Transcript of M.E. Sprengelmeyer's interview with Ralph Nader

The Rocky

Published August 21, 2008 at midnight

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Interview with Ralph Nader by M.E. Sprengelmeyer of the Rocky Mountain News on June 23, 2008, at Nader’s sparsely furnished campaign headquarters in a riverside office building in the Georgetown area of Washington, D.C.

NADER: This is an unusual initiative for newspapers these days. They’re all so tightening everything.

Q: Did Chris tell you what we’re doing?

NADER: Twelve-part series?

SPRENGELMEYER: Ten parts. What we’ve done is we’ve gone all over the country. Usually, we try to double up: two or three in the same town. We’re trying to find figures from each election. Doesn’t always have to be the leading candidates. But we’re doing one story that encapsulates that year. In the case of 2000, we’re going to be focusing a little bit on the past. It’s our way of bringing into your campaign this year. So if I ask about 2000, I hope you understand we’ll be getting into 2008, too.

(Sound check.)

Q: I wanted to ask you if you remember a very simple thing, where you were while the Democrats were holding their convention in 2000 in Los Angeles. Did you get to make an appearance out there by the Staples Center?

NADER: I think I was there but I couldn’t get in. I was in the Los Angeles area, yeah. But it wasn’t, it was right after they finished. I went to the Republican convention. But I didn’t go into the Democrat one . . .

Q: I noticed there were a lot of your people who were inside the pens . . .

NADER: There was a big rally.

Q: So where were you while Al Gore was up on stage making his speech? And all those other things going on. Where were you? Were you watching on TV? Or where are you?

NADER: I was, I was campaigning. I know I was there like a couple days after, because I actually walked around the Staples stadium. But I was probably in the West Coast somewhere, Colorado or someplace, or in the mountain states.

Q: Did you pay much attention by that point to what the Democrats were doing on their stage?

NADER: Oh yeah, for sure. We took notice that Gore had some pretty populist paragraphs in his acceptance speech, contrary to what Lieberman advised him. So he went out after the insurance companies, the oil companies, the drug companies. The usual rhetoric that the Democrats throw to the masses.

Q: I guess I’m wondering . . . Let’s go back to when you launched that campaign in 2000. Did you launch it thinking, I’m going to win here. Or did you launch it with the intent to . . . I know some of your followers said, we just want him to hold the so-called progressives’ feet to the fire here and move that party in your direction. What was your intent when you launched that race in 2000?

NADER: Well, it was to try to build the Green Party, because traditionally third parties exerted a pull, if they were of sufficient magnitude, on one or both of the parties. Historically in the 19th century, the anti-slavery party, women’s right to vote and the bigger populist farmer-labor parties did that. So we wanted to do that and try to have a more continual alternative for people to deny the two parties their vote and put it in another column. The Green Party.

Second is to pull the Democrats closer to their traditional pro-working families, pro-labor positions because they had veered away from them ever since about 1980, when they started taking money from corporate interests, big time. So that’s the second.

And third was to try to roll out after the election with some sort of a democracy movement coming off the momentum of the 2000 election, and deploying more of the young people who came into our campaign and learned the techniques and skills of politics.

Q: What was your expectation for how well you would do that year when you first launched that campaign?

NADER: It was hard to say because the polls fluctuated. They came in at 7, 8 and 9 percent for a while. And then, as often is the case, they shrink when the voters get closer to Election Day, because voters define winning in terms of ultimatums. Namely that only one or two major parties are gonna win . . . So they want to be with the winner. And the system does not allow for multiple definitions of winning, like winning an issue or two. Like, gee, you know, the Green Party that got the Democrats to pick up the “living wage” or a real single-payer health insurance that gives you free choice of doctor and hospital. No, ever since elementary school, you know, we define winning as the poll, the Election Day result, period. Not what people get their feet wet in politics, then become mayors and state legislators, go into politics as a result of our effort, or issues that the Democrats or the Republicans had to adopt . . .

It’s a very sterile political environment in this period of American history. Very exclusionary, anti-competitive. The two parties are really like a two-party elected dictatorship. They have all these ballot access obstacles and so on, exclude you from the presidential debates. Their conventions get $60 million each in taxpayer money. The system is rigged from A to Z against any kind of competition. That’s why it’s decaying, because historically in the 1930s, ’20s, the great ideas, the new energies, the agendas, came from small parties and independent candidates.

Q: The California progressives and that type of thing, or who do you . . .?

NADER: You name it, you know. Direct election of senators, women’s right to vote, anti-slavery, 40-hour week, progressive taxation, Social Security, Medicare, and on and on and on, it all started with the smaller parties.

Q: Did you ever, or maybe a better way to phrase it is, when’s the last time you ever considered yourself a Democrat?

NADER: I never was a Democrat. I grew up in a family that was always independent. My father, when he used to be asked are you a Democrat or a Republican, would say, “Neither, I’m an American.”

Q: And so you always stayed an independent?

NADER: Always.

Q: When that race was going on, because you have mentioned several platform planks that you sound kind of proud that Democrats have picked up, did you have any moments when you had any discussions with Democrats, or did they pay you any attention in the early stages before that (2000) convention? Did they pay you any attention or talk to you or (say), “What do you want, Ralph?”

NADER: The Democrats were always unfriendly the moment I announced and then became increasingly unfriendly, and became real hostile a few weeks before the election. They’re not used to competition from the progressive side of the political spectrum. The Republicans are used to it. They have the Libertarians, they have Pat Buchanan, they have others on their side. They’re not as freaked out. They’re not as exclusionary. They don’t go to partisan judges and try to get these smaller candidates off the ballot the way the Democrats do. And after the election they scapegoated the Green Party tremendously instead of looking themselves in the mirror as Democrats, saying, “Why in the world couldn’t we have landslided this bumbling governor from Texas with the terrible record?”

