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NADER In a message dated 8/23/00 5:12:28 PM, NJ4Nader writes: Harper's Magazine -- September, 2000

Cover Story: A CITIZEN IN FULL (excerpts)

Ralph Nader campaigns for president with a course in civics



By Lewis W. Lapham, Editor of Harper's Magazine "We can have a democratic society or we can have a concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both."
-- Louis Brandeis

Ralph Nader declared himself a candidate for president on February 21 in a Washington hotel, and for the next two months the national news media were careful to ignore the proposition. Although well-known as a zealous consumer advocate, Nader didn't enjoy much standing as a politician.

So little was said about Nader's presidential campaign in February and March that as late as April 10 it wasn't hard to find New York sources supposedly well-informed (editors at Doubleday, columnists for Vogue) who hadn't been told. They had heard that somewhere west of the Pecos River Pat Buchanan was on the hustings for Ross Perot's troubled Reform Party, but if in answer to a question about the November election I said that I intended to vote for Ralph Nader, I could count on expressions of genuine surprise.

Most of the upscale media adopted a complacent tone when they were obliged to take notice of Nader's campaign in early May. The candidate by then had placed his name on the ballot in fifteen states; actively in search of votes, he was making stump speeches in Kentucky and South Carolina, attracting endorsements from prominent celebrities (among them Willie Nelson, Susan Sarandon, Pearl Jam, and Paul Newman), apparently being taken seriously by the United Auto Workers union. Still not enough of a campaign to warrant mention on the political web sites maintained by ABC, CBS, and CNN, but certainly a curiosity deserving of the same attention paid to spotted owls and giant pandas.

Nader's candidacy gained currency during the spring and early summer (his acceptance in Denver of the Green Party's presidential nomination, nearly $1 million raised in campaign contributions, his name on the ballot in another ten states), but the official portrait in the media (that of the harmless reformer, high-minded but faintly ridiculous) wasn't retouched until June 30, when the New York Times promoted him to the rank of public menace. The upgrade took the form of an impatient editorial, royalist in sentiment and pompous in tone, reprimanding Nader for his meddling in an election that was beyond his sphere of competence and none of his concern:

"He is engaging in a self-indulgent exercise that will distract voters from the clear-cut choice represented by the major-party candidates, Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George Bush.

"It is especially distressing to see Mr. Nader flirt with the spoiler role.

"Of course, both Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Nader have the right to run. But given the major differences between the prospective Democratic and Republican nominees, there is no driving logic for third-party candidacy this year, and the public deserves to see the major-party candidates compete on an uncluttered playing field."

Disappointed as well as piqued, the editorialist acknowledged Nader's "legacy as a conscience-driven crusader" and took the trouble to commend him for championing the cause of automobile safety and having "sharpened Americans' awareness of the flaws in their political system." Which was why it was distressing to see a man once principled destroy his reputation with conduct unbecoming a moralist. His irresponsible behavior threatened Al Gore's chances in "swing states like California," and if he were a true gentleman and a real liberal he would stay with the seat belts and leave the politics to the professionals.

It so happened that June 30 was the same day on which I had arranged to interview Nader in Washington, also to accompany him on his afternoon rounds of the television talk-show circuit. I'd read the Times editorial on the plane from New York, and when I arrived shortly before noon at Nader's campaign headquarters on N.W. Fifteenth Street, I discovered that it had been received as a gift of rare good fortune. The few campaign workers present looked like graduate students -- young, idealistic, underpaid, not the kind of people given to cutting deals with trade-association lobbyists or shouting into telephones -- and their response to the rebuke was less loud or sarcastic than quietly pleased. It meant they were making progress. The lead editorial no less, publicity that money couldn't buy, 618 words of fatuous indignation proving Nader a candidate in fact as well as theory. Several recent news clippings posted on the walls confirmed an uptick of interest from syndicated columnists suddenly as worried as the Times about the damage likely to be done to Gore, and among other signs as hopeful, Nader's web site was receiving 20,000 visits a day; 12,000 volunteers were setting up storefront operations in every one of the fifty states; there was talk of a campaign bus, maybe even television commercials; some of the national opinion polls were conceding Nader 7 percent of the prospective November vote, as opposed to 2 percent for the far more lavishly financed Pat Buchanan; Vogue had called with the request for an interview; so had CNBC and Slate.

