Invasion of the Greens

by MARGARET KRIZ

National Journal, January 6, 2001, volume 33, issue 1, page 22

In a tattered, pre-Civil War town house in Washington, former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader and a small band of 20-something true believers have spent the weeks since Election Day filling out the requisite Federal Election Commission forms and poring over voter returns from around the country, looking for evidence that Nader's candidacy helped the liberal causes to which he has dedicated his life.

Nader argues, for example, that his bid for the White House attracted thousands of new voters to the polls in Washington state. According to his statistics, those newcomers helped Democratic senatorial candidate Maria Cantwell win by a razor-thin 1,900-vote margin against the environmental community's archenemy, Republican Sen. Slade Gorton. Leaning over stacks of papers in his cluttered office, Nader makes his case: "If they want to blame me for causing [Vice President Al] Gore to lose, then why don't they credit me for bringing the Senate to 50-50?"

In the world according to Ralph, his $8 million presidential bid shifted the political balance in Washington and advanced a host of progressive causes. "We're laying the basis for a long-term political reform movement," he told National Journal. He argued that, for the next two years, Capitol Hill Democrats will work harder on liberal causes because they'll be worried about facing Green Party opponents in future elections. "The Senators will now be saying, `Hey, there's another variable here,' "Nader said. "Because now they know they could lose some votes to the Greens."

But if the 66-year-old Nader thought that liberal activists in Washington would cheer him as their returning hero, he couldn't have been more wrong. In the aftermath of Gore's defeat, Nader has been reviled by some of the liberal activists with whom he's stood shoulder to shoulder during three decades of public policy battles. They've accused Nader of deliberately playing the spoiler in the presidential race, particularly in Florida, which Gore lost narrowly to President-elect George W. Bush. The outcome would have been far different, they note, if some of Nader's 97,000 Florida votes had gone to Gore.

After the election, Democratic consultant James Carville called on progressives to spurn Nader. Speaking on MSNBC's Meet the Press, Carville charged: "He obviously cost us the presidency. I will not speak this egomaniac's name. Not for the next four years."

"He had a disastrous impact on the election," Steve Rosenthal, political director for the AFL-CIO, said in an interview. "We're in the mess we're in right now because of Ralph Nader's candidacy." Nader protests that it's unfair to target him as the main reason Gore lost. "Let's put it this way: Al Gore slipped on 15 banana peels, and they're picking one," he said.

Now left-leaning activists are raising an alarm about Nader's intentions for 2002. Nader wants the Green Party to field 1,000 candidates to run in local, state, and congressional elections. Liberals fear that an onslaught of Green challengers in close congressional races could torpedo Democratic hopes of winning control of the House and Senate.

Nader said he won't encourage Greens to run against liberal Democrats in tight re-election races--but he won't discourage them, either. His primary goal is to expand the reach of the Green Party. "When you're building a party and a candidate is challenging a fairly good Democrat, what are you going to say? `Back off'?" Nader said. "You'd shatter the whole morale of the party if you start saying, `Oh, this guy's good. Don't challenge him.'"

Nader would prefer that Green Party candidates run against congressional incumbents who don't have a strong opponent. In those races, the Greens could "become a second party against a Democrat or Republican right away," he said. "You can get 20 or 30 percent" of the vote. That's what happened in November, when a Green ran against Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash. The Green Party challenger, Joe Szwaja, garnered 20 percent of the vote, even though the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club had endorsed McDermott.

Nader is also encouraging Green Party candidates to run against some moderate Republicans, such as Rep. Nancy L. Johnson of Connecticut, who has, he said, a "terrible" record on progressive issues. (That's not how the Sierra Club, which endorsed Johnson in the November election, viewed her.) Nader denied published reports that he would encourage Greens to challenge liberal Democratic Sens. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin and Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. But he welcomed future Green challenges to Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., who won re-election against Republican Dick Zimmer by a mere 653 votes. Environmental and union activists vigorously backed Holt in that race. But Nader described Holt as "a really bad Democrat. Rush Holt deserves to be defeated," he said. Green Party candidate Carl Meyer drew 5,774 votes in that race. Nader predicted that next time around, Meyer could tip the vote against Holt.

