Last Spin Around the Beltway

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- On the last Beltway Sunday before the nail-biting presidential election, the crowded sidewalks, bars and pizza-slice joints of D.C.'s trendy Adams Morgan neighborhood buzz with campaign talk from college kids and slumming young pols. Ethiopian-born taxi drivers break down the intricacies of Michigan electoral trends, while bartenders proclaim they want to vote for Bill Clinton one more time.

And at Ralph Nader's buzzing and cluttered four-story Victorian campaign headquarters a few blocks up from K Street, the frazzled twentysomething workers spend their little free time muttering about the lack of Nader coverage in the New York Times and Washington Post -- even as their candidate was blasting the Times' extraordinary editorial campaign against him as repulsive.

The two heavyweight papers combined for more than 15 full pages of campaign coverage Sunday, none of it focusing on the Green Party presidential candidate who, according to a Washington Post survey of 14 pundit predictions, will get 4.35 percent of the popular vote.

But the New York Times editorial board Sunday did find newsprint space to batter Nader for a third time in five months, saying he "Seems at this point to be beyond the reach of reason," that his supporters need to "face the fact that the Nader candidacy represents a direct threat to a woman's reproductive freedom," and that "it is an act of supreme arrogance for Mr. Nader to consign the country to bad policies for some imagined ideological payoff down the road."

In response, Nader told NBC's Tim Russert on Sunday morning that "this is really pretty repulsive. Even a tabloid wouldn't sink to those kinds of levels. Many of my reforms that I have proposed over the years are shared by the New York Times editorials in the past. It's just inconceivable they would be so occluded by their poster-boy, Al Gore, that they could denigrate an effort to give the American people a broader choice, and broader competition."

With the race between Democrat Gore and Republican George W. Bush getting even tighter at the wire, and the Green Party candidate's support hovering perilously close to the 5 percent minimum threshold for federal matching funds, Nader was all over the Sunday editorial pages and Monday newsmagazines littering the coffee shops of Georgetown and Foggy Bottom, even as he stayed out of the news pages.

Lifetime political reporter David Broder of the Washington Post wrote Sunday for the paper's op-ed page that Nader "put on the best campaign" of this election.

"Despite being shut out of the presidential debates, having meager funds and not a nickel of public financing, Nader has made himself the fulcrum of power in a half-dozen battleground states," Broder wrote. "Often in the past a nagging bore, he proved himself a quick and witty TV performer, adept at sharp sound bites. ... Nader's greatest feat was shifting his followers' focus from his impact on Election Day, when he is clearly a spoiler, to a different rationale for his candidacy: 'To establish a progressive political reform movement' that, he says 'will monitor and challenge the politicians of both parties.'"

Elsewhere in the Post, longtime Gore confidant and tutor Martin Peretz, editor in chief and chairman of the New Republic, argued that the country needs the vice president's pragmatic centrism, not the Green candidate's misguided idealism.

"Though the left won't admit it, Gore's fiscal conservatism, combined with his targeted spending to help society's most vulnerable, would do more to promote real-world equality than the extravagantly utopian schemes of Ralph Nader."

Nader staffers are still shaking their heads at Peretz' broadside in his own New Republic last week, "basically getting as close to calling him an anti-Semite without actually saying it," said Assistant Press Secretary Tom Adkins.