Q: Did they do it before the election, too, as I recall? I remember the “Nader traders” and those types of things.

NADER: That was very expansive in ’04. They had a much bigger operation to get us off the ballot, harass our petitioners in the streets, filed frivolous lawsuits before partisan judges. They used every statutory, technical, intimidating tricks.

Q: But in 2000 now . . . First, why don’t you describe Al Gore. He eventually became the nominee, but during that campaign, how did you view his rhetoric on the environment back then, and other things that were important to your candidacy back then, too? Did you view him as any kind of an ally then? Before the election.

NADER: I did when he was in Congress, the House and Senate, but he changed when he became Clinton’s vice president. For example, he never really made a big thing out of solar energy, global warming. Clinton and Gore came out with a joint report in 1993 about global warming. One would think that would really be front and center, and he and Bush gave the auto companies eight years of clearance. They never proposed one fuel efficiency standard to Congress in eight years. Occupational contamination in the mines, foundries, factories and so on, they basically shut down OSHA, didn’t issue or initiate or complete one chemical control standard in eight years. Fifty-eight thousand people die, according to OSHA, every year from workplace disease and trauma. See, so he was not really up-front. Now maybe he was muzzled. He had written a great book before he was chosen as vice president. But maybe he was muzzled or whatever. He did lead the reinventing government project. That was basically a huge leap in outsourcing government and disrespecting the civil service, I think, which of course the Republicans have expanded on since. And he was always a big booster of the drug industry, so . . .

When I saw him at his book-signing last year in a downtown bookstore, I stood in line with 300 people. I said, “How does it feel . . .?” I came up and, he was very cordial, said, “How does it feel to be free at last?” And (he) said, “It feels good.” I asked him, “How does it feel to be free?” He said, “It feels good.”

Q: Did he say anything else to you?

NADER: He was very cordial. He signed it, “To my friend, Ralph Nader, with respect.” I don’t think he thinks we, quote, “cost him the election.” I think he really believed he won it. He did win the popular vote. It was thrown into Florida. The press has reported dozens of ways before, during and after Election Day, from Tallahassee to the five Republicans on the Supreme Court, they took it away from him . . . He also, by the way, realized, by the way, he should have won his home state of Tennessee, which, everything else being equal, he’d have become president.

Q: When he came to that convention in Los Angeles, was there anything that he or the Democrats could have done differently to give you a victory in a sense with the platform, or is there anything they could have done differently that you think would have made you able to unify with them in any sense?

NADER: Not unify in the sense of dropping out . . .

Q: Or to take enough of your votes?

NADER: Yeah, what they should have said is, “Hey, the Green Party is for this, this and this. Did you know that the Democratic Party is also for this, this and this? Why should you vote for the Green Party? Vote for us.” That’s what they should have done. And they could have done it before the election. But they’re really stuck in this corporate cocoon, where they’re trying to raise a lot of money at the expense of Republicans from corporate interests. They’ve gotten into that routine since about 1980. Harry Truman was confronted with a Progressive challenger in 1948: Henry Wallace. The former vice president under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And Henry Wallace was at 12 percent at one point. And Truman just took some of the issues away from him, in addition to some unfortunate redbaiting. But he took some of the issues away from him and Henry Wallace ended up with a little over 2 percent of the vote.

Q: So the Democrats could have done something like that.

NADER: Oh, sure.

Q: What were the areas they could have highlighted, you think, and fairly highlighted, where their platform did match?

NADER: A clear-out, full Medicare for everybody, government insurance, everybody with private delivery of health care. Instead they had an inscrutable, cockamamie plan that no one could really understand. That would have drawn a really bright line with Bush. Living wage. The minimum wage has been dragging terribly in purchasing power behind that of 1968. That would have related to tens of millions of workers. Those are the two. The third is they could have had an exciting peace dividend. You remember, that was after the decline of the Soviet Union. They could have said, “Oh, now we’re going to have a lean and mean military budget. We’re going to cut back on all these weapons systems that were designed for the Soviet Union era of hostility and we’re going to put it back in the community to repair and upgrade the libraries, the clinics, the schools, the drinking water system, the sewer treatment system. All the things that people saw — the roads and bridges — all the things that people saw were crumbling in front of their eyes, and bumping all over these rough roads, and getting alerts about unclean drinking water. And that would have created a lot of good-paying jobs that couldn’t be exported to China. Those are some of the things that would have won votes.

People want to see politicians who stand for them, who stand with them, who are on their side. That’s why Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to win election after election, because he was viewed as the president of the working people of this country, and the Republicans were viewed as the party of the rich. It’s a simple formula. But as long as they’re dialing for corporate dollars, they define themselves competitively with the Republicans as to who was raising more money.

You’d talk even to some very progressive liberals in the House and you’d say, “How’s the Gore-Lieberman race?” (They’d say,) “Well, they’re raising more money.” No, I’m not talking about that. “How do you think they are on the redirections of the country that people care about?”

Q: Were they trying to distinguish themselves too little, basically?

NADER: Oh yeah. It’s called protective imitation. It’s a real disease among the two parties. The Republicans played it.

They blurred the Democrats on the drug benefit bill. They blurred the Democrats on a number of other things that they were proposing. No Child Left Behind. Democrats played this “triangulation” game when Dick Morris came to the White House and advised Clinton. That’s basically trying to be like the Republicans but not quite like the Republicans and still have a little Democratic image. 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.”

Q: So you see as much difference between Republicans and Democrats as between GM and Ford?

