days devoted to planning and attracting people to this large gathering took away, in the minds of some staffers, from time and resources needed for getting out the vote nationwide. I favored the rally for two reasons. First, I was under the impression that the field representatives in the various states already had their roles defined and would not be affected other than possibly to have another national story to buttress their efforts. Second, I wanted to have the final super-rally in the most heavily African-American city in our country to publicize its disenfranchised status and miserable neglect before the large turnout of national and international media. As the only capital district of any democratic nation in the world to deprive its residents of voting representation, the District of Columbia bears the brunt of presidential campaigns. Washington, D.C., is treated as the whipping boy and pilloried as a nest of officious bureaucrats.

Congress essentially rules the District in spite of a locally elected government. Congress controls the purse strings, can and did replace the elected D.C. governmental authority with an appointed Financial Control Board, can overturn popular referenda, and is the ultimate veto on just about everything done by public authority there.

This was not an event that we expected would attract black voters to the Green ticket. From the beginning, I knew that the Democratic Party, having made its mark with civil rights advocacy in the sixties, had the allegiance of all but a few black voters. Still, from the beginning of our campaign, I made every effort to show how the Democratic Party should stop lunching off its past and get moving on subjects dear to the hearts and minds of African Americans and Hispanics nationwide. Because people in low-income areas vote Democratic, the Republican presidential candidates don't bother campaigning there, while the Democratic presidential hopefuls take them for granted. For years, the Democrats, led by Clinton, would refer repeatedly to helping "the middle class" as if the poor did not exist.

The point is that the goal of campaigning should be more than seeking votes. It is an opportunity to connect with people who have been ignored, who see in politics nothing for them, who are never asked for their insights and worries and aspirations. I did that all over the country, where presidential candidates are seldom seen or heard. I conversed on black talk radio -- local and syndicated -- and on the Monday before Election Day accepted the Reverend Al Sharpton's invitation, which he had extended to other presidential candidates, to meet with neighborhood people, local leaders, and media at the National Action Headquarters in Harlem. There, I urged the transition from chants of "We Shall Overcome" of the civil rights movement and "We Are Somebody" of the past twenty years to "We Want Power." Freedom is participation in power -- the necessary expansion of democracy to include the dispossessed and the voiceless. The devastation of community, I said, guarantees bad schools, unlawful police violence, the failed war on drugs, and a criminal injustice system with its sharply discriminatory prosecution. It also guarantees another kind of pervasive violence -- the silent cumulative type that comes from lead-based paint poisoning of little children by the tens of thousands yearly in rotting apartments, the pollution that feeds an epidemic of asthmatic illness, the contaminated food that distributors dump into ghettos, the obstacles that block access to equitable health care, the infant mortality, the inequities in the delivery of municipal services such as fire fighting, community policing, and law enforcement of building safety codes in low-income neighborhoods, and the environmental racism that exposes poor families to incinerators and other intensely polluting facilities and toxic dumps. The discrimination inherent in "breathing while black" deserves at least equal attention to "driving while black."

A meticulous understanding of rebuilding community has to be consciously revived or originated. The old saying "Without community there is crisis" is very apt. Community health clinics, food and other cooperatives, such as community development credit unions and repair shops, bind the neighborhood together. Ending redlining by banks and insurance companies breaks the vicious cycle of decay that undermines home ownership. That takes law enforcement. Community policing is a proven way to stabilize a fearful community, reduce the animosity toward the police, and diminish police brutality because the police live where they work. All this nourishes a climate for attracting private capital that doesn't have to be so heavily subsidized by the taxpayers because there are needs to be met for people who can afford to pay for them in a safe environment. All this comes together in a larger framework embracing a comprehensive effort to abolish poverty and destitution through community building and community self-reliance and self-sufficiency.

