Let me start out by saying, there are two distinct groups of “they”, each with their own reasons and agendas for claiming that Ralph Nader lost the election for Al Gore in 2000.
The most visible and virulent, of course, are the sour puss Democrats. I understand how they feel. Which is why I have no respect for them anymore.
Disclosure: I was raised working class in Detroit, when unions were strong. I don’t think I even met a Republican for my first eighteen years. Certainly my parents, their friends, and everyone within 50 miles of the trailer park we lived in was Democrat. Until 1996, I voted as a knee-jerk Democrat.
So let’s get down to the nitty-gritty.
The presidential election of 2000 was decided in Florida. Almost 6,000,000 people voted. Al Gore lost to George W. by 537 votes. There were massive irregularities in the election, including 54,000 alleged felons who were disenfranchised of the right to vote. Most turned out to not be felons at all, and 54% of them were African-American, a demographic highly likely to have voted for Al Gore. Also, there were all sorts of problems with chads and double-voting, usually attributable to weirdness with vote tallying and the ballots themselves.
Having said that . . .
97,421 people voted for Ralph Nader. It is assumed that had these 97,421 people not voted for Nader, they would have voted for Al Gore and he would have swept the election.
Wrong!
But even before I get into that, why don’t they rail against the 538 registered Democrats who were too lazy, too drunk, too preoccupied, too busy shacking up with some honey, too hooked on some soap opera or sitcom, or maybe too stoned, to get off their lard asses and vote for Al? Why pick on people who made a considered, deeply principled decision to take a stand against the rabid conservatism of the right — aka the Republicans — AND against the sell-out and betrayal of the progressive left by the Democrats?
It’s no secret. Bill Clinton and Al Gore were responsible for tilting so far to the political right they gutted the Democratic Party of its core values. True progressives — the kind of people who responded to Nader’s message — comprising the 97,421 and voted for him in Florida, were finally fed up with the Democratic Party, its pandering to big business, its pathetic cowering to bubble heads like Newt Gingrich.
If Ralph Nader had not been on the ticket, most of those 97,421 would have stayed home. Because they — like yours truly — had had it up to their widow’s peak with the Beltway’s business-as-usual, resented Clinton’s pivot to the right, and were stunned if not horrified by the corporate takeover of the Democratic Party.
I admit I was charmed by Clinton. I loved his humor, his persona, his sax playing. He was — and still is — a brilliant speaker, a real charmer. But remember, this is the man who led the charge for deregulating Wall Street and the abolition of Glass-Steagall, initiated the subversion of the social safety net with his aggressive attack on welfare, and foisted on a gullible nation the horrible trade agreement known as NAFTA .
Yes … NAFTA!
I remember watching the debate between Al Gore — who by then I found both articulate and in his robotic way extremely mesmerizing — and Ross Perot. I recall my reflexive and now embarrassing rooting for Al, wanting him to put that ugly little jerk in his place. But guess what? Al was wrong! I was wrong! Ross Perot was dead on the money. NAFTA has turned out to be, just as Mr. Perot predicted, a very bad deal for America.
That was just the tip of the iceberg. Much of the Clinton-Gore agenda — Mr. Gore’s commitment to the environment being the commendable exception — turned this country completely around. But in the wrong direction!
When the 2000 campaign got underway, many of us were getting wise to this. Growing numbers of voters were becoming restless, disenchanted. I sat in the huge coliseum in Portland, Oregon where 10,000 people paid to hear Ralph Nader speak. That’s right, we paid for tickets like we were going to a Sting concert. That’s how desperate people were becoming for a presidential candidate who talked straight and made sense.
So let me take this a step further. Instead of blaming principled voters who used the ballot to make a genuine cry for real change, why not blame the Democratic Party for making a challenge from Mr. Nader a necessity? Why not blame all of the knee-jerk Democrats who maintained their steadfast, unprincipled and unthinking loyalty, despite the fact that the party was moving further and further to the right, abandoning the unions, abandoning their core working and middle class constituencies? The country then deserved and still deserves a real alternative, a choice which aligns with the vast majority of the voting public on most key issues. The Nader phenomenon was created by the gaping void left when the Democratic Party become the Republican Party Lite.
Let me add the clincher now. The record shows that 24,000 Democratic voters defected and voted for Ralph Nader. Wow! 24,000? That’s a lot!
But guess what? It pales next to the 308,000 Democrats who voted for Bush! Yes, you read that right. 308,000 Democrats crossed party lines and voted Republican. Do you still want to blame good, decent citizens who voted their conscience in an attempt to save America from the selling out of the Democratic Party to corporate interests and Wall Street?
So, misinformed, misguided Democrats: Blame yourselves for Al Gore losing the 2000 election! Don’t scapegoat a man who has given forty years of his life to unselfish public service, has been a model of integrity, has always been open and honest about his views, never sold out, and has been rewarded with ridicule, mockery and every vile form of abuse our shallow and snide media clowns could whip up between games of Foosball and sniffing celebrity panties.
At the beginning of this article, I said there were two “they” factions who propagate the Spoiler Nader myth. The second set of “theys” is a little more stealthy. Please pay close attention, folks.
I’ll tell you who else benefits from this false narrative. The conservatives! The right wing! Because if the public can be convinced that the choice is only between Tweedledee and Tweedledum — as Nader characterized the Democrat-Republican option — there will never be a credible threat to their agenda.
The only occasion Democratic candidates — generally fairly privileged and connected individuals who live more in the stratospheric upper reaches of society — give notice to the needs of the working and middle classes are when they are challenged from the left. That’s why the New Deal became the agenda of the Democratic Party. The country was in turmoil and socialists and even communists were viewed as a legitimate threat at the polls. Same thing at the end of the 19th Century with the rise of the Progressives. When there is what is perceived as a real alternative to oligarchic, monopolistic, and corporate control, the Democratic Party must embrace progressive policies or get their butts kicked at election time. It’s pure politics.
