Ralph Nader, Los Angeles 2000

The man accused of taking crucial votes away from Al Gore sees things another way: The Democrats should have taken ideas from his party.

By M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 21, 2008 at midnight

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Photo by Chris Schneider © The Rocky

2000 Green Party presidential nominee Ralph Nader.

Photo by J. Scott Applewhite © AP

Ralph Nader announces his run to be the Green Party’s presidential nominee at a Washington news conference on Feb. 21, 2000.

WASHINGTON — Pick your favorite term for the grumpy-faced man sitting at a desk in the back of a sparsely furnished office suite.

Populist or egotist. Crusader or pariah. Idealist or spoiler. Hero or has-been.

Ralph Nader prefers to consider himself as “conscience” of the progressive movement, although he knows that his five-letter surname also has become one of the dirtiest words in the language of the Democratic Party.

“Nader” — sometime pronounced with an expletive attached — has been a fighting word ever since the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Critics claim that by “siphoning” just enough votes from Vice President Al Gore in Florida, Nader helped George W. Bush win the state and then the Electoral College.

Nader, 74, has always rejected that “sub-elementary-level analysis.” He says it ignores bigger issues, like a confusing “butterfly” ballot in some Florida counties, alleged shenanigans that purged qualified voters off the rolls, Republican legal maneuvers to stop recounts, Gore’s failure to win his home state and Democrats’ other self-inflicted wounds.

Still, from day one, fingers pointed his way.

“Score One for the Raider,” a headline in Newsweek blared in a story saying Nader “stole the marginal votes Gore may have needed to clearly carry Florida — and the election.”

Since then, some political analysts, bloggers and letter writers have been merciless, saying Nader effectively “has blood on his hands” from everything that has happened under Bush’s watch, including the war in Iraq.

Prominent liberals refuse to shake Nader’s hand. He’s shunned by former Capitol Hill allies. The social networking site Facebook has some Nader fan clubs, but also dozens of groups with names like “Ralph Nader, Please Go Away,” “No, Nader, No,” “Ralph Nader, Sit Your Corny (expletive) Down,” and even, “If You Vote for Ralph Nader, I’ll Kill You.”

And Nader is tired of the Democratic blame game.

“They don’t want to look themselves in the mirror for betraying their finest progressive traditions. And so they have to lash out at someone,” Nader says. “They’re not going to blame themselves for selling out again and again and again . . .”

The backlash from 2000, and his barely-a-blip showing in 2004, haven’t deterred Nader from mounting yet another presidential bid, this year as an independent.

He might seem like an odd choice to offer advice to Sen. Barack Obama — a man he has criticized in the most inflammatory ways possible.

In an interview with the Rocky Mountain News this summer, Nader accused Obama of trying to “talk white” and playing on “white guilt” to win the White House — comments that drew widespread scorn from Obama supporters, observers and the candidate himself.

But in that same interview, Nader gave Democrats a road map for how he thinks they can use their Denver convention to make left-flank challengers like him less relevant.

Stop pointing fingers, stop stressing what they’re against and stand for the party’s old values again, he says.

“They make mistake after mistake after mistake because they’ve lost their self-respect. They don’t know who they are anymore. They’ve lost their identity,” he says. “They’re basically appealing to the public by saying, ‘Do you know how bad the Republicans are?’ People say they don’t think that much of the Democratic Party, but, ‘Do you know how bad the Republicans are?’ If you define yourself by the worst instead of the best you can be, there’s something wrong with your psychological makeup as a party.”

* * *

Nader remembers taking a stroll around the Staples Center in Los Angeles shortly after the 2000 Democratic National Convention.

The party was over. He hadn’t been invited. And he wasn’t impressed by what he had seen and heard from afar.

It was Vice President Al Gore’s show.

Gore didn’t have a free ride to the nomination. He was the Democratic establishment’s heir apparent entering the 2000 primaries. But he had to survive a challenge from former Sen. Bill Bradley. Time magazine had hyped Bradley in late 1999 as “The Man Who Could Beat Gore,” and some prominent progressives lined up behind him.

“It’s not just health care and the budget,” Bradley fan and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote in The New Republic. “Gore is to the right of Bradley on almost every important issue.”

In the early days of the primary, “Gore provided no clear direction, no guiding vision,” Newsweek reported in a post-election summary. “He had, at various times in his political career, been a neoliberal, tough on crime and communism; a New Agey environmentalist and techno-futurist, and an old-fashioned Bible-thumping populist. Gore’s response to problems, said a long-time aide, was to consult five pollsters.”