NADER: Well, except for some of the social issues, you know, like obviously pro-life, pro-choice, the gay-lesbian rights, the Social Security issue; when it comes to corporate power issues, and there are always a few examples that are exceptions, like (Reps.) Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, but generally speaking, in the corporate power issues, in how corporations control government, how they get the tax privileges, how they get those big, unnecessary defense contracts, how they get those leaseholds of our natural resources, the differences between the Republicans and Democrats really are about the velocity with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door. The military budget is a perfect example of that, with defense contractors.

Q: We started with this and so I’m going to ask it, it’s a little bit of a similar question, but I wanted you to remember if you could, physically where you watched the convention, if you can remember, a hotel or wherever you were, and describe what that convention looked like from your eyes when you saw, not just Al Gore. Describe what you saw in that presentation . . .

NADER: Well, the speeches were really bland. They were kinda Sen. Bullworth type, you know. Just usual bland, empty speeches, mutual admiration society, praising each other. Some general criticisms of the Republicans, as if they were aside. It wasn’t really an appeal to the people. It wasn’t really mobilizing their people. You know, praising the Democratic Party historically. They mentioned John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman, FDR. They’re empty exercises. The hospitality suites tell the story. You don’t get many hospitality suites at Democratic conventions of networks of neighborhood groups or labor unions or consumer groups, environmental groups. They couldn’t afford it. The drinks were too expensive. The suites were too expensive. It’s the corporations. It’s one big corporate orgy. That’s what it is.

Q: Is there any way it could be otherwise? You’ve got two parties. The other party’s doing it. The other party’s got the big prime-time glitz, glamour. They’ve got the corporate suites for the donors helping them finance their conventions. Could one of the major parties unilaterally disarm and still be competitive, do you think?

NADER: I would think they’d want a better image. I’d have some, you know, farmers in overalls, some steel workers, copper miners, migrant — you know — harvest people who harvest our food, people who take care of the elderly, health-care nurses. I mean, can you think of better images than that? They’ve won you elections. Instead it’s limousines provided by Ford and General Motors, it’s lavish hospitality suites, and the conventions are no longer contentious. They used to come and there would be some quasi-serious contenders. You wouldn’t quite know who would win. Now it’s a foregone conclusion. In fact, they don’t like contentious conventions. They wanted Hillary to drop out, drop out. I put out a statement saying, “Hillary shouldn’t drop out . . .” If you want to oppose her, oppose her supporters’ support, you never tell anybody not to run or to drop out any more than you tell anybody to shut up, because running is a clear form of First Amendment. It’s free speech, petition, assembly — all three in one package when you run for office. You should never say to people, “Don’t run. Drop out.” Argue for them, against them. That should be the Democratic way.

Q: So you saw Al Gore at that convention. You described his language a little bit as adopting a little bit of populism in his speech.

NADER: Yeah, he wanted, he said, “I’m for the people and not the powerful.” So he got his little slogan. He got his drug company, insurance company, oil company slam. And his main purpose was to say he is now his own man. He is not just Clinton’s acolyte, Clinton’s VP, signaling that he was going to be his own man. He almost said it that way.

When you remember the conventions, you don’t remember any new theme coming out. You don’t remember any new strategy of organizing the populace coming out. You only remember the music.

Q: I read an account of the Green Party convention that year. It said that Medea Benjamin was running for Senate that year? Was she really?

NADER: Yeah.

Q: She has gone on to her own thing with Code Pink these days, hasn’t she? What was your convention like compared to the Democratic convention? It was just shortly after that, right, also in L.A.?

NADER: It was in Denver in 2000. It was in L.A. in 1996, when I wasn’t really running. They just . . . People wanted me to just, “OK, put my ballot on in a few states.”

Q: What was your convention like that year then . . .?

NADER: Well, it was very vociferous. And I can’t say it was contentious. I think they were glad to have someone they thought could get ’em some votes . . . And it gave them a good speech. They had a lot of great signs. Probably about 500 to 600 people. Nothing fancy. No hospitality suites by companies. There were a lot of people from around the world, though. There are Green Parties around the world. Europe, Asia, Africa . . .

Q: So then, obviously the election went forward, we get close to the end of the election. People are looking at polls in individual states and they’re seeing Nader taking a little bit of the vote from whomever. I would like your description for why you don’t feel remorseful in any way about what happened to Al Gore and the way the election turned out. This wasn’t the Nader problem, from what I’ve read of what you say.

NADER: Because I believe we all have an equal right to run for an election. So why should I feel remorseful any more than he feels remorseful for taking votes from me? He took a lot more votes from me. Bush took a lot more votes from Gore than I did. Why should I feel remorseful? The two parties don’t own the votes in this country. They should have to earn them like we all do, and either we’re equal or second-class citizens if we’re not members of the two parties. And that’s why the word “spoiler,” which is a contemptuous phrase of political bigotry — because they don’t apply that; if anybody spoiled Gore it was Bush and his associates. If anybody is spoiling this country, its politics and its government, it’s these two parties. So there’s a subtext to the word “spoiler,” which is, “What are you doing competing? Don’t you know it’s a two-party game? A two major party game? What are you doing competing?” That’s a pretty anti-democratic philosophy.

Q: I’ve heard it described that the European system, the parliamentary system, if you have some form of proportional representation you can do your coalition-building after the election.

NADER: Yes.

Q: In the winner-take-all system, typically it has been where the coalitions build before the election.

NADER: If there is . . .

Q: If there is an ability for the progressives to get together with the “triangulators” or whatever you want to describe these as, why couldn’t you do that within that system — make your coalitions, butt heads ahead of time, fight within a party like that?