I found Nader in the front room on the third floor. He was wearing his customary rumpled suit. The standard press description gets it right about Nader's frugal habits and bookish manner -- sixty-six years old and never married, he doesn't own a car, a cell phone, or a credit card -- but it misses his candor, his modesty, and his wit. More amused than offended by the Times editorial, he asked me if I knew who might have written it: "You've got to love these people," Nader said. "They think the American electoral process is a gated community."

Never in recent memory, he said, have the Democratic and Republican parties so closely resembled each other, and if the absence of 100 million citizens from the polls in the 1996 presidential election didn't indicate, or at least strongly hint at, an impressive lack of respect for the threadbare wisdoms in office (and thus "a driving logic" for a third party, or any party at all that could reinvigorate the country's moribund political debate), then what would it take to prompt the editors at the Times to smuggle their heads out of the sand? For ten years the American electorate has been voicing its objection to "a government of the Exxons, by the General Motors, and for the Du Ponts." The party of discontent voted for Ross Perot, elected Jesse Ventura governor of Minnesota, made credible the candidacy of John McCain, paraded in animal costumes through the streets of Seattle.

Several well-wishers already had telephoned that morning with the suggestion that Nader distribute reprints of the editorial as an endorsement, on the ground that anybody who so provoked the Times couldn't be all bad, and when Studs Terkel called from Chicago to offer the same advice, Nader said, "Remember that you're talking to your friend, the clutterer. Obstructing the playing field for next autumn's Yale-Harvard game."

They talked for five minutes, then it was John Anderson on the phone, saying that when he had run as a third-party candidate in 1980 the Times had cast him in the same role --"spoiler," "ego-driven" nuisance, no friend of America.

"You would think," Nader said, "that in twenty years they could come up with some new words."

The judges on the bench of prime-time opinion say that Nader lacks charisma, but the word admits of different interpretations, and if it can be referred to a lively intelligence as well as a bright smile, Nader seems to me a good deal more charismatic than David Letterman or Brad Pitt. I know of few spectacles more entertaining than the play of a mind being put to constructive or imaginative use, and I like to listen to Nader talk. I never fail to learn something new, and in Nader's idealism I find an antidote for the cynicism that constitutes an occupational hazard on the shop floors of the image-making industries in New York.

Accepting the Green Party nomination in Denver on June 27, Nader had presented his campaign as a question -- "How badly do we want a just and decent society, a society that raises our expectations of ourselves?" -- and in Washington three days later he supplemented it with further commentary and explanation.

"Unlike Gush and Bore," he said, "I don't promote myself as a solution to the nation's problems. The idea is to encourage a lot of other people to use the tools of democratic government to take control of the assets they hold in common -- the public lands, the public broadcast frequencies, the public money. Whatever your issue is, whether it's racism, homophobia, taxes, health care, urban decay, you're not going to go anywhere with it unless you focus on the concentration of power. We have an overdeveloped plutocracy and an underdeveloped democracy, too many private interests commandeering the public interest for their own profit. Most Americans don't realize how badly they're being harmed by the unchecked commercialization of what belongs to the commonwealth. If enough people knew what questions to ask, we have both the ways and means to achieve better schools, a healthier environment, a more general distribution of decent health care."

Nader has been asking the questions for forty years. He established his credibility as a consumer advocate in 1965 when he published Unsafe at Any Speed, a fierce indictment of the carelessness with which General Motors manufactured its cars. The book resulted in legislation that forced G.M. to improve its automotive designs, and Nader went on to search out further proofs of malfeasance almost everywhere else in corporate America, filing investigative briefs against oil companies, banks, hospitals; publishing another twenty books (about corporate accountability, the judiciary and banking committees in both the Senate and the House, etc.); organizing numerous civic-minded committees (among them the Center for the Study of Responsive Law and the Public Interest Research Group); and bringing about, or at least setting in train, changes for the better in the management of the country's pension funds, classified information, and toxic wastes.

