Thanks for Nothing, Ralph

by JACK W. GERMOND and JULES WITCOVER

National Journal, November 18, 2000, page 3691

Ralph Nader scored a remarkable political trifecta in the 2000 election. He managed in a single stroke to compromise himself, his causes, and the future of third parties in American politics.

The 97,000 votes cast for Nader in Florida confirmed the worst fears of the Gore campaign and threw the outcome of the presidential race into chaos. The result is that the consumer advocate is now persona non grata with Democrats everywhere, including those in Congress, where he most needs help for his causes. For at least the foreseeable future, any Democrat who stands with Nader will face a risk rather than a political advantage. And such a threat, of course, means far less enthusiasm for the causes that ostensibly were Nader's reason for making his run for an office he knew all along he could not win.

Nor did Nader receive any compensating benefit for his failed campaign. On the contrary, he and his followers came away with nothing to show for their little adventure in presidential politics. Because he captured less than 5 percent of the national vote, the Green Party did not qualify for federal matching funds in 2004, as the Reform Party under Ross Perot managed to do four years ago. And his role in undercutting the Democratic Vice President will translate into more reluctance on the part of contributors to both his causes and his political operations.

The Nader fiasco should discourage other third-party adventures for at least a generation or two. Despite his long-standing reputation as a squeaky-clean advocate of "good" causes, he couldn't make the 5 percent threshold even against two such seemingly flawed candidates as Al Gore and his Republican rival, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas. Moreover, as Pat Buchanan demonstrated so clearly, even the federal matching money, some $12 million, wasn't enough to make the Reform Party a player in the campaign. The voters recognized that, like it or not, the choice was between Gore and Bush, and it would be a close call.

The damage Nader inflicted on Gore's chances fulfilled the predictions that any number of political professionals and opinion polls expressed before the election. The exit polls showed that perhaps one-third of Nader's voters were people who otherwise would not have gone to the polling places at all, and that the rest split roughly 2-to-1 in their preference for Gore over Bush. Thus, it is reasonable to infer that the Green Party nominee cost the Democratic candidate more than 40,000 votes in Florida, far more than the Vice President would have needed to foreclose the post-election political drama there. Whether the Nader vote was equally crucial in other states proved to be a moot point.

The campaign Nader ran was particularly infuriating to the two major party standard-bearers because of the way he justified his candidacy. He called for a plague on both their houses because, he argued, Democrats and Republicans have both slavishly capitulated to the corporate moneyed influences. It was, in effect, a less direct version of the complaint in the 1960s by another third-party candidate, Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, that there isn't "a dime's worth of difference" between the Republicans and the Democrats. This is nonsense, and no one should know it any better than Nader, who has relied for years on liberal Democrats to carry his proposals forward, often in the face of Republican resistance.

Nader and his acolytes in the Green Party put the best face on their motivations, of course. But he will not be able to avoid the perception that he was on an ego trip. Running for President, even as an asterisk, can be heady stuff. Buchanan has never seemed subject to flights of fancy, but he has now run three times, two more than he needed to prove to everyone in politics that his appeal was too limited for him to be taken seriously. Buchanan did, of course, win New Hampshire's Republican primary in 1996, and he caused some temporary embarrassment in 1992 for President Bush. But those showings were more of a reflection of the weakness of Bush and Dole than a testament to Buchanan's potential as a Republican or Reform Party candidate. This time around, the television commentator and columnist ran such a weak race that he apparently didn't divert enough conservative votes to cost Bush any electoral votes.

What Nader lacked was a clearly defined issue on which to mount the kind of protest vote that Ross Perot achieved in 1992 with 19 percent of the vote--a share that obviously undermined the Republican incumbent just as Nader undermined Al Gore. In that case, there was a pervasive national concern about the condition of the economy and the failure of then-President Bush to deal with that concern. The only question was whether voters would give the Texas billionaire or the untested governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, the chance to change things.

This year, the rationale for supporting Nader was never defined beyond a vague discontent with corporate America and its ability to influence government at the expense of "the people." Not enough Americans perceived such a threat to make Nader a serious candidate, but there were enough to make it possible for him to self-destruct.