Instead of presenting this social symphony, many Democratic politicians who address the underclasses avoid facing these necessary prospects by playing up the fear of Republicans who, they say, would take away what little these people now possess. There are always enough grants, patronage, and get-out-the-vote money to secure the political loyalties of many local leaders. This pattern has been resisted by African Americans like Lawrence Hamm, who, since he was nineteen years old, with a stop at Princeton University's graduate school, has been organizing neighborhoods in Newark, New Jersey. There are hands-on leaders like Hamm in other cities, but there are far too few of them to turn the political dynamic away from sweet talk by the Democrats who have dominated the central cities for so many years, a few Republican mayors notwithstanding.

Too many black leaders are prone to this politics of fear. The summer annual convention of the NAACP in Baltimore invited Gore and Bush to address their members. I was not invited, despite the groundbreaking work we have accomplished in the areas of redlining, consumer fraud, environmental racism, health care discrimination, and biased educational standardized testing. Randall Robinson made calls on my behalf to his friends at the storied civil rights organization to have me make a presentation. When Bill Clinton had to ostpone his appearance for two days, Julian Bond and Kweisi Mfume gave that afternoon slot to me. Then, suddenly, Hillary Clinton's people called and asked if she could fly down from New York and speak. We met in the holding room. She was pleasant enough, exchanging a few words about her having been on a committee with my sister years ago and our common interest in reducing global infectious diseases. She spoke before me and went beyond her allotted time, thereby pushing me further away from any news coverage. Whatever the motivation behind Hillary Clinton's last-minute arrival, it worked for her party. The next day's newspapers featured her appearance and ignored my substantive speech. The NAACP leadership was polite and cordial but clearly they were not into anything other than to defeat Bush and elect Gore without demanding a comprehensive agenda from the vice president. The next day, Gore gave his evangelical speech and told them, "I'll fight for you."

At the same time, Congressman John Conyers was releasing a statement praising Gore beyond hyperbole and dismissing my efforts on "issues critical to progressives." An example: "While Nader was fighting for a safer bus," Conyers wrote, "Gore was fighting so that Rosa Parks could get a seat on the bus." There is a "Gore-like" calendar problem here. Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955. I was in law school then, where I wrote and spoke about civil rights violations. Al Gore was seven years old at the time. Twenty years later, well after the major civil rights laws were enacted, Gore was a twenty-seven-year-old newspaper reporter in Nashville.

All the same, thousands of people poured into the giant MCI Center that Sunday afternoon. Diverse bands were playing, and local speakers, including Jamin Raskin of American University Law School and the D.C. Greens, were making their views clear, as was Annie Goeke of the Association of State Green Parties. Tom Tomorrow, the nationally syndicated cartoonist, showed his political video and said a few words sharing his pictorial passion for justice through satire. There was a Chuck D video, and Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys spoke, while Phil Donahue assumed the master of ceremonies role.

It was one great speaker after another. The Reverend Graylan Hagler was such a community force in Boston that when he left to work in Washington, D.C., it was front- page news in the Boston Globe. He quickly established focus when he led others to picket the D.C. headquarters of Fannie Mae (one of the world's largest corporations at the asset level), which received tax exemption from D.C. taxes through congressional enactment. Fannie Mae has a good deal. It escapes roughly $300 million in annual D.C. taxes, and through its tax-exempt foundation grants a tenth of that sum back to District charities. Hagler rose to speak: "Everybody keeps coming to me and saying, 'What do you think of these elections?' And I have to respond, 'What election?' My issues are not being addressed. The issues of working people in America are not being discussed. Nobody is addressing the issues of where I live, where my community lives, except for Ralph Nader."

Danny Glover held the audience spellbound as he spoke of his own struggles before and after his years as a community organizer. He declared that a Green vote was one that "means our vision of the world we want to see matters, that we are prepared to be participants in our own rescue, participants, not onlookers." He proceeded to recite the beautiful, poignant Langston Hughes poem "Let America Be America Again."