But . . . if everyone can be convinced that voting for a third party is throwing away their votes, voila! No threat from the left. The Democratic Party makes its gradual but certain migration to the comfort and safety of Daddy Warbucks. Big money talks and politicians walk. But with their backs to ordinary citizens like us. With Citizens United and the recent McCutcheon decision by the Supreme Court, that is truer than ever before in our history.
So the other they — the right wing of this country — also want you to think there has never been or never will be a progressive option. “See what happens. You vote for those kooks and you end up throwing the election!”
I’d really like to think we’re smarter than this. But it’s not encouraging. Third-party voting is a tough way to go. I voted Green the last three presidential elections. As a result I suffer the constant taunts about throwing my vote away and being an air-headed chump. But I don’t for one second believe that I in any way furthered the evil juggernaut of the right wing in this country. I like to think — perhaps too idealistically — I’m just part of an awakening, a vanguard for what will turn politics in America around and restore something resembling the ideal of democracy to our nation.
There’s one other benefit . . .
I can sleep at night.
Character Witness
Two-and-a-half years in the making, it’s not just more pulp fiction to add to the pile. I wrote this with serious intentions of making a difference __ a huge difference __ in the way America goes about its elections.
The great thing about writing a novel is being able to speak through the characters. Martin Truth is my main character for An Unlikely Truth. Martin is a third-party congressional candidate making his fourth attempt at ousting a duplicitous, blowhard, right-wing incumbent in Ohio’s conservative 3rd District. Like many __ how about most? __ politicians these days, the incumbent says one thing, then does the exact opposite. His loyalty is to big campaign donors, corporate sponsors, and deep-pocketed oligarchs, at the expense of his well-meaning but gullible constituents. In baffling but predictable lockstep, people keep voting this guy back in, even though it’s ultimately against their own interests __ sound familiar?
Martin wants to put some integrity back into politics, at least in his district, and fights an incredibly difficult battle against near impossible odds and the ruthless tactics and brutal smear campaign of his opponent, driven by a naive but firm belief in the fundamental right of voters to be properly represented.
Here is a key passage from the book . . .
“What did Martin Truth stand for?
As the Green Party candidate he obviously believed in protecting the environment. Something had to be done to stop global warming, if it wasn’t too late already. We had to end our addiction to fossil fuels, especially oil. There should be huge private and public investments in renewable alternative energy sources: wind, ocean, solar. We had to reverse deforestation. End desertification. Halt the privatization of water and other basic necessities. Encourage local food production, promote organic agriculture, and reduce the use of pesticides and GMO seeds. In general, the world needed to back off corporatizing everything and return to local production and control. With bold and determined political leaders on the front lines, it needed to confront and defeat the multinational corporate juggernaut that was polluting and destroying the Earth.
As might be expected, Martin’s progressivism extended broadly from his commitment to environmental causes to a number of co-related social issues. He categorically took exception to the every-man-for-himself madness of the right wing and believed that all of us through representative government should take a greater role in helping others, especially those who were less able to fend for themselves. This included the old, the infirm, victims of racism and other forms of discrimination. And those who had lost their jobs and fallen on hard times. The poor. The undereducated. Children. Most definitely children! Without a doubt, Martin would be labeled as a bleeding-heart liberal by the crass law-of-the-jungle conservatives, who he thought lacked both compassion and common decency, people who called themselves Christians but somehow missed the most obvious and critical aspects of Christ’s teachings: Feed the hungry, clothe the poor, heal the sick, tend to the needs of the less fortunate.
‘For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me … Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.’ – Matthew 25:35/36/40
Hardly what could be called a Bible-thumper, questionably even a Christian at all by any conventional standards, Martin had used that passage in his campaign literature last election season. Very few voters seemed to appreciate its relevance to the progressive ideals he espoused. If they did, they still managed to forget about him when it came time to vote.
Martin was also deeply committed to human rights, under relentless assault long before humankind even recognized what they were. It was ironic that now in many countries which had long had an onerous record of human rights abuses, there were significant improvements, while in America itself, allegedly champion of humane and just treatment, fairness, and respect for all, human rights was suffering dismal setbacks every day.
He was especially concerned about the intrusive levels of officially unacknowledged surveillance, and the constant push for locking up more and more citizens. There seemed to be a new mentality taking over which destroyed any sense of proportion and reason with respect to incarceration. It certainly was destroying justice and equality before the law. The operating principle was: If we build it, they will come. Or more to the point: We’ve built a helluva lot of these prisons, now we’ve got to fill them! They were filling the prisons all right. Mostly with people of color.
Admittedly, there was a lot on his wish list, a substantial catalog of action items which embraced the things Martin thought had to be done immediately to reverse the downward, self-sabotaging course of the country. It was a daunting set of tasks requiring the energy of the whole nation working together, unified and determined in their dedication to rebuild a great America.
Daunting or not, these were the things which drove him to seek a seat in Congress.
These were the things he thought crucial for a better world.”
People love to label others. Somehow this puts them at ease. Once they’ve put someone in a box, they feel they can deal with them. Or just dismiss them and walk away. I full agree with Martin Truth. So what does this make me? A liberal? A socialist?
I think it just makes me a decent human being.
If I ever have to stand trial, I hope to call to the stand a character witness who merely says that. “Like Martin Truth, John is a decent human being. He just wants a better world.”
An Unlikely Truth has been out since mid-February. Just go here for all of the ways to pick up a copy. If the reviews are to be believed, it’s a good read with a solid message.
I certainly hope your reading it will be as inspiring as it was for me to write it.
Peace.