NADER: Two words: Dennis Kucinich. He played by the rules. He was on all the debates. Campaigned around the country. Good, loyal Democrat. They didn’t give him one exclamation point on the platform. He had all kinds of proposals, very reasonable. They wouldn’t give him anything even in the Democratic platform. They gave him nothing. He was through by March, so that’s how they treat dissent that represents a lot of people. He was proposing things that a majority of people would support, like living wage.

And also, the interesting thing is although they scapegoat small parties on the progressive side, why don’t they support instant run-off voting, not just proportional rep, but instant run-off voting? They could do that. That would take care of that problem. Why don’t they get rid of the Electoral College? They didn’t make a move to get rid of the Electoral College after they lost the presidency in 2000. What more motivation will they ever have?

So basically, 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. 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 (whispering) “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.

Q: This story is a little different than all the stories we’ve done, because we’re usually talking to fellow Democrats and asking their advice for their party. But I’d like to ask you your advice for them. Based on what you just said about not knowing who they are, is that something that based on that experience in 2000 that they need to do still?

NADER: Of course. See, it’s not just corporate money that homogenizes them or converges them with the Republicans on issue after issue. It’s that their districts are too safe. The two parties have carved up the districts so that the vast majority of electoral districts there’s only one incumbent party, and everybody knows who’s going to win. Republicans, Texas, for example. Democrats, Massachusetts. And when you have these safe seats, you don’t have any fear of primary challenges. You don’t have any fear of a vibrant, two-party or a multi-party constituency, so you become very much in a rut. You become complacent. And why should you change? Why should you take any risk? Why should you have to challenge a view that the established corporate interests here find antagonistic, because you’re going to be re-elected, on and on and on. It’s like a big company having no competition. Like a big monopoly, it gets stagnant. Its technology gets stagnant. Its executives get complacent. It has in effect prevented itself from being renewed, from being invigorated by the fear of losing votes to a more progressive alternative. Or even to a Republican alternative where they carve out the districts.

Q: So that is a motivation for you, causing the fear in a party like them to start basically trying to subsume the things that you want in your platform.

NADER: Well, you’ve got to challenge them. You’ve got to take away what they value the most, which is votes. You can’t do that from the outside. I tried to do that for 20 years. You know, Mondale’s better than Reagan. Dukakis is better than Bush. Clinton is . . . Not Clinton. I never really had much cachet for Clinton. But, it doesn’t work. You have to be inside the electoral arena, even though it’s rigged badly.

In fact, if I was on the three debates in 2000 it would have been like Perot. My polls would have shot up. Most people didn’t even know I was running. How do they know you’re running when the three television networks, according to two professors who analyzed all the presidential coverage of ABC, NBC and CBS from Labor Day 2000 to Election Day 2000, the total coverage of the Nader-LaDuke Green Party campaign, not us speaking, total coverage, including a few sound bites on all three networks combined: three minutes.

Q: So when you got to that election of 2000, and we’ve gone through a lot of hand-wringing on the part of some Democrats . . . when we got to Florida, describe what your thoughts were immediately on Florida. Did you immediately say: He lost the state, the ballots lost the state, the state was stolen, but I didn’t cost Florida? Did you always believe that you . . .? What was your thought when the Florida results came in?

NADER: Yeah, because I knew that most of my votes would have stayed home or voted Republican. Only 40 percent or so would have voted Gore. I also knew that with the 527 being the difference, just recounting would have changed that. You’re talking about 5 million-plus votes. And also I knew ahead of time that tens of thousands, or maybe thousands, of Floridians were deprived of their right to vote because their names sounded like ex-felons, so they were cut out, and most of those would have gone to the Democrat according to the surveys. And there were a lot of other things that I noted beforehand that the (Republicans), through the secretary of state in Tallahassee and Jeb Bush, were doing to handicap the Democrats, even though the Florida Supreme Court was predominantly appointees from a Democratic governor. I mean, they rigged that system in so many ways. It was the Democrats’ fault because they approved the butterfly ballot in the counties. What were they doing approving a ballot that was so confusing that people that wanted to vote for Gore ended up voting for Buchanan?

But I don’t believe in “costing.” See, I don’t believe in that concept at all. Because we’re all trying to get votes from one another, so let’s get over it and just get the . . . stop looking back and say “cost.” Because it’s interesting that the Democrats thought that Greens “cost” them the election, but numerically, who really cost them the election? It was Bush. He had far more votes from, quote, Gore. So these votes, this “costing the election,” “siphoning votes,” it’s as if the two parties are entitled to votes and someone comes along and illicitly takes away votes from them? So I don’t even talk that way.

Q: After that election, even though you think that, do you have people stop you on the street or people who come to your speaking engagements or try to make an issue with you about that election still?

NADER: Oh, yeah. It’s the virus of American politics. You take the smartest people, politically, whether they’re political science people or whatever, it doesn’t matter who they are, the smartest, shrewdest people, when it comes to the election, they move to a sub-elementary level of analysis. And here it is: How many votes did Nader get? What’s the difference between Bush and Gore? Nader’s votes all come from Gore, therefore, Nader cost Gore the election.

There isn’t like, well, let’s see, the ex-felon shenanigan. The mayor of Miami went to Madrid for 11 days, didn’t bring out thousands of voters because he has a grudge with the local Democratic apparatchiks in Florida. A quarter of a million Democrats registered voted for Bush in Florida. Why didn’t Gore win Tennessee? He would have been president, everything being equal. Why didn’t he win Arkansas, which is a Clinton state? He would have been president, everything else being equal. In other words, most people, these people in their regular lives do multi-variable analysis. They don’t just pick one variable and ignore all the others, even though all the others, independently, everything else being equal, would have gotten Gore the election. Why don’t they slam the Electoral College? That was the first one they should have slammed, because in most democratic societies, if you win the popular vote, you usually become the leader of the country. Only in America you can come in second in the popular vote and walk into the White House.

