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How to Beat Bush, part 1
June
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June
11, 2003
Spoilers or Saviors?
Greens,
the Antiwar Movement and 2004
By TOM GORMAN
Even today, two and a half years later, you still
hear it. "Oh, that Ralph Nader. How can he sleep at night?"
Letter-writers to the Los Angeles Times
(4/5/03) carped that the Green Party should have no say in resisting
the Iraq war, one arguing that "I remember Ralph Nader's
simplistic accusation that there is no practical difference between
Democrats and Republicans," and another who claims that
the Greens were "the same party that made a mantra of the
phrase "'there is no difference between Bush and Gore,'"
calling this assertion "absurd" and pointing out, among
other policies that would supposedly have been different had
Gore been elected, "a host of civil liberties crackdowns"
under the Bush Administration. (This writer apparently forgets
that it was the Clinton Administration that started us on the
slippery slope of Constitution-shredding with his Anti-Terrorism
Act in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing.) Another Times
letter-writer (3/25/03) cautioned that while he agreed with Michael
Moore's Oscar comments, Moore's "own support of Ralph Nader
contributed to the 'election' of Bush. By following the absurd
Nader line that there was 'no difference' between Al Gore and
Bush." War resister and folk hero of the Vietnam Era Daniel
Ellsberg even had harsh words for Nader. "To say that there
was literally no difference between these two candidates was
a falsehood as great as I have ever heard in electoral politics,"
(Los Angeles Times, 4/25/03). (Really, Dan? What about "I
am not a crook"? Or, more recently, how about the notion
that Al Gore was the pro-environment, pro-working class, tough-on-big-business
candidate?)
In an Associated Press article, (3/21/03)
Nader rebuffed such claims. "Nader. . . dismisses suggestions
[that] he asserted during the election there was no difference
between Bush and Gore. 'I never said that. I said there are few
major differences. . . . The similarities between the two parties
tower over the dwindling reality of the issues they're willing
to fight for.'" Moreover, when Nader made these types of
comments during the campaign, he seems to have said it about
as often as Adam Smith referred to the "invisible hand"
of the marketplace in The Wealth of Nations (i.e., not many),
but (like Smith's metaphor) people ascribe it as a "mantra."
Another point often made by the "blame
Nader first crowd" is along the lines of "we wouldn't
be invading Iraq if Al Gore had won." If these people have
this kind of ability to know what "would have been"
under Gore, one wonders why they didn't see the Florida debacle
coming and raise a big stink about Jeb's reintroduction of Jim
Crow to purge Blacks from the voting rolls. (One also wonders
why, after they knew about it, the Gore campaign didn't do more
to defend these disenfranchised African Americans? Or why the
were-tough-on-crime-just-like-Republicans Clinton/Gore team didn't
realize that cramming two million people into American prisons
over the last decade--a disproportionate number of them Bla!
ck--was actually disenfranchising one of their traditional constituencies?)
What we do know about what Gore would have done as President
comes in his many statements since 9/11. Gore has whole-heartedly
praised Bush's attack on Afghanistan, saying repeatedly that
it is just what he would have done if elected. (There are, of
course, those Democrats who supported the brutal terrorist attack
on Afghanistan, but decried Bush's terrorist attack on Iraq.
Most likely, these are the same moralists who see Hiroshima as
"justified," but Nagasaki as "excessive.")
Would Gore have invaded Iraq? Perhaps not; for the sake of argument,
let's assume that he would not have. What wou! ld that have left
us with? Among other things, the status quo of thousands of Iraqi
children dying from US-led UN sanctions, a policy that Gore supported
even more strongly than Clinton during the 1990s. Nader was right:
choosing the lesser of two evils leaves you with evil.
Now, admittedly, in the aftermath of
the election, as a Nader supporter I was at first hiding out
like the apostles after the Crucifixion. But over the last two
years, I have drawn some hypotheses about Nader's candidacy that
I rarely see in print. As described above, many argue that Nader
cost Gore the election. (An episode of The Simpsons depicts a
meeting of the Springfield Republican Party wherein the leader
asks if there are any ideas for strategy. A gangly man in a frumpy
suit furiously raises his hand, but the leader chides him, "No,
no Nader; you've already done enough.") This assertion of
"Nader-as-spo! iler" is impossible to prove or disprove.
We will never know if those who voted for Nader would have voted
for Gore, some other third-party candidate, or would have not
voted at all. Speaking for myself, had Nader not been running,
I most likely would not have voted (or I would have voted for
Kodos_again, Simpsons fans will get the reference.)