Jim Hightower and Michael Moore -- our era's most evocative populist communicators -- brought tears of laughter. And 1980 independent presidential candidate John Anderson raised our sights once again. However, it was up to Randall Robinson and Cornel West to speak to the African-American community about why it was time to leave the Democrats. Drawing on history, law, and the precedent of reparations for other ethnic groups, Robinson recently authored the compelling case for restitution from those who profited from a long and massive unpaid labor of black slaves, including businesses like Aetna, and state treasuries and the U.S. government. These reparations would take the form of institutional payments for the alleviation of conditions flowing from the destructive legacy of slavery and its de facto aftermath. "This is not about cash to individuals," wrote Robinson. And before anyone reacts in knee-jerk fashion, they should read his incisive book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks.

But on that Sunday at the MCI Center, his impassioned, low-key words were intended to erase the myth of the day:

For the better part of the century, the Republican Party has been hostile to the fundamental interests of America's black community. Consistently, Democratic Parry candidates for the presidency have sought and received our support, only to turn their back to us upon assuming office. Nonetheless, for all my adult life, I voted for Democrats seeking the presidency. I cannot do that again.

This is the course to be taken by one hundred million Americans who, on Tuesday, will choose to not vote at all. Were Ralph Nader not running for the presidency, I would be, for the first time in my life, among their ranks. They are not homogenous, though largely young and poor. They proportionately include women and men, black and white, Asians and Hispanics. They have dropped out because they intuit that their vote means nothing, that deals have been cut, that public policy has been bought, that jobs have been peddled, that favors have been traded, that big money has made folly out of our democratic exercise, fools of our citizenry.


Robinson's words have a way of sinking into one's recollections long after you hear them. When Cornel West completed the event, he drove home his belief, which he has conveyed directly to many of his friends in and outside of Congress, of where the line must be drawn:

We will not be deterred by frightened liberals. We will not be deterred by short- sighted Republicans. We will not be deterred by mean-spirited neoliberals. We are on the move. Why? We are on the move precisely because we believe we are at an historic juncture. We are wrestling with a fundamental question: What are the conditions under which progressives will break from the two-party system?


Then it was my turn. The first twelve minutes of my address focused on the continuing denial to residents of the District of Columbia of rights held by all other Americans in the fifty states. Some in the audience later told me that it was a side issue that took away from the finale. However, I believed it was important to illuminate the colonial mentality of Congress, the affront to a largely African-American population that faithfully gives over 90 percent of its vote to the Democratic presidential candidates. I was also persuaded by the dedicated work of civic leaders Sam Smith, Ambrose Lane, Gail Dixon, Jennifer Ellingston, Scott McLarty, and many others who have fought so long for democracy in the District. How appropriate it was to conclude the event with all the speakers joining Patti Smith in singing with the audience "The People Have the Power."

The hallways outside the arena were filled with activists staffing tables that advanced D.C. statehood, living wage, health care, eliminating child poverty, an end to the death penalty, revoking the cruel life-destroying sanctions on innocent Iraqi people, protecting the global environment, free Tibet, and sustainable self-sufficient economies. The turnout, estimated at ten thousand by the New York Times, was gratifying. Amazingly, this rally was organized by our energetic campaign staff and volunteers in just a few days.

There was one major disappointment. Although our community volunteers distributed more than three thousand free tickets to black churches, union locals, and numerous neighborhood nonprofits only a few blocks away, there were not many African Americans in the audience. It will take much more effort by Green Party workers and supporters from black and Hispanic neighborhoods to encourage minorities to run for the many local, state, and national offices as Greens. For our efforts, we received 5 percent of the vote on November 7 in the District. Bush got 9 percent and Gore, without campaigning there, garnered 85 percent. Taken once again. No change foreseeable.

Here was my take on that day, as reprinted in the New York Times:

The Green Party recognizes that every major social-justice movement in our history was made possible by a shift of more power to the people, away from the power that the few control. And it's way past time for a shift of power today from big business to the people.