So this is what it does to people. You cannot believe the list of names that I have, people who are at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, political science professors at major universities, clever politicians like Pat Leahy who know how to deal with variables and nuances, you know, Jann Wenner, the head of Rolling Stone. One after the other of famous names. Liz Holtzman wouldn’t shake my hands at a political gathering. You don’t get people much smarter than that politically. Once they deal with this two-party duopoly and they challenge it, and they look at the vote, they reduce their mind to a sub-elementary-level analysis. And of course that means that they basically have put a nose ring in their nose and have provided the Democrats with a tether.

Q: What other kinds of confrontations have you had? You’ve had people refuse to shake your hand. What other . . .?

NADER: Joe Biden after 2000 said to the press, “He better not come up here on Capitol Hill . . .” Leahy wouldn’t let me testify against Ashcroft. You know he was the minority leader, right? He could have had his, you know, they all have their legacies. It’s, it’s shall we say the ultimate political bigotry because they would never say to voters that they don’t like, don’t vote, even though the voters were against them. But they say to candidates that they don’t like, “You shouldn’t have run.” You should have dropped out. They’re both essential to one another, right? Choice of candidates, voter choice. Why do they want to deny our voters the right to vote for candidates of their choice? Not by arguing better than we, not by proposing better than we, but by using all kinds of shenanigans to get us off the ballot, to say to our voters, “Now you only have two on the ballot to choose from.”

Q: Has anyone gone so far as to blame the things that have happened under Bush, including the war, on . . .

NADER: Oh, yeah . . .

Q: . . . directly to you, I mean.

NADER: It’s a total psychiatric phenomenon. You just can’t believe it. They blame . . . I get letters from people who blame me for everything that went on in Iraq. I say, “Gee, you know, what was Kerry’s excuse? Why didn’t he win?” Why didn’t the Democrats stop Bush on Iraq? Why did they surrender their declaration of (war) power authority under the Constitution and send it up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House? Which itself is a violation of their oath to uphold the Constitution. It doesn’t matter.

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.” And they would say, “Who?” Like there isn’t anyone they would agree with. I say, “Barbara and George Bush. They created him. Why don’t you go back to the origins? Why don’t you go back to Ann Richards who could have easily defeated him when he ran?” What was his record when he ran for governor? A losing businessman who had just made a windfall based on the tax-supported Texas Rangers stadium using his family name. It’s just . . . And if you want to come more immediately, why do Democrats give him everything he wants when it comes to funding the war? Just most recently. I mean they put some veterans benefits on, and so on, but they’re still funding the war.

Q: During this presidential campaign 2008, the primary for the Democratic side, you heard from a lot of repentant senators who — senators and former Sen. Edwards — who all would go one after another saying, “I made a mistake. I made a mistake . . .” (about the Iraq war powers vote). Do you think that there’s . . .? If you were to go to Denver, or if you were thinking about the Democratic convention, whether it’s the war or other issues, what would you hope that the Democrats would do at that convention? Maybe to make you less relevant but to adopt more of your . . .

NADER: Have me speak to them, because I’m basically their conscience. The reason why they’re so angry with me is that they know that my proposals are the proposals that the old Democratic Party of FDR would have adopted. And they feel, 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. They’re not going to blame themselves for selling out again and again and again, so they lash at my candidacy, and that’s why they’re never going to renew themselves.

I mean, they may win the election. They’ve been losing elections again and again. The Democratic Party has been very good at electing very bad Republicans the last 25 years. One of the reasons I ran is I couldn’t rely on the Democrats to defend the country against the worst Republicans in Republican history, the most craven people that ever crawled up Capitol Hill. Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich, all these people . . .

But they just refuse to look at themselves in the mirror and say, “What are we doing wrong?” Why can’t we stand with the people and beat these guys at the national, state and local level? Why do we give up on over half the country, called red states? That’s one thing that Dean did that was good, he said you don’t give up on half the country, run 50-state campaigns. Imagine giving up on half the country, not even going to campaigning in places like Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Alaska, the Rocky Mountain states, that’s a sign of decay of the party. So if they really wanted to hear where the party could win, they’d hear me speak there. But that wouldn’t happen in a million years.

We’re going there, by the way. We’re going to the Democratic National Convention. We’re going to be in Denver.

Q: What are you doing there?

NADER: We’re going to provide an alternative agenda. We’re going to ask the Democrats, why not have these and other issues on the table . . . We’ll have an auditorium, we’ll have press conferences, maybe we’ll even have demonstrators. It depends on how close you can get these days.

* * *

VIDEOGRAPHER JUDY DEHAAS: I had a quick question to kind of consolidate. What I really would like to know . . . what advice you would give to Democrats to actually have a proper convention. One thing you mentioned was to allow you to speak. What else, Mr. Nader, would you advise the Democrats to do?

NADER: They would interpret my asking to speak as egotistical when it’s basically my desire to tip American politics into the progressive highway, even if you have to take the Democrats kicking and screaming into them. I’m a very results-oriented person. I mean, I came to Washington in the ’60s to improve my country, got a lot of things done in the following 15 years before the doors started closing, Democrat or Republican, congressional doors, way before I indicated I was going to run. They closed on all citizen groups. FDA was one of the worst in 30 years of monitoring them, under Clinton-Gore, by (name) and the Health Research Group. So they wouldn’t understand that. They’d go into conniptions if they thought I wanted to speak to their convention.