If we argue that most of the two and
a half million votes that Nader garnered would not have been
cast at all (or would have been cast for an even more obscure
third-party candidate), perhaps, it could be argued, Nader's
campaign galvanized enough Democrats to get out and vote for
Gore in order to counter the "Nader factor." Had Nader
not run, it is entirely possible that the lack of voter interest
would have led to smaller numbers of Democrats bothering to vote.
(Even partisan analysts agree that Republicans are better at
getting out the vote; where Democrats try to be, well, democratic,
Republicans demand and receive greater discipline from their
rank-and-file.) This would have meant a "moral" vic!
tory for George Bush in winning both the popular and electoral
votes, rather than the specious "legal" victory that
leaves an asterisk next to his "Presidency." Had Nader
not run, the Republicans would not have had to resort to the
Brownshirt tactics that they did (or the tactics to which they
resorted before the election, such as purging the voter rolls,
would not have mattered, the argument would go, because Bush
would have won anyway).
The "Nader factor" then, is
akin to the antiwar movement of the last year in that they both
robbed the "victors" of moral legitimacy. Nader drove
Democrats to get out the vote (though Gore was still unable even
to win his home state) and kept Bush from winning election outright,
much like the antiwar movement in the US, and much more so around
the world, kept the UN from giving legal sanction to the Iraq
invasion. Nader didn't stop Bush, but he helped put a cloud of
illegitimacy over him; the antiwar movement didn't stop the war
(which was unlikely in any event), but made Bush go ahead with
it despite the opposition of practically the entire world. Had
Bush gotten the UN approval he so desperately sought, he would
be clamoring even more than he has for an invasion of Syria,
Iran, North Korea, etc., and be more likely to receive the approval
of the UN. (Bush often said in the lead-up to war that the UN
risked irrelevancy; think how irrelevant it would be had it become
a rubber stamp for Bush's imperialism.)
What, then, should be the Green plan
for 2004? I have debated over the last several months whether
to support whichever Republican in Democrat's clothing is put
forward, or to support a third party candidate, such as Nader.
(Unfortunately, as this Tom
Tomorrow cartoon points out, Dennis Kucinich has little
chance of gaining the support of the "New" Democrats,
i.e., "Old" Republicans). Many argue that "giving"
Bush a second term is so dangerous that even Joe Lieberman would
be an improvement. Perhaps so. But then, considering what I've
written ! above, what action will "give" Bush a second
term? Going back to my analogy of the antiwar movement, if one
had "supported the Democrats," one would have supported
the war, considering the manner in which the Democrats rolled
over to the imperialist whims of Bush. After all, the Democratic
position had never been "antiwar"; rather, it was "war
with a greater backing from the rest of the world." If one
is forced to choose between the Democratic and Republican positions
on the Iraq war, off the table is any discussion of the morality
of the war itself. Similarly, if Greens and other third-party
activists decide to throw their support behind the Democratic
candidate in 2004, it is possible that the complacency that led
many (if not most) Democrats to support the war, could also lead
to greater indiff! erence toward "voting Bush out."
Indeed, the only hope for energizing the Democrats to elect their
candidate--and thereby deny Bush a second term--may be a strong
third-party challenge.
Ralph Nader may just save the Democrats
from themselves after all.
Tom Gorman
is a writer and activist living in Glendale, California. He welcomes
comments at tgorman222@hotmail.com.
Weekend
Edition Features
Alexander
Cockburn
The Terrible Truth
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Going Critical: Bush's War on Endangered Species
Joanne
Mariner
Ashcrofts Sides with Torturers
Steven
Sherman
A Different Theory of Everything
Ron Jacobs
Sports, Politics and the 60s
M.
Shahid Alam
Pauperizing the Periphery
Amelia
Peltz
If This is the Road, I'd Rather be Lost
Shelton
Hull
Another Powell, Another Capitulation
Binoy Kampmark
Nuclear Deterrence and North Korea
Ben
Tripp
A Fish Story
Sen. Robert
Byrd
Where is the Outrage?
Robin
Philpot
Congo Distortions
Julie Hilden
Murder and the Matrix
Laura
Flanders
An Interview with Isabel Allende
David Lindorff
The Last Byline
Adam
Engel
Talk Dirty Scary Monsters
Poets'
Basement
Kearney, Reiss, Guthrie, Albert and Hamod
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