When slavery was abolished, shift of power from the plantations. Women's right to vote installed, that was a shift of power. Freedom to form trade unions by workers, shift of power from the industrialists to the workers. When the farmers started the progressive political movement, shift of power from the banks and the railroads to the farm areas and gave us political reforms for all Americans to enjoy to this day 100 years later. Power is the central contention of politics; that's what it's all about.

If we don't have a more equitable distribution of power, there is no equitable distribution of wealth or income. And people who work hard will not get their just rewards. And the main way to shift power, if you had to have one reform, it's public funding of public elections. Clean money, dean elections.

Clean money and clean elections to stop the nullification of your votes by special interest money. Just think about it: you go down to vote, you expect it to count, and the votes are cut off at the pass by fancy fund-raising dinners all over the country where fat cats payoff politicians for present and future favors and the politicians shake down the fat cats in a kind of combined symbiosis of legalized bribery and legalized extortion.


***

On Monday November 6, the ABC News/Washington Post poll, conducted between Friday and Sunday, showed voters supporting George W. Bush slightly more than Al Gore -- 48 percent to 45 percent, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percent. That morning I was back at the National Press Building taping short interviews with television stations in various cities through satellite hookups. There was no guarantee that these segments would actually be used on the noon or evening news, but we had to give it a try. Then it was off to New York and Harlem for a community meeting and a press conference.

Candidates and their associates are really on automatic in the last days of a campaign, trying simply to reach as many people as possible while the field representatives work to get out the vote. These reps from California to Massachusetts were telling us that the Gore forces were taking back the Gore voters who were thinking of voting for Nader-LaDuke but got cold feet when the race tightened. This was true even in the landslide states, whether for Gore or Bush. Voters, by and large, do not think about the electoral college; they vote as if the popular vote determines the outcome. Although we cautioned voters for months about this confusion -- we wanted to receive more votes from the nearly forty states in the landslide category -- it did not sink in for the most part. Carl Mayer tells the story that on Election Day in Princeton, New Jersey, he was passing out literature at a voting precinct. Along came a graduate student who chatted with Carl and heard his message that Gore had New Jersey locked up. The student nodded, said he was voting Green, and went inside and voted. Emerging from the building, the student met Carl again and said that although he voted for local and state Green candidates, he voted for Gore for president because the race with Bush was so close. Carl was left shaking his head in disbelief. Unfortunately, there were many people like that graduate student. This explains perhaps why polls conducted weeks after the election had 6 to 10 percent of the people saying they voted for us.

From New York City, it was up to Boston for an 8:30 P.M. overflowing rally at Boston University. My able and enthusiastic advance men, George Farah and Andy Goldman, were always one step ahead of us. We traveled to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for a 10:30 P.M. rally and finally ended this marathon in Portland for a midnight gathering of 250 cheering Mainers. There greeting me was the grand old man of the Green Party, retired professor John Rensenbrink. A hardy veteran of hundreds of Green Party meetings and conferences in the United States and Europe, he is a very committed proponent of Ten Key Green Values: grassroots democracy, ecological wisdom, social justice and equal opportunity, nonviolence, decentralization, community-based economics, feminism, respect for diversity, personal and global responsibility, and present and future focus for sustainability.

Wind-up political speeches are usually reduced to a series of one-liners. I compromised with my remarks, reducing the means and goals of our long-term reform movement to short paragraphs. These words were very well received and, I hope, remembered, for the gratifying road up the mountains of justice is long, and the trip is not for the weary but for the long-distance runners.

On Election Day I flew from Portland to Philadelphia. Theresa Amato thought it would be an appropriate symbol to end the campaign at eleven A.M. outside the Liberty Bell in front of Independence Hall. It was a terrific occasion for some serious words about the accomplishments of the campaign and the call for people to give us their votes if they believed in enhancing their common causes after the election. "The Green Party, coming in third, could be a watchdog party," I said, "holding the other major parties' feet to the fire, the more so, the more votes received. That is what your vote can mean with the votes of other Americans."