Wouldn't that help conservative Republicans? Nader argues that such a defeat would be "a wake-up call for other Democrats.... Remember when the Christian Right came up? They defeated [Rep. John] Buchanan [R-Ala.] in the primary. What a message that sent to Republicans!" In that 1980 race, the Christian Right helped conservative Republican Albert Lee Smith defeat the moderate Buchanan.

Nader said that an attack on the Democrats is warranted because Democratic leaders are taking liberal voters for granted. Nader's confrontational stance angers his allies on the left, many of whom poured time and money into campaigns to elect liberal and, in most cases, Democratic candidates to Congress. Deborah Callahan, president of the League of Conservation Voters, warned that an invasion of new Green Party congressional candidates could severely damage the re-election chances of environmental champions in Congress. "Where a Green can run and do well is a seat that's probably held by a liberal Democrat," she said. "And that's where we have some of our best environmental support." The AFL-CIO's Rosenthal added, "If the Greens are just running as spoilers, if they help elect a Republican with a zero percent record on our issues vs. a Democrat who has a 75 percent record, that's a big setback for us."

THROWING STONES

During the last weeks of the 2000 presidential race, the Gore campaign enlisted dozens of Democrats and liberal leaders in an all-out crusade to stop Nader. The Core army fanned out to universities and liberal enclaves around the nation, arguing that a vote for Nader was really a vote for Bush. A team of prominent former Naderites wrote letters and op-ed columns calling for Nader to withdraw from the race. Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., sent a letter to The Nation belittling Nader's liberal credentials. Some begged Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, which Nader founded in 1971, to intervene with Nader. "I told them that he's the most stubborn man in America," Clay-brook recalled in an interview. "It'd be a big waste of my time."

When the votes were counted, Nader didn't win the 5 percent of the national vote that the Green Party needed to qualify for federal matching funds in the 2004 presidential race. He received 10 percent of the total vote in Alaska and 5 percent or more in 12 other states. But nationwide, Nader earned only 2.7 percent of the vote.

Because of the pivotal role Nader played in Florida, however, some liberals contend that he's to blame if Bush does any serious damage to progressive causes. "If the right wing ever does take control of the Supreme Court, unfortunately I think that will become [Nader's] lasting legacy," said Ralph G. Neas, the head of People for the American Way. "That would be a real tragedy, almost of Greek tragedy proportions."

Longtime allies say that Nader's candidacy has changed his public image. "Now when he says there's not an iota of difference between the Democrats and Republicans on any of the important issues, it sounds like the voice of someone who wants to inject himself into the debate," said Pharis J. Harvey, executive director of the International Labor Rights Fund. "Nader's comments seem less the voice of a prophet than an interloper."

Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, who locked horns with Nader during the election, said his group will continue to work with Public Citizen and with Nader. But he added: "I'll work with him like I work with any other politician. Now he has an agenda."

Nader isn't accepting the blame for the liberals' fury. He says that progressive leaders should thank him for promoting their public policy wish list on everything from environmental causes to workers' rights issues. "If there's a rift, it's their rift to heal," he said about the grumbling in the liberal community. "Because we put their agenda on the front burner as much as anyone. Now they're saying: `Even though you're on the same side [that] we are on issues A through Z, we don't want to have anything to do) with you.' Have you ever heard anything more ignorant than that?"

Nader sharply criticized liberal groups that turned their backs on his campaign. After the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth endorsed Gore for President, Nader wrote an open letter to the environmental community accusing the environmentalists of displaying a "servile mentality." Cataloging the environmental missteps of the Clinton-Gore Administration, he warned that the two environmentalist groups' endorsements "tell future political leaders that the environmental community is for sale." After unsuccessfully courting unions, Nader also took a swipe at union leaders in a post-election talk with reporters: "It's not so much that they're corrupt, as that they're tired," he said. "They're worn out. They're out of gas."