In the Iowa caucuses, however, Gore seized the momentum back. He won in a landslide. Bradley failed in the expectations game. It carried over to the New Hampshire primary and the loss of momentum doomed Bradley as the great progressive hope.

Some analysts blamed Republican John McCain, the “maverick” challenger to Republican front-runner Bush, for taking away some of Bradley’s appeal among independents. Either way, both Bradley and McCain were on the sidelines by the time the conventions rolled around.

At the Democratic National Convention, one of Gore’s goals was to gain some distance from his old boss, President Clinton.

Although the outgoing president was popular, riding on eight years of economic prosperity, Gore reportedly feared a belated backlash from the personal scandals — and failed impeachment — that marked Clinton’s final years in office.

So inside the Los Angeles Lakers’ new basketball arena, Gore took the stage, stressed his family values by giving his wife an awkwardly long kiss, then went on to declare himself “my own man” in his acceptance speech.

Domestic policy was the centerpiece of the address, and Gore boiled down the big differences he saw between Republicans and Democrats.

“They’re for the powerful. We’re for the people,” Gore said, and the crowd frequently broke into chants of “Go, Al, go!”

Gore took aim at “big tobacco,” “big oil,” “the big polluters,” insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and HMOs.

Nader, who had just accepted the Green Party’s nomination at a Denver convention, noted that there were “some pretty populist paragraphs” in that speech. But after eight years of Clinton-Gore, Nader said it was just words: “The usual rhetoric that Democrats throw the masses.”

Given the convention’s corporate hospitality suites, the event did nothing to convince him that Democrats were going to reassert their identity as the people’s party, he says.

Meanwhile, the event also celebrated Gore’s running mate, centrist Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who eventually would bolt the Democratic Party over Iraq war policy.

Then and now, Nader says that except on social issues and civil rights issues, it’s hard to tell the two parties apart. He accuses both of being mired in a period of “protective imitation,” when they try to blur distinctions with one another in hopes of winning votes in the middle of the road.

“That’s basically trying to be like the Republicans but not quite like the Republicans and still have a Democratic image,” he says. “It’s protective imitation. The auto companies used to do that. General Motors would have fins and hood ornaments, and so Ford and Chrysler said, ‘You know, they have half the market. We’d better look like them.’ ”

At the 2000 Democratic convention, the Associated Press’ Ron Fournier found some delegates who worried that Nader could hurt Gore’s chances, and at least one delegate who sounded like a possible defector.

“Gore advisers say Nader’s appeal will dim as the election draws closer,” Fournier wrote. “They’re also counting on (Reform Party candidate) Pat Buchanan to nab would-be Bush votes . . .”

* * *

Gore enjoyed the traditional bounce in the polls after the Los Angeles convention, but soon it was clear that his race with Bush would go down to the wire.

Nader was excluded from presidential debates, and the Democratic nominee virtually never uttered his name. At that point, Nader says, the Democrats could have stolen his thunder by acknowledging his existence, tackling some of the issues he raised and arguing why they were better.

“Yeah, what they should have said is, ‘Hey, the Green Party is for this, this and this. Did you know that the Democratic Party also is for this, this and this? Why should you vote for the Green Party? Vote for us,’ ” Nader says.

Instead, Nader’s theory is that the need for astronomical campaign funding has made Democrats reluctant to go near his hard-line, anti-corporate message.

Nader’s poll numbers did shrink from the high point of around 6 percent. But with the Bush-Gore race a dead heat, some Democrats went into an anti-Nader tizzy in the closing weeks. Internet sites buzzed with “Nader Trader” schemes, hoping to get average Nader backers in battleground states to pledge vote swaps with Gore backers in “safe” Democratic states.

In the closing days, Nader was back in Denver at the Paramount Theatre, where he scoffed at those who claimed he was hurting Gore.

“It’s not my job to elect Al Gore or George Bush,” he told the Rocky Mountain News then. “We all have to earn our votes.”

That night, Nader called Gore — who would later share a Nobel Prize for his work on global warming — a “talker, not a doer” on environmental issues. Democratic activist Christiane Citron of Denver, a former “Nader Raider” from the 1970s, said Nader was jeopardizing the social and environmental causes Democrats supported.

“I think it’s an ego trip and people have lost sight of what the goals are,” she said.

Well, Election Day came. Nader drew less than 3 percentage points nationally, but he won more than 5 percent in 12 states, including Colorado. Of his 2.7 million votes, everyone focused on the 85,000 he won in Florida, where Bush’s initial lead was reported as less than 350.