But they’re in a terrible rut and my advice to them is to look at our agenda and ask themselves, one, does it make sense? Two, do the American people want it? And three, is it long overdue? And go with it.

Why are they supporting 100 percent U.S. government loan guarantees to the nuclear industry? If they’re going to guarantee loans for energy projects, they get far more bang for the buck by supporting energy efficiency, retrofitting buildings, creating jobs everywhere.

(Looking at a list of proposals on his campaign literature:) I’m looking at these now. What’s the downside for announcing an aggressive law-and-order crackdown on corporate crime and rip-offs? The only downside is that they may not raise as much money from the corporate interest. Well, they’re bragging about the Internet. Why do they keep having to raise it from the corporate interest? Because they think the corporate interest can put up candidates against them, destabilize their sinecure of automatic re-election, putting up primary candidates, for example. And also, why rock the boat? They’ve got a lifetime job, most of them, on Capitol Hill.

Q: To summarize what Judy was asking, it’s basically, if you take yourself out of it, that you need to be the one that addresses the convention. What things could they specifically add that you think they feasibly could add that might bring some of your people to agree with the party?

NADER: The issues, full Medicare for all: You know, 18,000,000 to 22,000,000 people die every year because they can’t afford health insurance, as I mentioned. Getting out of Iraq with a set deadline. Our main bargaining chip to knock the bottom out of their insurgency is to give Iraqis back their country and their oil, with U.N.-sponsored elections over a six-month period . . . That one would do it. Redirecting the wasteful military budget. People are appalled by the stuff they see on 60 Minutes and elsewhere, and putting it back into public works repair, schools, clinics, sewage treatment systems, highways, public transit, drinking water upgrades, so they don’t read in the paper there’s leaks and there’s contamination of the drinking water. Living wage, 10 bucks, that’s about the purchasing power of it was in 1968. Why is it a big deal? The productivity of workers has doubled since 1968. We should be $20. Ten bucks? They’re afraid of a 10-buck minimum wage? Who can support a family with necessities on that? Even if two people get 10 bucks an hour, mom and dad? Solar energy, hugely popular, because it’s decentralized, it really brings alive communities, you know. Solar water heaters . . . passive solar architecture. It’s all here. This makes sense. (Snaps his fingers.) Majority support . . .

* * *

(After one cassette tape runs out, the interview picks up on a new topic: questions of how Nader sees Sen. Barack Obama compared with the 2000 nominee, Al Gore.)

SPRENGELMEYER: Do you see Barack Obama as qualitatively different than Al Gore or any other Democrats? He talks about taking on lobbyists, not taking money directly from lobbyists . . . People portray him as being different. Do you see him as being any better than Al Gore or any of the other Democrats that you’ve opposed over the years?

NADER: No. I mean, he’s deceiving people. He takes, he takes, in this very building he would take money from corporate lawyers who are not registered lobbyists but whose desks are across the aisle from corporate lawyers who are registered lobbyists in the same law firm. That has been reported more than once in the mainstream press. Five out of six . . . Six out of seven industries, as of a month ago, have given more money to Obama than they have to McCain, only the transportation industry is more equal-opportunity corruption.

Look at the health care industry. It has poured money into his campaign. The securities industry, the defense industry. No.

There’s only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He’s half African-American. Whether that will make any difference, I don’t know. I haven’t heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What’s keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn’t want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We’ll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards.

I think his main problem is that he censors himself. He knows exactly who has power, who has too much, who has too little, what needs to be done right down to the community level. But he has bought the advice that if you want to win the election, you better take it easy on the corporate abuses and do X, Y, Z. When I hear that I say, “Oh, I see. So he’s doing all this to win the election, and then he’ll be different.”

Well let’s see if it worked. Did it work for Mondale? Did it work for Dukakis? Did it work for Clinton? Yes, but only because of Perot. Did it work for Gore? Did it work for Kerry? It’s not exactly a winning formula not to stand tall with and for the people on all these things, from health insurance to the integrity of the use of the tax dollar, to fixing up the public services, to giving the workers rights, to having a living wage, and to use the law against the rich and powerful, not just against the deprived and the weak.

Q: Do you think he would be offended at the suggestion that he’s trying to talk white and distance himself from Jesse Jackson? Or do you think that’s really what’s going on here? Do you think he’d be offended by that assertion?

NADER: You should ask Jesse Jackson. Have you seen him with Jesse Jackson . . .?

Q: We talked to Jesse Jackson last week, actually, and he was kind of glowing about him.

NADER: Until he’s off the air. And he was on an interview recently and he was glowing, and then when he was off the air you wouldn’t want to print the words about how arrogant he thinks Obama is when it comes to former, when it comes to black leaders without whom he wouldn’t be where he is today. I mean, without Jesse Jackson’s two runs, it’s doubtful whether Obama would have had the opportunity.

Q: We talked to him for an hour about that.

NADER: But personally, he’s offended, because Jesse Jackson is not invited to ever appear — just think of that — to appear with Barack Obama. Think how Jesse Jackson must feel about that. There’s a major politician in New York who told me the other day that his favorite description of Barack Obama was that he’s a black Clinton. And this politician . . . supported Hillary Clinton.

Q: Does it start with a C?

NADER: No.

Q: Do you think he’s basically trying to talk, what was your term, “talk white?”

NADER: Of course. I mean, first of all, the number one thing that a black American politician aspiring to the presidency should be is to candidly describe the plight of the poor, especially in the inner cities and the rural areas, and have a very detailed platform about how the poor is going to be defended by the law, is going to be protected by the law, and is going to be liberated by the law. Haven’t heard a thing.