Such stone throwing within the progressive community could have a serious ripple effect. Former allies in the labor and trial lawyer communities, long contributors to Public Citizen and other Nader organizations, say that they and their colleagues are angry and are unlikely to open their wallets for those groups in the near future. "Even a small amount of votes that he gets makes a difference in a close election, and it made a big difference in this election," argued trial lawyer Stanley Chesley of Cincinnati. "Who does he think he is? Who needs him? The country doesn't need him."

Claybrook said she has received many calls complaining about Nader. But she said she doesn't expect her group to stiffer a major financial setback because of Nader's candidacy. "I just don't think it's going to be wholesale or substantial," she said. "I certainly hope not. And if it is, we'll work hard on that." According to Claybrook, Public Citizen receives about 65 percent of its funding from individual donors, 10 percent to 15 percent from foundations, and the rest from sales of books and other publications. In 1998, the lobbying branch of Public Citizen had a $3.7 million budget; Public Citizen Foundation, the research and education component, had a $6.4 million budget.

The discord over Nader's candidacy is also causing problems at the Sierra Club. When the group endorsed Gore, some members resigned. A vocal group of dissenters formed an informal coalition called Environmentalists Against Gore, which supported Nader's candidacy and charged the Sierra Club board with selling out politically. "The Sierra Club uses the environmental issue as political currency to get even worse Democrats elected," argued Tim Hermach, executive director of the Native Forest Council and a longtime critic of the Sierra Club's leadership.

That conflict came to a head in November when the Sierra Club's board of directors censured board member Chad Hanson for using his club identification in an article urging people to vote for Nader. Hanson said he was protesting an anti-Nader op-ed column written by Sierra Club Executive Director Pope. In an interview, Pope contended that his oped piece "wasn't an attack on Nader's policies, which the board had agreed not to do. It was an attack on a specific thing he was saying, which was, there is no difference between Bush and Gore--which we obviously disagreed with."

Pope, who was not censured by the board, argued that the Sierra Club's internecine warfare stems from a more fundamental split within his organization between those who want the club to take a hard-line, no-compromise stance on a host of controversial environmental issues and those who are willing to negotiate with Washington politicians. In 1996, for example, the hard-liners successfully pushed the club to adopt a policy supporting a ban on commercial logging on all federal lands. Pope opposed that position. He maintains that the group should be "an organization that gets things done within the process."

The Sierra Club's internal conflict mirrors a chasm that has emerged in the progressive movement between Nader's take-no-prisoners attacks on the Democrats and the efforts by other liberal leaders to work within the two-party system to enact progressive policies. For example, Neas said that the liberal community increased its political muscle this year by raising five times as much money for liberal candidates as it did in 1996. But Nader supporters complain that while labor groups, African-Americans, environmentalists, and other liberals continue to support liberal Democrats, party leaders have consistently advocated centrist policies.

Nader maintains that it's time to give up on the politics-as-usual approach. The increased dominance of corporate money and the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, he argues, has turned the Democratic Party into "a crypto-Republican Party. When the Democrats lose, they say, `We haven't taken enough issues from the Republican Party.' So they give the back of the hand to the whole progressive wing of the party." If Democrats want to avoid being hurt by Green Party candidates, Nader said, they should return to their liberal roots. "The Democrats are certainly capable of minimizing the challenge by adopting our issues," he said.

A CHANGED ICON

Nader is unaccustomed to being attacked by the Left. For more than 30 years, he had been portrayed as a selfless liberal icon, a Chaplinesque everyman lighting for the average consumer. Beginning in 1965 when a law school paper grew into his best-selling book Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader has been involved in one consumer crusade after another, creating a string of respected progressive policy groups that have helped train thousands of liberal activists. Over the years, the business interests he has challenged have criticized, insulted, and investigated him. But until he ran for President, the liberal community treated him as the nation's best-known victims' advocate, someone who could attract media attention just by showing up.

