On the Road with Ralph

By Janet Reynolds, Hartford Advocate. Posted June 13, 2000.

Stoop-shouldered and wearing the same gray suit and tie he's worn for the past three days, consumer advocate and Green Party presidential hopeful Ralph Nader stands before a group of about 30 people gathered in Paul Newman's Manhattan living room and speaks of why he wants to be president.

His Lincolnesque stature and craggy face seem oddly in tune with the primitive American art filling much of the wall space.

"I'm not going to start with the usual exhortations," Nader says. "I want to talk to you about Gerry Spence."

Spence, for the uninitiated, is a wildcat flamboyant Wyoming lawyer, famous in part for winning a $1 million-plus verdict for the estate of whistleblower Karen Silkwood against the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant in Oklahoma, after Silkwood's car mysteriously ran off the road and her apartment was found to be contaminated with plutonium. When Nader heard a few years ago that a U.S. Senate position was opening up in Wyoming, he called Spence and urged him to run.

"Ralph," Nader recalled Spence saying, "I'm sitting here looking out the windows at the Grand Tetons, my life is good, I can take the cases I want. Why would I want to enter that Senate cesspool?"

"I think your country needs you," Nader says he responded. "I said, 'Suppose someone came by in the middle of the night and dropped a truckload full of manure on your front step, blocking your front door. Would you fight it or would you still say, 'I'm sitting here looking out the window at the Tetons and life is good'?"

There was a pause on the other end of the phone before Spence said, "You bastard."

The group in Newman's living room includes former talk-show host and longtime Nader friend Phil Donahue, as well as both the publisher and the editor of The Nation. After a pleasant meal of mushroom-stuffed chicken, wild rice and lightly sautéed vegetables, they chuckle at the punch line. Nader smiles before delivering the real punch.

"I'm only standing here because any one of dozens don't want to."

Not exactly the fist-pumping rhetoric typical of other presidential hopefuls, who call up years of supposed public service as they shout, "I can't do it without you!"

The anti-politician Nader offers a far different message. "We're counting on each other," he said repeatedly to citizens' groups around New England two weeks ago, "and I don't want to do it without you because it doesn't work."

It's a low-key approach that has some dismissing Nader's campaign even as it's begun to hit its stride. By the middle of June, Nader, who announced his candidacy at the end of February, will have visited all 50 states, something no other candidate will do. He has pledged to raise $5 million and has raised more than $600,000 so far. He is on the ballot in 14 states, and volunteers are gathering signatures to get on the ballot in the rest. He expects to have 30 full-time organizers focusing on getting out the vote.

But Nader must overcome more than the already large -- some would say insurmountable -- obstacle of running as a third-party candidate. Besides fighting to get on the ballot and included in the presidential debates, (see "The Debate Debacle"), Nader must combat the perception that he's yesterday's man.

Sure, he was instrumental in the mid-'60s and early '70s in changing political history. His intervention between 1966 and 1970 via Nader's Raiders, a group of young lawyers dedicated to exposing government abuse and corporate wrongs, is directly responsible for the Traffic and Motor Vehicle Act, Wholesale Poultry Products Act, Wholesale Meat Act, Radiation Control Act, Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act, Coal Mine Health and Safety Act and Occupation Health and Safety Act. In addition, Nader was a key player in creating the Freedom of Information Act and the Consumer Protection Agency.

But in a society whose attention span can be measured in 30-second sound bites, many wonder what Nader has done for them lately. Those who do remember his role in this country's history may worry that his low-key approach and insistence on citizen involvement and grassroots democracy are anachronistic in an age rooted in cynicism and apathy.

Nader is haunted as well by his 1996 presidential bid. He spent less than $5,000 and did not campaign as the Green Party's candidate then, prompting people and political pundits to ask why they should believe he's really running this time around -- especially if it means that a vote for Nader is a vote taken away from presumed Democratic candidate Al Gore.

To dismiss Nader this way, however, is to miss the many ways in which he could be a real factor in this campaign and the ways in which he could, as he has in the past, change the course of political history. Overwhelmingly disgusted with political patronage and corporate corruption, Americans have avoided the voting booth in hordes in recent elections.

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