"The oligarchy," he said, never wants anyone to know what, or how much, ordinary citizens can accomplish if they learn to use the power of their own laws. Apathy is good for business-as-usual; so is cynicism. Convince the kids that history is at an end, that nothing important remains to be discovered, done, or said, and maybe they won't ask why a corporate CEO receives a salary four hundred times greater than that of the lowest paid worker in his own company."

The first of Nader's television appearances, a taped broadcast for CNN's Crossfire, was scheduled for 2:00 PM, but he was slow to finish talking to a reporter from Business Week, and in the car Theresa Amato, his campaign manager, worried about being late.

As Nader was being ushered to his seat at the table between them, Theresa and I found chairs against a back wall, and Novak greeted the candidate with a condescending joke. "Well, Ralph," he said. "I see that you have brought the whole of your bloated campaign staff."

Nader let the remark pass without comment, and while the technicians fixed his microphone Novak turned to the teleprompter to read the opening tease. Smoothing his vest, adjusting his tie, he puffed up his voice into the registers of mock urgency and canned sensation, bringing his viewers the promise of furious debate -- "Ralph Nader in the crossfire. Ralph Nader and his third-party presidential campaign. Will it last? Will he find money? Will he take votes from Al Gore? Is he serious? Can he win?"

The lights went briefly down, and during the lull that accompanied the first commercial break, Novak sagged back into the posture of a bored Washington courtier, the Rosencrantz to Bill Press's Guildenstern (or, on alternate days of the week, the Guildenstern to Press's Rosencrantz); it was obvious that with respect to the questions he had just asked, his answer to all of the above was no. Nor was he particularly interested in the interview that he was about to conduct. Nader quite clearly wasn't going to be giving tours of the White House or tipping anybody off to tomorrow's bombing of Belgrade. But the show was the show, and what Novak had to sell was the sport of bearbaiting. When the lights again came up, he instantly regained the pose of "the citizen who cares" and began a garbled interrogation along the lines of the morning editorial in the Times, "Are you really totally indifferent to these two candidates?" "If you were to take away enough votes from California to carry the state for George Bush, I think that might elect him. Does that give you trouble sleeping?"

Nader said he could sleep. The Democratic Party had shifted its thinking and policies so far to the right that the only difference between Bush and Gore was the relative velocity "with which their knees hit the floor when the big corporations knocked on the door."

Nader began to explain his reasons for saying what he'd said (i.e., with specific reference to the Clinton Administration's record on child welfare, medical insurance, national forests, the Glass-Steagall Act, etc., etc.), but well before he could complete the bill of indictment it was time for another commercial break, and as soon as the cameras returned for the second half of the program, Novak was talking about "Ralph Nader, consumer advocate multi-millionaire!" He had seen a newspaper report placing Nader's net worth at $4 million, and real money in the hands of anybody to the left of William F. Buckley struck him as prima facie evidence of hypocrisy. Liberals were supposed to be poor; their poverty was what made them liberals.

So, said Novak, as if peering under a pillow or a rock, you have $4 million. Nader said the number was about right, but he went on to explain that he lived on only a small fraction of the income and gave the bulk of it to his several public action committees. The answer didn't satisfy Novak, and for the next fifteen minutes, attempting to discredit Nader's claim to the prerogatives of an idealist, he pursued the subject with questions about how the money was invested, in what kind of stocks, and were those companies cruel monopolies, enemies of the people, creatures of the corporate state? Because Nader answered the quiz without embarrassment or evasion, the effect was lost.

Twenty minutes later we were back in the car, and Nader was saying that he thought the show had gone about as well as could be expected. He cited the list of issues on which Gore had sold out his avowed concern for the environment to the highest corporate bidder -- oil development in Alaska, organic food standards, greenhouse gases, ozone-depleting chemicals, the California redwoods.