I mean, the amount of economic exploitation in the ghettos is shocking. You’d think he’d propose a task force to at least study it. I mean, these people are eroded every day. The kids, their bodies are asbestos and lead, municipal services discriminate against them because it’s the poor area, including fire and police protection and building code enforcement. And then the lenders, the loan sharks get at them, and the dirty food ends up in the ghettos, like the contaminated meat. It’s a dumping ground for shoddy merchandise. And, you know, you don’t see many credit unions there. You don’t see many libraries there. You don’t see many health clinics there. This is, we’re talking 40-50 million Americans who are predominantly African-Americans and Latinos. Anybody see that kind of campaigning? Have you seen him campaign in real poor areas of the city very frequently? No, he doesn’t campaign there.

Q: And so, what do you think the purpose of that is?

NADER: He wants to show that he is not a threatening, a politically threatening, another politically threatening African-American politician.

I mean, it’s one thing if he was distancing himself from some of the crooked African-American politicians, but that’s not what’s on his mind. He just, he wants to appear, he he wants to appeal to white guilt. You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as a black is beautiful, black is powerful. Basically he’s coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it’s corporate or whether it’s simply oligarchic. And they love it. Whites just eat it up.

Q: Is there any . . .? It sounds like you’re saying Barack Obama will not even necessarily be your favorite of the Democrats.

NADER: Well, if you were to say, where do I disagree with Barack Obama, I’d say, well, let me start with this. I disagree with Barack Obama who disagrees with himself.

(There’s a break in the interview for technical reasons: changing a videotape.)

Q: What I was asking is, it sounds like Barack Obama is not even your favorite of this bunch of Democrats who ran this year.

NADER: Well, my favorite is Dennis Kucinich — always has been. I worked with him when he was mayor in Cleveland, pretty isolated. He took on the banks and utility companies. But people say, “Well, where do you disagree with Barack Obama?” I say, “Well, let’s start with my disagreeing with Barack Obama disagreeing with himself.”

Q: Tell me what you mean by that.

NADER: I mean that he knows what’s wrong in this country. He knows that corporations abuse people. He knows that they control too much of our politics and our government departments and agencies. That he has suppressed those awarenesses and become just another politician who will say and do anything to win elective office. And of course the Democrats have been losing with that formula, year after year.

Q: Does he remind you of past nominees that we’ve had?

NADER: No, he’s very much like . . . in that sense he’s very much like Gore, Mondale, very much like Clinton. None of them have picked up on these issues. These aren’t new issues.

Q: They talk about single-payer and even Barack Obama will talk about single-payer as, “If I had my way, and if I could, single-payer, but I can’t unilaterally, so I’ll do this . . .”

NADER: So OK, he makes a rotten system worse, because he’s pumping more tax dollars into a rotten, redundant system that decides who lives and who dies, who gets treated and who doesn’t get treated in America. My answer is, what problem do you have with full Medicare for all, when a majority of the American people support it, even without Democratic leadership increasing that support by coming out for it. And an April 2008 poll of doctors says 59 percent of doctors support single-payer because they want to practice medicine. They don’t want to practice bill-collecting. And they don’t want to have their hands tied by clerks on the 20th floor of an HMO building or an Aetna building telling them who they can refer patients to and who they can’t.

Q: I would have asked you this question in 2000, and I’m going to ask the same question for 2000 and 2008. Going into the convention — we’re a month and a half away from the convention — a month and a half away from the 2000 convention, is there anything that the Democrats could have done or said to make you say, “OK, I’m with you for this election”? And the same thing for this year, in 2008, is there anything that Democrats could suddenly do or say that would make you say, “OK, I’m with you in this election?"

NADER: I don’t believe the promises of politicians, whether they’re Democrats or Republicans. Only deeds. Only legislative enactments. Only regulatory decisions by the executive branch. Only those kinds of deeds are persuasive. And those, obviously, do not come in an election year with two months left or four months left. So it’s just words. Would I be beguiled by their words? No. I’ve seen too much political betrayals, and they’d always find an excuse. “Oh, well, you know, the Republicans are filibustering or something.” “Oh, we’ve got more important things we have to do.” Also, I would never betray my supporters. You do that once and you destroy any kind of credibility for a third party or independent candidates, because who’s going to trust these candidates if they cut a deal right before?

Q: Which party are you running under this year?

NADER: Independent.

Q: Isn’t . . . did you try to get the Green Party nomination . . .?

NADER: No, no. Right from the beginning, I didn’t. They have a convention in Chicago in July.

Q: If you’re trying to build a movement that’s going to pick up steam over time, why not do it within one party and if you win the nomination, great . . . I mean, why not stay with the party that took you last time?

NADER: The Green Party is not a functioning party. It doesn’t have any discipline. And it doesn’t have any maturity. It drives out the best Greens who come in, stay around, look around at all the bickering and internal rivalry and say, “Let me out of here.” Even the green candidate who was elected to the City Council in San Francisco is not an active Green anymore. He’s supporting Obama. He’s one of the highest elected officials . . . So it’s not a functional party. I left them with almost 3 million votes in 2000. I went to dozens of states afterwards to try to strengthen them. I went to 40 fundraisers at my expense, and they frittered it away. So I really think you have to start a citizen movement or independent movement first before you have to start a party.

I wish we had politics without parties. I really wish we had elections without parties. If you look at the statements of Jefferson and Madison, George Washington and others, they didn’t like parties. They were sucked into it finally, but they thought parties were factions, bickering, inward-looking, selfish, driven by pure ambition to grasp more control of power. But the system is such that it almost requires parties after a while in order to gain any order of magnitude. But you don’t want to go into a party that basically collapses on the candidates, can’t even raise money.

