Get Nader!
Back in 1992 Jackie Blumenthal, wife of Sidney Blumenthal, was asked why she and her husband were such rabid supporters of a con man from Arkansas called Bill Clinton. "It's our turn," she hissed, as though that settled the matter once and for all. And so indeed it was: the turn of that whole class that had endured the 12 long years of Reagan/Bush time to take their rightful place in Washington.
Of course, in terms of substantive change, America remained a one-party state. By the spring of 1993 Al Gore was sitting down to write the press release announcing the recruitment as White House senior counselor of David Gergen, hauled out of the archives of Reagan/Bush time to take over as impresario of the floundering Clinton presidency. It was all over.
The amazing thing is that Clinton never endured mutiny from his left. He stuffed NAFTA down the throats of labor and the AFL-CIO endorsed him in 1996. (Why so quick with another endorsement in 2000? One incentive may have been a White House threat to unleash the Justice Dept. on Rich Trumka, top AFL-CIO official, for alleged financing shenanigans during the campaign to reelect Ron Carey as president of the Teamsters, a race won by James Hoffa Jr.) Clinton threw the crime bill and the welfare bill at the liberals and they took it with barely a peep. In 1996 he never faced a challenge, as had Jimmy Carter, from old-line liberalism embodied in the form of Ted Kennedy.
In 2000 the only halfway-serious threat to Gore came from another neoliberal, Bill Bradley. By the early summer we were set for another status-quo election, a reaffirmation of the one-party state.
The first and biggest thing that's happened this fall is that people have taken a look at Al Gore and they don't particularly care for him. No one does. Time after time I've met ardent defenders of the Gore-Lieberman ticket who absolutely refuse to listen to argument, even dispassionate recitation of the facts at hand, because they know they've got a dud on their hands. My old friend Don Pretori, co-owner of Black Oak Books in Berkeley, actually covered his ears when he saw me walk into the store to sign some copies of Al Gore: A User's Manual. "Don't tell me why I should vote for Nader," Don shouted across the store. "Whatever you say, I'm voting for Gore."
There are millions like Pretori who know how shoddy their man is. They'll fill out their ballots with gloom in their hearts, and if, against all the apparent trends displayed by pollsters as of Oct. 30, Gore prevails on Nov. 7, no joy will warm their hearts. The Gore voters are like a beaten army, heads bowed, shackles clinking as they lurch sadly forward. Only Clinton could levitate Clintonism into something alluring. He's the great three-card monte artist, whose carny appeal to the voters consisted in part of saying, Yes, I am a rogue. Wanna bet on this card?
Somewhere in the third week of October the Gore crowd woke up to the clear and awful thought that they might not make it, that maybe it wasn't their time anymore, and that the man to blame is Ralph Nader. It wasn't the first time Nader had shown up on the crisis radar screen. Right around the time of the Democratic Convention in August, Gore had felt it necessary to make a populist feint to his left. Surrogates like Pat Ireland of the National Organization for Women, Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, Barney Frank and Jesse Jackson were sent out to firm up the faithful and paint George Bush as the Great Beast.
But at that time, before the debates, Gore was heading up in the polls to what looked like an impregnable 10-point lead, and the Nader numbers were around 3 percent. There didn't seem too much point in roughing up Ralph and Greens. Best let the defectors slowly trickle back across the lines.
By the third week in October it was a very different story. Gore had bombed in the debates. The Greens had organized a whole string of Nader super-rallies across the northern half of the country, from Seattle and Portland through the upper Midwest to New York. In Minnesota, Nader was polling 10 percent by most counts. In parts of south Minneapolis, Pam Costain of the Resource Center of the Americas told me, there are so many Nader signs on the front lawns you'd think he were the Democratic candidate against Bush. In Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Maine, maybe even California, Nader could make enough of a dent to put Bush over the top.
And so the Get Ralph campaign began in earnest. In many ways the contour of the attacks reminded me of the last time the Democrats had to deal with dissidence, back in 1988 with Jesse Jackson's populist challenge. "What does Jesse want?" was reborn as "What does Nader want?" But Jackson was running inside the Democratic Party. By the time the '88 convention in Atlanta rolled around, Jackson was back on board. By the start of 1989 and the Bush years, he'd brusquely disbanded the Rainbow and fallen in line.