"Critics tell me that I ought to work 'within the system,' but people 'within the system' don't welcome new ideas. They like to talk about social change, but when it comes to actually doing something, they remember that social change is outrageous, un-American, and wrong. Look at the history of the country. I don't care whether you're talking about the Revolution of 1776, or abolitionists forcing the issue of slavery in the 1850s, about women's suffrage, the late nineteenth-century populist revolt against the eastern banks and railroads, the trade-union movement, Social Security, meat inspection, civil rights. The change invariably begins with people whom the defenders of the status quo denounce as agitators, communists, hippies, weirdos. And then, ten or twenty years later, after the changes have taken place, the chamber of commerce discovers that everybody's profits have improved. The captains of industry never seem to understand that a free democracy is the precondition for a free market; try to turn the equation the other way around, and you end up with an economy like the one in Indonesia."

By the time we returned to the building on N.W. Fifteenth Street three more newspapers had called with requests for interviews, 60 Minutes had expressed interest, and Tom Brokaw's producers had asked if it might be possible for Tom to follow Nader into Minnesota with a camera crew. The campaign staff was impressed, but not to the extent of sending out for beer and paper hats. Like their candidate, they understood the political crisis in the country not as an ideological quarrel between liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, but rather as an argument between the people who would continue the American experiment and those who believe the experiment has gone far enough, between the inertia conducive to acceptance of things-as-they-are and the energy inherent in the hope of things-as-they-might-become.

To the delegates at the Green Party convention in Colorado, Nader had defined his politics as "first and foremost a movement of thought, not of belief," and later in the afternoon, riding in a taxi to the PBS studio in Arlington, Virginia, I asked him whether politics so defined didn't set him up for a good deal of disappointment. "Maybe it would if I were into mood changes, he said.

The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer allotted Nader ten minutes at the top of the broadcast and didn't bother with the theatrics of false confrontation.
Lehrer asked straightforward questions, but they were so tired and perfunctory that it was apparent he didn't understand Nader's critique of the sham democracy. Nor, like Novak and Press, did he seem to know what was meant by the phrase "economic injustice." Where was the problem, and why the complaint? Here we all were in the most prosperous society ever to see the light of heaven, real estate prices going nowhere but up, the ever expanding middle class floating in suburban swimming pools on the buoyant mattress of the Nasdaq, and why were we talking about poor people?

In the time allowed, the conversation couldn't become anything other than an exchange of platitudes, but it permitted at least one memorable question and answer. Lehrer was asking Nader what he would do in and with the office of the presidency in the unlikely event that he won the election. How could Nader possibly appreciate the complex workings of all those vast and complex government agencies in Washington? Nader paused for a moment, as if he couldn't quite believe what he'd just heard. Then he laughed and said, "Well, I don't know anybody who has sued more of them."

The station provided another taxi to return Nader to Washington, and he offered to drop me at the airport if I still had policy issues that I wished to raise. Once again we found ourselves stalled in traffic, but over the course of the next half hour I mostly asked less lofty questions about Winona LaDuke, the vice presidential candidate on the Green Party ticket -- an Indian woman, a White Earth Anishinaabeg from Minnesota, Harvard educated, an author, a social activist who shared his views on foreign trade and human rights. He'd met her a few years ago and had been impressed by her integrity and strength of character; he knew of no finer person in the United States.

As my plane to New York climbed into a steep turn over the Potomac, the sight of the Lincoln Memorial in the lovely evening light reminded me that a democratic republic knows no higher rank or title than that of citizen. The media prefer celebrities, who come and go like soup cans or summer moths, unthreatening and ephemeral. Cheaply produced and easily replaced, made to the measure of our own everyday weakness, celebrities ask nothing of us except a round of applause. Like President Clinton, they let us off the hook. Nader sets the hook on the sharp points of obligation to a higher regard for our own intelligence and self-worth. Less interested in the counting of votes than in the lesson of freedom, he mounts his campaign on the proposition that the party of things-as-they-are depends for its continued survival on the party of things-as-they-might-become.


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