Ralph Nader, Amok Raker
Sanford, David
The Alternative: An American Spectator • December 1975 • Volume 9, Number 3 David Sanford Ralph Nader, Amok Raker • • (Mr. Sanford's article has been adapted from his forthcoming book, Me and...
...The PIRG controversy of 1975 is another case of Ralph Nader mired in his own muck, believing that any means justify a hero's ends, equating with evil opponents who this time happen to be on solid ground, disowning his own ugly baby, and turning democracy on its head...
...In mid-1971 Dodge finished work writing a book called Small on Safety: The Designed-In Dangers of the Volkswagen...
...One night recently Lowell Dodge heard noise at his front door and when he went to check on it found a slip of paper in a crumpled bag stuffed through his mail slot...
...If one doesn't send back the refusal card he gets the book, whether he likes it or not...
...Von Hoffman is keen about the negative checkoff because without it he can't see a way for Nader and his disciples to raise the needed cash to do their wondrous work...
...They are not to be confused with their supporters...
...Nader in his travels about the country urges students to set up campus lobbies, permanent institutions staffed by lawyers, scientists, and other full-time professionals that operate year-around researching issues and pushing causes of the sort Nader has promoted...
...or those students who didn't read the bill and its instructions...
...The escape clause is said to make the plan fair because in theory no one ends up paying for PIRG who doesn't want to...
...There are answers to these questions, of course...
...Those who oppose contributing are told they can get the small fee refunded if they go in and ask for it...
...That is not the issue...
...At least they had broadened their investigation of university conflicts of interest to include 45 colleges and universities, concentrating first on Penn State...
...Other contested stories about how President and Mrs...
...Are the corporations going to give it to them...
...And it is in the central notion of a 'public interest' that both Nader and Rousseau manifest their most dangerous tendencies...
...PIRG is the acronym for Public Interest Research Group, a Nader idea that is flourishing at 145 colleges and universities in more than twenty states...
...Nader defended the negative checkoff favored by the petitioning students as "majority rule...
...Namely Nader...
...He has inspired the new profession of the public interest lawyer...
...Even many opponents of the funding mechanism agree that PIRGs are edifying and that they serve a purpose, which happens also to be Nader's purpose...
...Oswald suffered a personal smear...
...PIRGs are central to Nader's dream of mobilizing a nation of Naders to reform politics, and to promote consumer causes and Public Citizenship...
...He has, through his lobbying efforts, written or backed a passel of new laws...
...Negative option selling prospers because of indifference and negligence and laziness...
...Nevertheless, his promiscuous use of the phrase (and its diabolical opposite, the 'special interests') raises serious moral questions with which Nader has never really grappled...
...As Peter Schuck told me in an interview, "Ralph talks as if he knows what the public interest is and of course that he represents it...
...Nader did that with assistance from Joan Claybrook and Carl Nash...
...He intended a reply to the Post about my piece and got his investigator Faith Keating to research a rebuttal...
...That's where I begin to disagree with Peter Schuck...
...I have indicated my belief," he said, "that there is educational merit to the participation of Penn State students in an activity such as PIRG and therefore the University should consider, if a substantial number of students indicate their interest, some form of relationship to assist PIRG...
...Von Hoffman, who entered journalism in middle age after a career of community organizing with the late Saul Alinsky, supports PIRG, Nader, and the negative checkoff, but quoted for balance a corn-ment by Michael Baker, Jr...
...A young woman assisting Ralph in his auto safety work once was bothered that Nader would never answer any of her memos, so she hatched a negative-option scheme of her own, writing Ralph about some now forgotten matter: "Unless I hear from you otherwise, I'll assume this is ok...
...Nader wanted PIRG to have its share of the fleece...
...Nader, according to the Pennsylvania Mirror, called Penn State "a citadel of fascism...
...And PennPIRG organizers childishly rejected the administration alternative...
...What happens here will affect what happens elsewhere...
...Dodge recalls, "The original conclusion to the...
...Loath as I stance, unreservedly...
...He admires Nader and his work and doesn't hate PIRGs but he was upset by the "strange twist of demo-cratic principles, that if a majority wants to pay this fee, the rest should be compelled to...
...For instance, you can't compare the Corvair, which you'd think Ralph would beinterested in doing, and the Renault, which had similar design problems...
...This was not what PIRG had asked for but Oswald made clear that he opposed "any relationship that would cause students who were not interested in PIRG to be assessed a fee...
...Unnamed sources of Von Hoff-man's had told him "that in the course of decorating the presidential mansion Mrs...