Q: Doesn’t that undermine your argument, though, from the start if you say you’re going to start a movement and get this set of ideas. And it’s not . . . you don’t want something that devolves into being just being a fight over ambition, one person’s ambition. But then you move to another party, and each time, the ideas that come in your breast pocket with your list of issues that come just with you, doesn’t it kind of undermine that argument about building a long-term movement and sustaining a long-term movement if you do that?

NADER: It could if you built the right kind of party, but to build the right kind of party, one or two people can’t do it. I have my hands full being a candidate and I haven’t seen people who can build a party, who’d do the administrative work, the organizational work, the fundraising work, to build the party that has its goal on the best interests of the American people instead of perpetuating itself. So it’s really, those people are few and far between, and my urgency is to put these issues on the table in 2008 and hope that after 2008 we can have some momentum to start Congress watchdog lobbies in congressional districts, which would turn Congress around because there’s nothing really organized out there other than economic interests and single-issue groups. There’s no citizen organization out there, say, with a couple thousand people willing to spend five hours a week on the average, put in 200 bucks, have a full-time staff in each congressional district. You’d have a remarkable impact on members of Congress with these kinds of issues. But there’s nothing out there, it really is unbelievably non-organized. The people are non-organized out there, except on things like some of the civil rights issues and the economic interests: the auto dealers, insurance agents . . . That’s why people on the Hill think they can away with turning their backs on the people, because their people are not focusing on them. They’re not getting the kind of energy that bird-watchers in the district give, bowling league fans give. We’ve got to watch Congress. I mean, members of Congress take 22 percent of your income and can do a lot of things bad and good. And we’re not watching them.

Q: So when you go to Denver this summer, whether you’re on the street or at a symposium, what is your message going to be? And in this election . . . what’s your highest point you think you could get in this election . . .?

NADER: If you read this article two weeks ago in Politico by Jeremy Lott, he thinks we’ve already had an impact over the last eight years on the Democratic Party. It was quite an eye-opener to me that he writes that way. I don’t even know him. He didn’t even interview me. But he said “the Democratic Party is now Ralph Nader’s party.” Of course, that’s a little ambitious. But he’s reflecting a pull. They are talking more populist. For heaven’s sake, they criticized WTO and NAFTA. Regardless of whether they’re going to follow through, the first step of reform is lip service. (Laughing.) And they’re giving a lot of lip service in a variety of areas — nowhere near what I would hope them to do. So it’s a tugboat candidacy at a minimum.

That’s what we’re hoping for. What the parties did in the early 20th and the 19th century. I mean, Norman Thomas actually had quite an impact on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was, like, looking over his shoulder even though Norman Thomas didn’t get that many votes. Huey Long had an impact on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Thought he was going to challenge him in ’36. And certainly . . . there were other parties that have gotten quite a few votes, really did have an impact. Now, it’s tougher these days because parties are more cast in stone than they ever have been, for all the reasons we’ve talked about and more. But you have to keep trying.

See, I have a sense of history about this. Every social justice movement was started by people who didn’t win, didn’t win, didn’t win, didn’t win, didn’t win. Then someday, they or others won. So they were willing to endure defeat. It’s not easy to endure defeat, because we’re living in a country that loves winners. But all I say to the people of this country is just be as smart a voter as you are a sports fan. You do your homework, you know the history, you know the statistics, you know the strengths and weaknesses of the players, the coaches, the managers. You can, in a sophisticated way, second-guess them. You can show how they made serious mistakes, even though they get paid a lot more to run that game than you do. But above all, you don’t just root for the winners, you root for the team that’s closest to your heart and your mind, even if that team loses again and again like the Chicago Cubs.

Be as smart as a voter as you are a sports fan and we’d have a much more throbbing and functional democracy solving a lot more problems.

Q: Is your point really that if Democrats, if Barack Obama loses an election or Al Gore loses an election, that they need to look at their own house if they want to assign any blame?

NADER: Exactly. They’ve got to look in the mirror and stop looking for scapegoats or blaming it on Swift Boats. The Swift Boats did harm Kerry. Why didn’t he turn it around and show the American people the vile way that Bush was low-balling U.S. soldier injuries in Iraq in order not to arouse the public against the war? So he was undercounting U.S. soldier injuries, because the Pentagon had a criteria that the only injuries that count are the ones that were experienced in actual combat. Well, it’s not that kind of war, so the injuries are three times . . . I told Kerry that. I even put it in a letter to him. And yet, no. Here’s a guy who was in Vietnam and he’s the one who’s on the defensive, not the sophisticated draft dodger who supported the Vietnam War, George W. Bush.

So mistakes, when you don’t know who you are, when you don’t have a sense of your identity or your tradition, when you engage in protective imitation of your adversaries, when you define yourself by how much worse your adversary is than you when you’re challenged by liberals as a party, you’re going to make mistake after mistake after mistake, and you’re going to lose.

I mean, it’s pretty hard, you know, to lose this election for the Democrats. You know, George W. Bush is an easy act to follow. But they may end up doing that. Look what Obama has done in the last few weeks: pandered to AIPAC and the Israeli lobby to a point where he offended even conventional politicians. Good heavens, why did he have to do all that? There is an Israeli-Palestinian peace movement, after all. The world is condemning the blockade of Gaza from medicine, electricity, fuel, food, drinking water. It’s against international law. Then he avoids public funding, calling it a broken system, but by dropping out of it, he breaks it even more. He’s following the same path of flip-flopping cowardliness that his predecessors have followed and have lost. And the Democrats have to work overtime to lose, but they could pull it off. They could pull it off and lose.

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