Even government officials handled Nader as they would an honored guest. Washington lawyer Victor Schwartz, who for years has gone head-to-head with Nader over industry attempts to pass tort reform legislation, tells a story of testifying before an Ohio House committee. Nader was also invited to speak. He showed up an hour late accompanied by an uninvited witness in a wheelchair, and spoke far longer than scheduled. "But it was Nader, so the chairman let him talk," Schwartz recalled. "He had absolute rule of the roost."

In recent years, Nader has been less involved in Public Citizen and other organizations that he helped create. Claybrook says Nader hasn't been on Public Citizen's board of directors since 1980, but he has kept his hand in the group's crusades. "He was the instigator of the whole effort to challenge these international free-trade agreements," she said. "He saw the need to take action before anybody else did, and lobbied a lot of public interest groups to get involved."

Claybrook said no one should have been surprised at Nader's decision to get into presidential politics. He telegraphed his intention in 1992, when he launched a "none-of-the-above" campaign in the New Hampshire presidential primary to call attention to a good-government agenda. In 1996, Nader agreed to be the Green Party's presidential standard-bearer, but he never campaigned. In fact, he raised and spent so little money that he didn't have to file Federal Election Commission reports.

This election cycle was different. Nader said he decided to make a serious run for President because he was aggravated at Clinton and Gore for embracing big-business policies. Nader criticized their support for a profusion of free-trade agreements. He accused the Administration of "wrecking" the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which he said didn't investigate safety problems involving Firestone tires and Ford sport utility vehicles until hundreds of people had died. And Nader contends that Clinton and Gore failed to enforce workplace regulations governing toxic chemical exposure. "I can give you 40 different reasons, the cumulative impact basically saying this is a corporate party," he said. "They just roll over for all these industries."

This time, Nader embraced his candidacy with the fervor he had thrown into earlier consumer campaigns on insurance reform and car safety. He drew up a $5 million budget and ended up raising and spending $8 million. At the campaign's peak, he had 85 paid staff members and hundreds of volunteers in the field and in his Washington campaign office. Flying coach, Nader visited all 50 states and held dozens of rallies to build support for his campaign effort.

In his speeches, Nader focused on a wide range of progressive policy issues, most prominently his opposition to what he considers to be a corporate takeover of the political process. But he says that the press didn't take his policy positions seriously and covered only the horse race. "I had a press conference on Social Security at the Madison Hotel in Washington," he recalled. "The Washington Post couldn't even cross the street and attend."

Today, some of Nader's former allies in the liberal community are treating him like an embarrassing enigma. Some are waiting for political tempers to cool down before reaching out to him. "Under the gun of a Bush presidency, it may be that the need to unite will overcome the bitterness of the campaign," said Harvey. "But I think it will take a while for those wounds to heal." A few continue to see Nader as a worthy partner on the public policy battlefield. "To the extent that Ralph Nader continues to oppose general tort reform, I think that the trial lawyers will continue to work with him," said Tampa, Fla., lawyer Bill Wagner, a former president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America.

But many progressive leaders say that Nader faces a difficult challenge if he continues to pursue his political aspirations while returning to his day job as national consumer advocate. "He cannot use both the Green Party and his other network of organizations simultaneously as his platform," Pope asserted. "He's going to have to decide whether he wants to primarily position himself as the Green Party leader or go back to positioning himself as a citizen advocate."

A NEW NATIONAL STRATEGY

Nader said that the American public should give the Green Party another three presidential cycles for it to emerge as a viable force. "Challenging the two-party system--it's incredible," he said. "They command almost all of the money. They command the attention of the media. They command exclusion from the debates. They command the statutory barriers to get on the ballot in some states.... But having said that, it's certainly worth trying."