...Nader and Morton Mintz of the Post have had a useful symbiotic relationship for a decade and Mintz is one of the early and persistent believers in the nonsense that Nader must be protected from criticism for the sake of the consumer movement...
...To do it again is to have a grudge against him that discredits the critic...
...Earlier in May Ralph Nader addressed three hundred Penn State students in behalf of PIRG, and in a press conference before his speech he said (according to Ken Chestek in the Pennsylvania Mirror) "the main obstacle to the formation of PennPIRG is a 'stubborn, petty administration.' " The funding mechanism that President Oswald supported would, he 6 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1975 said, "collapse PIRG...
...Now he exercises an enormous influence not only on auto safety but on nearly every aspect of American life dealing with economics, consumer goods, and health and safety...
...If one looks at that charitably, he is a politician, he is a player in the political process...
...Taking the risk, I wrote a Post column of my own, comparing PIRG financing to the negative option selling device of the Book of the Month Club...
...The positive checkoff proposal ultimately endorsed by the administration was a "sabotage technique...
...Ii 8 Thc Aliernativc: An American Spectator December 1975...
...The money adds up...
...We'll back you," he said, "if we have to make Penn State famous for something other than football...
...In a brilliant piece published in 1972 by the Texas Law Review, Peter Schuck, a former employee of Nader's, expressed his uneasiness about Nader's monopoly on the public interest: "For Nader, as for Rousseau, virtue consists in a passion for the 'public interest,' and the wisdom to apprehend it...
...book as I wrote it...
...We don't understand why he [Nader] should be so outspoken and vindictive and somewhat libelous...
...The book club-PIRG analogy is less than perfect only because PIRG is more disreputable than the book clubs...
...He has learned from reading his press clippings that he isincorruptible...
...What bothered Oswald, he maintained, was not the idea of PIRG but the way it intended to raise money...
...Nader, you see, had been true to his threat that he would see to it that Penn State would now be known for more than football...
...Where are they to get the money...
...Oswald selected a knob of a design sold only in lots of 1,000 and that nobody knows what happened to the other 999...
...Nader gets overbearing...
...The advocate's role, if I may stress the obvious, is advocacy, not truth telling...
...He said the conclusion should start with the phrase 'The Volkswagen is the most hazardous car in use in significant numbers in the U.S...
...If the board of trustees doesn't understand democracy, which I don't believe they do, those who don't understand it should resign...
...He has always pressed me to go public against Ralph, which up until now I've been unwilling to do...
...And thank God, when I read the conclusion I couldn't live with it...
...The sissy foundations...
...Sanford's article has been adapted from his forthcoming book, Me and Ralph, to be published in March 1976 by the New Republic Book Company...
...There was obvious rage in his remarks...
...Baker to study very carefully the meaning of conflict of interest if he wants to understand the kind of disclosures that will be forthcoming in the coming year...
...Dodge contends, however, that "that conclusion is not reflected in the data, not to say that you can't squeeze it out of the data, which is what the book now attempts to do...
...Book clubs readily admit that if the set-up were different, if one had to send back a card to get a book, they'd sell fewer books...
...Von Hoffman then passed on some disputed gossip about the President of Penn State and some phantom door knobs...
...Oswald do or do not live the grand life are swirling out of a school which heretofore has been known only for engineering and autumnal contact sport...
...Schuck concludes that Nader can ignore such moral issues because he is an "advocate," not a decision-maker...
...I have always carried around considerable guilt about what I regard as the extreme intellectual dishonesty of that conclusion...
...For example, when the Committee on Educational Policy of the Board of Trustees of Pennsylvania State University met May 29, the university's president, John Oswald, presented the PennPIRG proposal...
...One of Nader's values is causing trouble for corporations and he is not above tampering with reality in the service of his impulses...
...Nader furthermore can't bear criticism, especially when it comes from a newspaper like the Post where he has so many friends...
...Nader's most important possession has been his nurtured credibility or, as Robert F. Buckhorn, one of Nader's five biographers...
...His book on the Corvair, Unsafe at Any Speed, was published in November 1965, and it wasn't long afterwards that General Motors quite unintentionally saw to it that Nader would become the most powerful and probably the most admired private individual in the country...
...I am waiting now to see if Ralph will someday soon appear again in the Washington Post saying he was misquoted...
...Dodge took a vacation and did not participate in the toughening of the book's conclusion...
...He has spun off a score of organizations with pious names like Public Interest Research Group, Center for Study of Responsive Law, Public Citizen,and Corporate Accountability Research Group...