"If the basis of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the basis of popular government in time of revolution is both virtue and terror: virtue without which terror is murderous, terror without which virtue is powerless." That was Max Robespierre, back in 1794. I've always seen Ralph as our Robespierre, having to make do with class-action suits instead of the guillotine. Years ago Jim Goode, at that time editor of Penthouse, used to look across the piles of pin-ups with a shudder of distaste (he was gay) and snarl at me, "Alex, is your hate pure?" "Yes, Jim." Ralph's hate is pure.
So when the Democrats came at him, when he saw Toby Moffett, formerly a Nader Raider and until recently a Monsanto lobbyist, lining up squadrons of Nader bashers, he didn't blink and say he'd just had a long conversation with Al Gore and he'd be suspending his campaign, instructing his supporters to vote the Gore-Lieberman ticket, and that he'd be accepting an "influential" position inside the next Democratic administration (something I'm sure the Gore camp has already tried). He'd no doubt prefer to be running at more than 30 percent, but short of that, the privilege of being able to influence the race in at least six states is exactly what Nader has been waiting for all along: the power to remind the Democratic Party that it can't ignore the progressive slice of the country.
Get Nader!?2500 words from Todd Gitlin in Slate, still flourishing the instructive fable of Hubert Humphrey, dissed by radicals in '68. To be attacked by Gitlin, as the British politician Dennis Healey once remarked of one of his parliamentary opponents, is like being savaged by a dead sheep.
"If Nader had run in the primaries," Gitlin wrote, "or half the Naderite energy went to organizing a Million Human March to welcome Gore to Washington the day after he's inaugurated, we on the left would stand a reasonable chance of seeing a Gore more to our liking."
Oh yeah? Just like Michael Dukakis responded to Jesse Jackson's challenge in the '88 primaries by speaking to the concerns of the poor and the black in the fall campaign? Dukakis' first symbolic act in that same campaign was to visit the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi (where Reagan had opened an earlier election bid), at which venue Dukakis conspicuously failed to mention the three civil rights workers slain in the 1960s not so far away. And how did Clinton and Gore respond to the Jackson push four years later? By insulting Sistah Souljah, as a way of telling white voters the Clinton campaign was not held ransom by the "special interests," i.e., blacks.
After reading Gitlin's pained bleats I called up my CounterPunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair and bet him that within two days Nader would be under attack as a dirty Arab who wants to destroy the state of Israel. Sure enough. A couple of days before we had a piece in the Forward and we had a blast from Marty Peretz in The New Republic.
Under the headline "Nader's Green Party Calls for Halt of Aid to Israel/Gadfly Charges Gore, Bush 'Taking Sides' for Israel," the Forward's Nacha Cattan reported that "Ralph Nader's Green Party called this week for a suspension of United States aid to Israel and blamed the Jewish state for the current violence in the Middle East." Cattan then produced the sinister news that "Mr. Nader, a son of Lebanese immigrants...is said to be fluent in Arabic." Then the kicker: "Democratic activists are calling the Green Party's statement one of the most anti-Israel ever attributed to a party engaged in a presidential campaign. They are demanding that Green Party Jews abandon Mr. Nader and his running mate, Winona LaDuke, a Native American activist whose mother is Jewish."
As one might expect, Peretz was less decorous. After noting the outrageous fact that Ralph Nader had dared to open his mouth on the topic of the Middle East, Peretz went to work:
"There is something even more curious than Nader's sudden pandering. (Excuse us, his sudden hunger for Levantine [!] peace.) It turns out that Nader's cheapness on this question, and his conspiratorial view of the world, go back very far. They go back to March 1960, when the left's gaunt hero published an article called 'Business Is Deserting America,' in which he warned ominously of 'our ingrained gullibility to internationalism.' The remarkable thing is that Nader published his piece in The American Mercury, an obscenely anti-Semitic magazine. Nader's piece appeared in the same months that the magazine was publishing a series called 'Termites of the Cross'...