After a quick but delicious lunch at Judy Wick's White Dog Cafe, we took the train back to Washington and taught a couple of hours of rest in preparation for the Election Night celebration at the National Press Building's main ballroom.

Just before the start of the evening, I learned that America's most indefatigable environmentalist, naturalist, mountaineer, Bronze Star recipient in World War II, and institution builder, David Brower, age eighty-eight, had passed away. His family said that shortly before he died he sent in an absentee ballot for Nader-LaDuke. I had spoken with him last in mid-October when the environmental groups, some of which he founded (Friends of the Earth and the California League of Conservation Voters) or reinvigorated (Sierra Club), were pursuing their zero-sum pro-Gore, anti-Greens treks across the country. Brower had long experience with the tendency of leading environmental organizations to concede and recede before the forces of reaction. After building them, he had a parting of the ways and each time he reacted by starting a new group -- the last being the Earth Island Institute. Where there were rivers to be preserved, mountains and forests to be saved, parks to be created, air to be cleansed, and devastating technologies to be confronted, David Brower was there on site, networking, writing, and mobilizing. I remembered fondly how he would bring people together on Sundays for his famous strawberry waffle brunches at his Berkeley home. That is where I last saw him with Ross Mirkarimi, Danny Moses, Peter Camejo, and Tarek Milleron in June with his stalwart though ailing wife, Anne, and two of his four children. Brower mastered the facts, lifted the horizons for nurturing Planet Earth, and brought thousands into environmental action here and abroad. What was best about Brower was his extraordinary backbone and the enduring legacies of such stamina.

There were many people with backbone at the Press Club that Green Party evening. People who had lost friends, career opportunities, and business contacts. The prospect for such retaliation was high, all for daring to support a progressive third-party candidacy that challenged the dormant imperious Democrats and Republicans. They held firm.

(After the election, James Carville, the number-one apologist for Bill Clinton's frolics and detours, announced on television that he was going to "shun" me if I came into the same room where he was. "Shunned by Carville!" -- it sounds like the trade name for a cheap line of clothing! Only weeks after the election was decided by the Supreme Court, Carville and Paul Begala wrote an article chastising the Democratic Party and urging it to become more aggressive -- i.e., more progressive.)

With seven hundred people crowded into the ballroom chatting vivaciously and a variety of print and electronic media situated in the balcony trying to interview me and other key shapers of the campaign amid the din, the evening wore on without any confirmation of Gore or Bush winning, though there were many embarrassing projections by the networks. It was a very informal gathering. People were milling around, snacking, renewing old acquaintances and making new ones. I had a conversation with Greg MacArthur, who ran his own ads supporting our campaign, about strengthening the citizen movement. Lois Gibbs, the grand organizer of thousands of local groups against toxic environments, spoke, along with Todd Main and Theresa Amato. Winona LaDuke called in from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota and was greeted with enthusiastic applause. There were pictures of the campaign's high points, such as the 450 new Green Party locals, on the large projection screen and posters lined along the walls. From seven P.M. to two A.M. they stayed, and still no one knew who won several of the swing states, including Florida.

Leading Democrats, gathering for their late-night election parties, were nervous. As the returns were coming in from the close states, where Greens were seen as affecting the outcomes, Hillary Clinton in New York City and Michael Dukakis in Boston delivered crude and violent remarks that repelled some of their close supporters and friends.

