Let the Blame Games Begin

Before the votes are even counted in the scion-versus-scion, $300-million-plus presidential election of 2000, nervous Democrats are looking for a fall guy.

As the race entered its final fortnight, party loyalists and liberals ganged up on consumer advocate Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate. They complained that if Vice President Al Gore were to lose, Nader would bear the blame for the ascension of an anti-abortion president allied with corporate polluters, the conservative movement and the religious right. (Interestingly enough, the Republican side has not engaged in a pre-blame-game.)

Don't throw your vote away, don't elect George W. Bush, they urged. The Gore campaign dispatched prominent libs -- Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator Paul Wellstone, Jesse Jackson, Gloria Steinem and Robert Redford -- to Nader-friendly pockets, including Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington, to douse Ralph Fever. Some Dems have even called for a last-minute Nader bug-out.

After months of Gore aides maintaining their boss would not directly address the Nader challenge, Gore started responding to the Nader threat, boasting that his environmental record was as strong as Nader's. (How many nuclear power plants has Gore shut down? In fact, the Clinton-Gore Administration has demanded that the Kyoto global warming accords include emission credits for nuclear power, which would promote the development of nuclear power -- and more potential Chernobyls -- abroad.) And the anti-Nader campaign has gotten ugly. Steinem, for one, blasted Nader's rallies for being "so white, middle-class and disproportionately male."

There is a tactical argument for the Democrats to make to progressives: you have to vote for Gore, even if his record, positions, campaign finances, and personality are disappointing, to block the Texas Governor. Call it the Hollywood Squares plan. It's a pitch that has some sense to it. But citing Nader as the undoing of the Gore campaign is both melodramatic and premature, if not unfair and inaccurate. It is based on the fuzzy-math assumption that every vote Nader bags will be stolen -- as if votes can be swiped -- from Gore's pouch.

Clearly, not all Nader voters are Gore voters who were lured away by a progressive Pied Piper. Perhaps as many half of Nader supporters would sit this contest out if they were forced to choose a candidate from the Democratic-Republican, corporate-funded duopoly. At Nader events across the country, I have talked to his fans. He has -- somewhat surprisingly -- drawn well among the altie crowd -- students and post-students who believe they are part of an anti-corporate impulse (some call it a movement). They consider politics-as-usual a thoroughly corrupt and worthless institution, they worry more about the WTO than IPOs, and they desire a public debate dominated by green sensibilities, not greenbacks.

That Nader has rallied this small army of the disaffected is a feat. He's even gotten them to pay for admission to "super rallies" of 10,000 to 15,000 people. And Steinem -- who deserves respect and admiration -- is wrong in her mau-mauing depiction of Nader's gatherings. Plenty of ovaries are present. During a "Let Ralph Debate" protest at the University of Massachusetts campus on the evening of the first presidential debate, several college-age women told me they had been moved by Nader's no-bull critique of corporate culture to travel from upstate New York to Boston to join the protest. By the way, Nader's running-mate is a woman -- native American activist Winona LaDuke -- his campaign manager is a woman, and he is supported by noted feminist writer Barbara Ehrenreich. In Steinem's views, are they dupes, traitors to their gender?

Many of the young people Nader has revved up, as well as some of the older ones, would not otherwise be voting for Gore. The Nader voters also include independents and perhaps a few out-of-whack Republicans. (Nader's most significant strategic mistake was not aggressively courting the independent bloc. With his impassioned support of campaign finance reform and fair trade, he might have fared well with recovering Perotistas and other indies.) So before anyone takes Nader's standing in the polls and adds it to the Gore column, that number has to be cut probably by 50 percent, if not more. When this is done, the number of states where the so-called Nader affect might impede Gore drops -- at this point -- to one or two.