"As soon as anyone demonstrates that he is willing to expose the enemies of communism or world Zionism, their vast machines start working to advance his interests. The Disciples of Judas do not even have to be openly pro-Communist or pro-Zionist to qualify for the big payoff...."
Just think! For 40 years either Peretz has been keeping that old copy of The American Mercury ready against the day he might have to prove that Nader is Himmler's first cousin, or, more likely, someone at the Anti-Defamation League riffled through that outfit's files and rushed the clip over. It's awe-inspiring. Way back in the mid-60s, when Nader was attacking General Motors, someone at the ADL was taking careful note of the fact that Nader was of Lebanese origin and might, one day, represent a threat to Israel. Perhaps the investigators for GM worked hand in hand with the ADL from the start. And so then Nader keeps his mouth tactfully shut for 40 years on all questions relating to the Middle East, knowing full well that the moment he opens his mouth on a matter unrelated to consumer issues, the Israeli lobby will try to blow his head off.
Finally, as a presidential candidate who is supposed to have views on such affairs, Nader has the effrontery to criticize Israel. And lo! Here comes Peretz, who has spent 40 years opposing any decent settlement in Israel and bolstering his former student Gore to do the same, waving his tattered old page from The American Mercury, where Nader has been warning about gullibility to internationalism, exactly as he is today with his attacks on "free trade."
Truly, there's no one more venomous than a Cold War liberal on the rampage. By the time you work your way through Peretz's next paragraph, Nader is associated with communism, a vast anti-Zionist conspiracy, Judas, and a big payoff. It made Jack Tapper's attack on Nader's stock portfolio look pretty tame, even though Tapper did get what looks like a solid hit against Nader for having investments in the Fidelity Magellan mutual fund, which itself has positions in some no-no stocks (such as Occidental) from the Nader point of view.
"A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush." How quickly the Gore liberals adopt a totalitarian mindset, sounding like Soviet commissars back in the old days who would urge the voters toward a 98-percent turn-out for the Communist candidate, arguing that any deviation from absolute loyalty would "objectively" play into the hands of the imperialists. Nader "does not deserve a single progressive vote? Not one," screamed Eric Alterman in The Nation.
In fact, a vote for Nader is first and foremost a vote for Nader. And since, contrary to the assertions of the drumbeaters for Gore, the programs of the Democratic and Republican candidates are pretty much the same on issues ranging from corporate welfare to Wall Street to the war on drugs to crime to military spending, a vote for Gore is actually a vote for Bush, and a vote for Bush is a vote for Gore. It was the same in 1996. Clinton or Dole? Vote for Clinton and you got Dole anyway.
Having traveled around the country for the past few weeks, I can say with certainty that the enthusiasms of the young Nader activists aren't about to be quelled by lectures from Gloria Steinem or Barney Frank or Jesse Jackson, let alone Gitlin or Alterman, about the need to take the mature view and root for Gore-Lieberman. For one thing, they watched the debates. Did they take from those labored encounters any nourishment from Gore on issues that they have an appetite for, like trade or sweat labor or the drug war or the growing divide between rich and poor?
Gore liberals such as Steinem, or Patricia Ireland of NOW, or Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, have been trading in false currency for so long that they don't realize that as shills for the Democratic Party their credit was used up long, long ago. When Steinem, of all people, veteran of many a poverty march through the stores of Madison Avenue with whatever millionaire real estate developer or kindred entrepreneur she happens to have in tow at the time, wags her finger at Greens and tells them that poor people don't have the luxury of voting for Nader, somehow the call lacks credibility.
The final irony: As the Gore attack whippets struck at Nader, the most conspicuous effect has been a turn-off by Democratic voters, in the form of lower predicted turn-out. Early checks of Oregon's postal ballots show a sharp fall-off from the vote four years ago. This bodes ill for any hopes of a Democratic recapture of the House of Representatives. Not that Gore would necessarily care. Back in 1996 he denied House leaders vital campaign funds. He didn't want to see his rival Dick Gephardt as house majority leader. There's Al for you. And they attack Nader as bad for the Democratic Party!