Nader has never gotten into the mechanics of the Green Party. He's not even a member. But in the weeks after the election, Nader joined state party leaders for a six-hour strategy meeting. Now the Green Party is undergoing a metamorphosis designed to position the group as a national force

For the past four years, "Green Party" was a generic term that applied to two different national groups: the Association of State Green Parties and the Green Party USA. The state group is a loose affiliation of autonomous state-based parties. That was the group that formally nominated Nader for President at its nominating convention held in Denver in June. In contrast, the Green Party USA has functioned more as a think tank and less as a political party. The two groups have several important philosophical differences that have sometimes tripped up Nader supporters and reporters writing about Green Party candidates. Some writers, for example, have incorrectly associated Nader with the political platform espoused by the Green Party USA, which calls for the abolition of the U.S. Senate and the adoption of a national "maximum" wage.

To end that confusion, in October leaders of the two parties drew up a resolution agreeing to change the names of the two groups. If the groups' members adopt that resolution, Green Party USA would drop the word party from its name. And the state group would dissolve and re-emerge as the National Committee of the Green Party. This latter new group would then seek Federal Election Commission recognition as the official Green Party. The new group also anticipates establishing a national political presence and headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The state Green parties would continue to have the last word on whether to run candidates for local, state, and congressional office. "It really boils down to who wants to run, and most states have rules about endorsements," noted Gary Wolf, a member of the platform committee of the Association of State Green Parties. Wolf said that many state groups are gearing up to field more state and local candidates in 2002. "That's where you win," he said. "Then people start moving up in the political system, so that in 10 or 15 years we'd have somebody who would be a credible political candidate for a major race."

In the November election, a total of 56 Green candidates ran in congressional races in 19 states. None of them won, but at least one candidate may have helped defeat a Democrat. In the tight race for Michigan's 8th District House seat, Republican Mike Rogers beat Democrat Dianne Byrum by a mere 88 votes; Green Party candidate Bonnie Bucqueroux received 3,484 votes in that race.

Each state Green Party takes a different approach to the elections. New Jersey Greens ran candidates in 12 of the state's 13 congressional districts. In Colorado, only one Green Party candidate ran for congressional office. But that candidate ran against Democrat Mark Udall, one of the most liberal members of the House. Meanwhile, the California party focused on state and local races, successfully electing 12 Green candidates to local government offices.

While the Greens sort out their party dynamics, Nader has launched a new round of political activity. He's pushing for the development of a "People's Debate Commission" that would be more inclusive than the commission that ran the debates between Bush and Gore--and that excluded him from the three televised sessions.

Nader has also filed a civil rights complaint against the Commission on Presidential Debates for ejecting him from the Boston and St. Louis debate sites--even though he held tickets and credentials that would have allowed media groups to interview him after the debates. And Nader is conducting his own investigation into the operations of the existing debate commission. "By the time we're finished, their reputation is going to be lower than that of a crooked used car dealer," he said.

In addition, Nader plans to create a "watchdog" group to monitor the voting records of Capitol Hill lawmakers. He is organizing new Green Party chapters at universities. And he's helping the state Green parties develop local agendas that dovetail with the existing citizens groups that have formed to battle state and local problems, such as toxic-waste dumps.

In mid-December, however, in the midst of this flurry of new activity, Nader told staff members that he was about to take a break. As Bush was preparing to take over the reins of government, and as Gore began packing up his belongings in the Vice President's house, Nader arrived at a D.C. court building to serve his country. Nader, it turned out, had been called to jury duty.

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Unhappy with the major-party candidates in the 2000 election. Kathy Kinman was surfing the Internet in early Novemher in search of political solace when she came upon the Web site nadertrader.org. Kinman, a political novice who leans left, read the site's explanation of vote trading several times and also read up on Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. She decided to become a Nader trader.