To this day, the argument rages about how many of Nader’s voters would have backed Gore and how many would have stayed home. (Nader backers counter: What about Buchanan’s voters?)

Nader always has rejected the “spoiler” label. When he’s asked about people who blame him for Bush’s actions, like the war in Iraq, he grows terse: “Why didn’t the Democrats stop Bush on Iraq? Why did they surrender their declaration (of war) powers authority under the Constitution and send it up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House?”

“It got so bad that everything Bush did I was blamed for, until I ended up saying: ‘Gee, I know someone who should share the blame with me . . . Barbara and George Bush,’” Nader says dryly. “They created him. Why don’t you go back to the origins?”

* * *

The Green Party’s gains proved to be short-lived.

Even with Nader, the party fell short of the goal of winning 5 percent nationally, which would have meant federal matching funds and easier ballot access going forward.

Many Green party members argued that Nader was not the cause of Gore’s defeat. But just in case, presidential nominee David Cobb’s 2004 strategy was to build the party by focusing on states the Democrats or Republicans weren’t contesting.

Nader ran again in 2004 as an independent. But he was barely a blip with less than 1 percent of the vote nationally. He blames Democrats for costly legal challenges that made it tougher for third-party candidates to get on ballots.

By contrast, he says Republicans are used to challenges from Libertarians, Reform Party candidates or the likes of H. Ross Perot. “They’re not as freaked out . . . not as exclusionary,” Nader says.

Still, he’s back again in 2008, and some people wonder why.

When he announced his plans to the late Tim Russert on Meet the Press in February, both Obama and then-rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed disappointment.

That day, Obama told reporters: “He had called me and I think reached out to my campaign. My sense is that Mr. Nader is somebody who if you’re — don’t listen and adopt all of his policies, thinks you’re not substantive. He seems to have a pretty high opinion of his own work.”

A few months later, Obama went a step further when reporters asked him about Nader’s comments to the Rocky Mountain News accusing the presumptive nominee of downplaying poverty issues, trying to “talk white” and playing on “white guilt.”

“Ralph Nader is trying to get attention. He has become the perennial political candidate,” Obama said in a televised news conference. “I think it’s a shame because if you look at his legacy in terms of consumer protections, it’s an extraordinary one. But at this point, he’s somebody who’s trying to get attention, and his campaign hasn’t gotten any traction.”

Nader still thinks he’s relevant, though he now trails Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman, in most polls. As he stumps across the country, he’s hoping to have a “tugboat” effect on Democrats if nothing else, pulling them closer to his agenda.

In the meantime, he takes heart believing there’s at least one Democrat who does not hold a grudge against him: Al Gore.

“When I saw him at a book signing last year in a downtown bookstore, I stood in line with 300 people,” Nader recalls. “I came up and he was very cordial.”

Nader says he asked Gore: “How does it feel to be free at last?” He said Gore responded: “It feels good.”

And then, Nader says fondly, Gore signed the book: “To my friend, Ralph Nader, with respect.”

sprengelmeyerm@shns.com

• August 22, 2008

  5:23 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  fair2008 writes:

  Please not the way that you characterize Nader throughout the interview: You call him the "perennial candidate" and say he is "at it again." The whole thing is subtley designed to make him look like a delusional fool and discredity him in the minds of your readers. If you come out and make actual arguments against a person, people recognize it as an argument and can use their discernment to decide what they believe. If, however, you couch your supposedly "objective" article in words that are subtley mocking, you exert a much greater influence on your reader, who does not know you are making an argument and who leaves the reading with only a vague sense that Nader is a perennial fool. Please be more responsible. Make your arguments outright instead of standing in the way of people making a good decision.

  Secondly, it is the job of a reporter to verify the legitimacy of claims, but in all my reading of election coverage I have only ever heard that he is criticized for costing Gore the election. If you say that and then refuse to remark on whether this criticism is true, your readers will leave with the impression that it is and think that Nader did spoil the election. In reality, there are dozens of arguments--spanning from the statistical to the strategic to the politically philosophical--that you could draw on to confirm whether Nader was a spoiler and--more correctly--whether that is in itself a bigoted (as Nader suggests) word to apply to someone when doing a fair interview.

  For example, you could have included that 250,000 Democrats voted for Bush in the 2000 elections. Why did they not vote for Gore? Or you could mention that Nader, as a different candidate than Gore, is not required to defer to him. There are dozens of counterperspectives you could mention, but you instead have constructed a subtley powerful counterargument tucked into adjectives and intro statements.

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