Eating our own

Back on December 7, I wrote about what was then the still-open question of if Ralph Nader would or should run for president. After discussing his impact - both real and imagined - on the 2000 race and noting the numerous personal attacks made both then and more recently, I concluded this way:

All that said, do I think Ralph Nader should run for President in 2004?

No.

Not because of anything that's been said about him but frankly because it will be said again. That is, a Nader run would be divisive among progressives to the point of being disruptive, besides offering an easy target for whoever is the Democratic nominee to attack to show how they're "not really liberal." Frankly, a Nader run in 2004 would be a tactical mistake that could do more to weaken the Left than to strengthen it. So, no, Ralph, don't run.

I think events in the time since have born out that prediction to a pretty fair degree, as both liberals and a fair number of people who like to fancy themselves progressives engage in increasing vituperation, calling Nader everything from "egotistical" (You mean there's someone running for president who isn't?) to "destructive" to "delusional," labeling him a "hypocrite," a "right wing tool," a "dupe - no, not a dupe because 'dupe' implies that you don't know you're being used," a "cat's-paw," a "stalking horse" for the reactionaries.

And I for one am flaming sick and tired of it.

It's an unhappy necessity that these things have to be said first, but it reflects the character of the debate, so here they are:

1) As I already said, I think Ralph Nader should not have chosen to run.

2) I live in a safe state, so safe that in actual electoral college fact it doesn't make a flying damn whether I vote for Kerry, Nader, David Cobb, or Doctor Who. The result will be the same.

3) If I lived in a swing state, I expect I'd vote for Kerry. I'd do it with my tongue because I'd be holding my nose with one hand and covering my eyes with the other, but I'd do it.

With that said, here's some hard reality, kiddies:

First and foremost, Ralph Nader did not cost Al Gore the 2000 election and what's more, the Democrats know it.

It was not, for example, Ralph Nader's fault that Al Gore ran an astonishingly incompetent campaign in which, as even his supporters admit, he never really defined himself or what he stood for.

It was not Ralph Nader's fault that the "devastating" debater Al Gore blew three chances at a basically unarmed opponent, that Gore couldn't carry his own home state of Tennessee (which would have made Florida irrelevant), or that even after Gore knew the press would target him for "exaggerating," he continued to do it and seemed unable to respond when the claims of exaggerations were themselves exaggerations, as they often were.

Most importantly, Nader could not have cost Gore the election, because Gore won the damn election - but Florida's electoral votes were stolen by a criminal conspiracy among the Republican state hierarchy to reduce the number of Democratic voters. (Remember, for example, the voting list purges? The police roadblocks in minority areas? The "riot" by what turned out to be a group of Republican staffers to intimidate the people doing the recount?) And even with all that, under a statewide recount, he likely would have won anyway, according to a post-election study by a group of newspapers.

But the Democrats have engaged in a four year disinformation campaign to blame Bush on Nader (a notion which too many have swallowed whole). Why? To cover their own gutless, spineless, craven, cowardly refusal to actually take on the GOP and fight for what was right, for what the voters actually chose. The scene in Fahrenheit 9/11 that stays with me is the one where one after another, black members of the House challenge the certification of George Bush as president and one after another get gaveled down because not one - not one - Democratic senator had either the guts or the decency to sign on. The party had made a decision to give up, to give in, and that decorum was more important than democracy.

And whose fault was that? To hear the Democrats (and, again, too many so-called "progressives") tell it, it was Ralph Nader's.

Bullshit.

And equally so for the moans of impending doom because of Nader's presence in the race, most of which are drawn from highly and deliberately selective readings of opinion poll results. But what I've noticed is that when the same poll asks about both a 2-way (Kerry-Bush) and a 3-way (Kerry-Bush-Nader) race, the gap between Kerry and Bush, if it changes at all in the latter case, changes by an amount within the margin of error of the poll - that is, statistically, it doesn't change at all and Nader's actual influence is zero. I predicted as much on February 22:

How much impact will he have? I think very little. ... Overall, Nader's effect on the outcome will be negligible.

The polls, to the extent they're accurate, mean one of two things: Either most of Nader's support is coming from the undecideds and people who would otherwise be nonvoters, or he is drawing from both Bush and Kerry. But the Nader-haters can't have that, so they ignore it and instead claim that Nader gets all his support from Kerry, even though that's not what the numbers say. Indeed, they usually say Nader is "taking Kerry votes" as if those votes belonged to Kerry in some way and Nader is stealing them.

How far does this sort of paranoid willful blindness go? A recent article about Nader said that of the 21,000 signatures he gathered in pursuit of ballot access in Arizona, 65% came from Republicans and 18% from Democrats. Now, you could look at those numbers and say that Nader does in fact, as he has asserted, get some support from disaffected Republicans who want to cast a protest vote against Bush but don't want to vote for Kerry. But no - the conclusion drawn was that Nader is being used by the right to draw off Kerry voters and he doesn't care. (If the percentages were reversed, you can be certain they'd be used to "prove" Nader is, again, drawing votes from Kerry.) Like creationists, they have their answer and will interpret the evidence in whatever way is required to make it fit.

So I'm fed up with the ad hominem attacks, I'm fed up with the self-righteousness, I'd fed up with the self-serving self-deception. Most of all, I'm fed up with the whining. I've told this story before, but it bears repeating:

Some years ago I ran for Congress under the Socialist Party, USA banner against a reasonably liberal Democrat. He once asked me if I wasn't concerned that I would take enough votes from him that if the election was close his conservative Republican opponent would win.

I began to answer but before I got more than a few words out, he waved me off with a grin. "Never mind," he said. "That's my problem, not yours."

Exactly. His problem. If Ralph Nader is taking votes away from John Kerry, that's not Nader's problem, it's Kerry's - and yours if you want Kerry to win. So grow up, quit your whining, get off your flaming butts and go appeal to Nader's supporters. Give them a reason to vote for Kerry, and it's got to be more than the lazy, vapid "He's not Bush." Nader voters for the most part are people who want to vote for something, not just against something else. That's why the Democrats lost them in 2000 and that's why they are at risk of losing them again. In that December 7 post I quoted from a letter I wrote in December, 2000 while the Florida recount was still going on. I think it, too, bears repeating.

The Democrats have increasingly ignored, at times even disparaged, people who are at least theoretically part of their core support. They have done so at their own increasing risk and now, quite possibly, to their pain. Will they respond by recognizing that and moving to regain the support of the people they've lost? Or will they try even harder to avoid engaging them, preferring to attack those to their left even more vigorously than those to their right? Neither history nor recent events gives me any reason to think the former course will be adopted.

And it still hasn't been. Instead, Nader is being set up to be the excuse for the Democrats' blunderings and betrayals, just as he was after 2000, set up by a bunch of "go along to get along" boobs who spent the majority of the last four years licking Shrub's boots and who are terrified of the notion of not being able to take us - the real, actual, breathing Left in this country - for granted.

But the truth is, our votes are not Kerry's by some kind of divine right. Now, I've already made my choice. It's not a happy one, knowing that under different electoral circumstances I would compromise, but I've made it. But others haven't. And their votes, like any other votes, have to be earned. So go earn them.

In short: Put up or shut up.