One of Ralph Nader’s favorite barbs on the campaign trail went something like this: “The only difference between Al Gore and George Bush is the speed with which their knees hit the ground when corporate America comes calling.”
Now that the election is over—for Nader and quite possibly for Gore—that giant sucking sound you hear is Nader yanking the collective rhetorical knees of the Democratic Party out of his gut. As it grew apparent last Tuesday (and Wednesday and Thursday) that the presidency was perched precariously on a fulcrum of election lawyers, recounts, and absentee ballots, the assault on Nader as spoiler for Gore began with gusto.
Ground zero for the backlash against Nader is, of course, Florida, where the razor-thin margin between Gore and Bush is eclipsed by Nader’s tally of over 96,000 votes. On a smaller scale, with what we now know to be smaller stakes, the same thing happened in New Hampshire, where Bush out-polled Gore by less than 8,000 votes, while Nader drew more than 22,000. Nader’s vote dwarfed the Gore-Bush difference in a few other battlegrounds—Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Oregon—but in most of those states Gore will probably end up ahead despite Nader’s threat from the left.
So at the end of the day, the arithmetic critique of Nader’s alleged subterfuge can be engaged only in Florida. In the run-up to the election, Naderites deflected the charge that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush in part by rejecting the premise that all Nader supporters are disaffected Democrats who would otherwise prefer Gore. Exit polls confirmed that many who went Green would have voted Bush or stayed home. In Florida, however, the Nader vote so decisively swamped the Bush-Gore difference that no matter how you spin it, Nader’s absence would have handed the state to Gore.
But if Nader’s vote tally is implicated in the mathematics of Florida’s outcome, and by extension the election as a whole (if Bush prevails), does that make him personally responsible? It’s one thing to assess the mathematical impact of Nader’s candidacy on electoral patterns, but entirely another to cast blame—to say that Nader’s actions caused Gore’s defeat in a way that merits bitter condemnation and even retribution. Perhaps it soothes the tortured souls of anguished Democrats to grasp for an explanation that absolves the party’s own ideological flaccidity.
Going well beyond pointed disapproval, the assault on Nader from many quarters is venomous and mean-spirited. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney pronounced the Nader campaign “reprehensible.” Environmental Working Group President Ken Cook mockingly said, “I don’t think he’s going to build a Green Party any more than O.J.’s out there looking for the murderer.” Amy Isaacs, who leads Americans for Democratic Action, says Nader’s standing has been “severely diminished” by his campaign, which she labeled a “narcissistic, self-serving, Sancho Panza, windmill-tilting excursion.”
For some, anger and disappointment blend into an urge for revenge. Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware said flatly, “Ralph Nader is not going to be welcome anywhere near the corridors. Nader cost us the election.” James Carville concurred: “He obviously cost us the election. I will not speak the egomaniac’s name for the next four years.”
Nader counters that Gore and his supporters mismanaged a campaign that had “every advantage against a marginal, ill-equipped, and corporate-dominated Texas governor.” According to Nader, Gore’s bid failed to excite its traditional Democratic base, relying instead on an artificial strain of populism that betrayed progressive interests in universal health insurance, publicly financed campaigns, renewable energy, fair trade, the drug war, the death penalty, affordable housing, and child poverty.
The Democrats’ attack on Nader’s motives and strategy is as misplaced and counterproductive after the election as it was before it. In the final weeks of the campaign, Gore and his surrogates went all out trying to pry loose Nader votes to prop up Gore’s flagging prospects for victory. Although there was no doubt some leakage of Nader’s support on Election Day, which historically tends to happen to third parties, his popular vote tally of 3 percent was not significantly different from where he stood in national tracking polls on Labor Day.
Efforts to undermine Nader’s bid were ineffective because they were fundamentally dishonest. Unlike either of the major party candidates, Nader entered the race on substantively well-defined grounds and hewed to his ideology and message with prodigious consistency throughout the campaign. Charges by Gore backers that Nader had somehow morphed into a raving megalomaniac who reneged on a promise to avoid undermining Gore in key states had little traction because they had no credibility. The Democrats’ Nader-directed desperation, disguised as ersatz populism, was as transparent as it was contrived.
Liberal voters who went to the polls and punched the chad for Nader looked away from a Democratic Party that refused to engage the interests of its base on the left—first by ignoring it, and then, when threatened in the campaign’s late stages, by scolding it for bad behavior. It’s fashionable to say that Gore was a flawed candidate, but much of the responsibility is borne by the party, whose nomination process made it virtually impossible for a presumed standard bearer (in this case, a sitting vice president) to be challenged from within.
Green voters knew that Nader’s critique of Democratic Party ossification was dead on. If anything, pre-election efforts to repatriate Nader defectors reinforced that knowledge. Nader voters probably noticed that the amalgam of dire predictions and personal attacks on the Green candidate failed to mask the Democratic Party’s arrant unwillingness to address progressive dissent on their merits.
Gore hotheads who chose to escalate the war on Nader in the election’s wake risk signaling to progressives they have overstayed their welcome in the Democratic Party. This doesn’t necessarily guarantee a boost for the future prospects of the Green Party, which itself surely faces an uphill struggle for long-term legitimacy. It does, however, increase the odds that the Democratic Party going forward will be fractured as well as fractious. Telling thoughtful, principled voters in your natural base of support that their actions of conscience merit retribution is a dubious way to rebuild for the party’s future.
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