Kinman learned that, as a Montana resident, she lived in what the Web site called a "safe" state because Bush was expected to win by a landslide there. The site encouraged her to find someone who lived in a swing state, where the Gore-Bush race was close, who had been planning to vote for Nader, and to swap votes with that person. Kinman would vote for Nader, and the swing-state voter would cast a ballot for Gore. She swapped with her daughter in Oregon, and leveraged her Gore vote by, in effect, transferring it to a state where Gore stood a chance against Bush. And by voting for Nader, Kinman could send a message to Washington. "That, to me, was very intriguing, because I'm so sick of the partisan stuff," she said. "Any other party [in Washington] with some clout would be good." Kinman even persuaded a few of her neighbors in Bozeman, Mont., to swap votes. Future third-party campaigns will likely see in the Nader-trader phenomenon a new model for building support.

Nader did not reach his goal of 5 percent of the popular vote, which would have qualified the Green Party for federal matching funds in 2004. Although it's impossible to know how many people took part in the trading effort, some experts suggest it had some impact. For example, Kinman's conservative home state awarded Nader 6 percent of the popular vote. Vote-trading organizers estimate that about 15,000 people agreed to trade votes. "I think that Gore won some of the swing states because of vote trading," said Jamin Raskin, a professor of constitutional law at American University in Washington. "And I think he could have won Florida if there had been more vote trading," he added.

At least 11 Web sites advocated or facilitated vote swapping. Most of' them appeared in the last week of October. and Raskin helped catalyze the effort with an Oct. 24 column in Slate magazine that advocated vote trading. Some sites, such as nadertrader.org, simply encouraged people to engage in vote swapping by contacting friends, family, or strangers. Others, such as voteswap2000.org; offered a mechanism for swapping votes by helping Nader and Gore supporters to exchange e-mail addresses. A third set of sites, such as winwincampaign.org, offered more indirect means of vote swapping. Nader supporters in swing states could anonymously pledge to vote for Gore, while Gore supporters in nonswing states promised to vote for Nader.

Jeff Cardille, who established nadertrader.org, was encouraged by the speed at which the vote-swap message traveled. "It wouldn't have been possible without the Internet," he said. His site went up on Oct. 23, and a day later, fewer than 500 people had visited it. But on the seventh day, the sites's one-day total was 93,592 visits. By Election Day, Cardille said, more than 200.000 people visited at least once.

But vote trading quickly drew criticism. California Secretary of State Bill Jones said on Nov. 1 that such trading violated state election laws, and he threatened to prosecute owners of sites that facilitated swapping. As a result, three sites that matched tip vote swappers shut down. "I think, in some respects, that drew more attention to the phenomenon." said Steven M. Schneider, editor of NetElection.org, "It's probably the best thing that could have happened--to have the California secretary of state say, `You can't do that.'"

Despite legal challenges, vote swapping is here to stay, said Raskin, who will host a symposium on the subject on Jan. 18 at American University. "Vote trading is the essence of legislative politics: legislative logrolling is as American as apple pie," he said. "If the Electoral College survives the debacle of the 2000 election, then 1 think that vote trading will become the key mechanism for third parties to maintain a place in the presidential system."

Through Nader didn't support vote trading, Schneider said this kind of strategic voting could encourage other marginal parties to run candidates in hopes of getting a little bit more of the popular vote and spreading their message further. But vote trading has its limitations. It can be effective only in an election featuring two closely matched, relatively centrist major-party candidates plus one or more semi-viable third-party alternatives running either to the right or to the left of rite major-party candidates.

The theory of vote trading could also be applied to grassroots political efforts, said Michael Cornfield, research director at George Washington University's Democracy Online Project. "You don't just have to swap votes," he said. "You can swap political support." He cited environmental groups and labor groups, which often agree on trade issues. They might have their members contact each other to trade support on local proposals or bills in Congress.

Schneider said that the phenomenon is likely to reappear if for no other reason than it makes voters feel more influential. "It gives them more of an opportunity to feel like they're doing something more important with their vote." he said. Kinman added. "If something will shake the partisan politics in the country, I'd do it again."