During the hectic network television coverage of the election results, Mike Wallace of CBS was trying to elbow his way between the Gore-Bush Ping-Pong announcements and projections to render his opinion on our election run:

Well, Dan, as I was saying when Al Gore's victory in Florida interrupted us, I've not heard the name of Ralph Nader until just a couple of minutes ago when Ed Bradley and Bob Schieffer were talking about it. This despite the fact -- you know, they've spent up to one billion dollars, according to John McCain, during this campaign on television commercials, local and national. Well, despite all these commercials, that have assaulted and bored the dickens out of us the past few months, there were just two ads that caught my fancy. Take a look. [Footage shown of our two political messages done by the Hillsman firm.] They wouldn't let Ralph Nader into the debates. He charged ten dollars for a seat at his crowded rallies. He played it earnest and angry, mainly, in his speeches. And for millions of Americans, he managed to raise the questions and the doubts and to underline the disillusion that lots of us feel about how we wage our political campaigns.


Two days before the election, David Broder, dean of the Washington Post political reporters, gave his take on our election run. He wrote, "Who's put on the best campaign? Who's made the most of his available resources and opportunities?" He answered, "I think the answer has to be Ralph Nader."

Two days after the election, we had a farewell dinner with the campaign staff, about fifty of them. Many were leaving shortly to all points north, south, east, and west, so it was a sentimental parting between mostly young people who had become friends under the daily pressures of their tasks. I said a few words of gratitude and recognition at what they had accomplished and how enduring would be the memories as they looked back on campaign 2000 years hence. It was a lot of on-the-job training for many of them, even though they, like Stacy Malkan (journalism), Jonah Baker (computers), Megan Case (finance), and Darci Andresen (fundraising), brought relevant skills or transferable accomplishments to their responsibilities. I regretted not being able to spend more time with them at the campaign headquarters, but being on the road so much made my time back at the base one of rushing between responding to media and attending to pressing details with our manager, Theresa Amato. Throughout the dinner it was enjoyable chatting with each of them personally. I felt blessed by their idealism, enthusiasm, dedication, and self-reliance, but mostly buoyed by the thought that the coming decades would bring out their leadership qualities for the benefit of the society.

Our candidacy did not do as well as the polls indicated a week or two prior to Election Night. We expected that deflation because of the historic cold feet or "can't win" syndrome that afflicts most third parties especially given our exclusion from the debates. Those facts did not make it any easier to take. Nonetheless, in my remarks I summarized what we had achieved. The Greens now had the third-largest party in the county. We ran nearly three hundred local and state candidates and won nearly a third of them -- a pretty good percentage for a tiny young party. Five towns in California, led by Santa Monica, have Green mayors. Thousands of people, young and older, had come into the political arena, and millions of conversations were sparked about serious issues confronting our country and what can be done about them. We brought out more than one million nonvoters, according to the exit polls. The campuses came alive with a new post-election organization, Campus Greens, establishing hundreds of chapters at universities and colleges around the country. From this campaign involvement and this new post-campaign organization will come a new generation of leaders.

Idealism took a stand in 2000, facing squarely the least worst malady of two-parry politics. We got some progressive Democrats thinking out loud and more boldly to put their party on a reform track. We exposed the corporation known as the Commission on Presidential Debates as the rigged mechanism whereby the Republican and Democratic parties could exclude third-party candidates from reaching tens of millions of Americans on the same stage. This laid the groundwork for an entirely different, nonpartisan debate process in the future. We held the largest progressive political rallies in decades, bringing to the attention of many Americans what this campaign would mean for their daily lives and wellbeing. Finally, we gave heart to many committed Americans from a wide variety of backgrounds that there is a springtime parry ready for them to grow at the local, state, and national levels in future elections and ready soon to be a watchdog parry over the corporate uniparty. Then, of course, there are the intangibles of Americans, seeing the Green Party effort, deciding to engage their community in various ways. If the Greens keep expanding and stay closely aligned between elections with local and national community improvement or justice efforts, they will convey to an increasing number of Americans that new parties are important. They require the determination and patience of people over several election cycles.

Before calling it a day, I turned on the television at 3:30 A.M. to see Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson emphatically state that Bush had won Wisconsin and would be the next president of the United States. As it turned out, Bush lost Wisconsin by a few thousand votes and nobody knew who was going to be president until December 13, 2000, when Gore conceded and Bush declared victory.
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