...It is Nader run amok...
...today.' That is how, as you read the published book, the conclusion does start...
...did say, falsely as it happens, that "at most colleges and universities" mandatory fees are collected to support political activities, so why not PIRG...
...Nevertheless he didn't want PIRG's money to come "from students who didn't understand their right to refuse to pay or to obtain a refund...
...Appreciating fully the power of corporations, the inertia of government, and the relative lack of strength of his movement, Nader has come to believe it is right to cut corners and run down enemies in the service of a cause draped in virtue...
...Two lousy bucks a year, and they say, no, children, try it on your own first...
...If The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1975 5 so, by what standard may we conclude that voters who care more about highways than they do about mass transit are 'irrational' or 'victims of the special interests' ? On what grounds may we require mature, responsible drivers to purchase seat belts for their cars against their will...
...Public Citizen solicits a comparable amount in small donations...
...Each month a book club sends out a card listing the current offering to members who signed up voluntarily (unlike the hapless minority of students who don't sign PIRG petitions and who don't necessarily want any of The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1975 7 their money to go to Nader's legion...
...He admitted in Pennsylvania though not in the Post that he was ready to assist with "resources" (cash...
...The scheme is advertised as democratic because it has the backing of a majority of the students, but once it is implemented all the students are assessed the PIRG fee...
...He outlined various possible approaches that the university might take and recommended one: "The University would agree to place on the term bill of each student a clearly identified statement that permits the student to indicate his/her desire to add $2 to the term bill for transfer to PennPIRG...
...To a moral purist that might seem like a dishonest thing...
...To Ralph criticism always has petty and sinister motives...
...If PIRG has the educational merit I believe it has, then the organizing students should be able to educate other students as to its values to the point that they will voluntarily assess themselves the $2 fee...
...Nader's speaking and writing earn him a quarter of a million dollars a year or more, 95 percent of which he claims to turn over to his octopus...
...His passion to prevail—to keep his David and Goliath show on the road—has moved him to contempt for democratic principles, for fairness to antagonists, and for simple facts...
...It was signed XXXX...
...The day after the trustees endorsed President Oswald's sensible alternative Nader called the decision "tyranny 1776 style" and said he would undertake an investigation of the corporate members of the university board, university spending, and conflicts of interest of board members, focusing particularly on investigating one Michael Baker, Jr...
...Von Hoffman reported the denied allegation that John Oswald had built a $5000 house for his dog Disraeli with money from the taxpayers of Pennsylvania...
...Nader has gotten away with a lot in ten years...
...Doing something (rejecting a book) is harder than doing nothing...
...Are the revealed preferences of voters entitled to the same respect in the legislature as those of consumers in the marketplace...
...Nader had the genius and the public relations skills to make full use of the opportunity, and since GM's dick, Vincent Gillen, hadn't been able to find any dirt on him, Ralph's credibility was very high from the start...
...Dodge submitted his manuscript for approval and Nader sent it back to him for rewriting...
...The courts and the legislatures have shut down getting it from judgments in class action suits...
...What I should have done was raise the issue then and fight it, say this is dishonest...
...At some campuses a percentage of the fee is retained by the university to pay for administering the refunds...
...One is allowed to disagree with Nader only once...
...On the paper was written: "Blabbermouth...
...After Oswald had finished his presentation the board approved the alternative funding scheme he favored...
...was unacceptable because in Nader's words it was wishy-washy and mealymouthed...
...This is commonly referred to as positive checkoff...
...Having invoked the 'public interest' ad nauseam, Nader seems convinced that he knows what it is...
...He never masquerades, he doesn't pretend, cheat, or manipulate...
...Enter now Nicholas von Hoffman, the syndicated columnist of the Washington Post, who thinks, incidentally, that Nader would make a good President of the United States...
...In attempting to discredit him with the fruits of a private investigation, GM sent Nader flying, for here, in trumpeting the deceitfulness of the nation's largest industrial corporation, was a ready-made opportunity to develop and lead the "consumer movement...
...Epstein later told me, "What Nader did was self-righteously change the subject...
...We have had Ralph Nader to kick us around for ten years...
...but you can't reach the conclusion that it's the most hazardous, partly because you don't have data on a lot of other cars...
...He found someone associated with PIRG to admit that while a negative checkoff at Penn State would raise $270,000 a year, a truly democratic positive checkoff might take in at most $30,000...
...The effort is in order both because Nader is not the man his admirers believe him to be and because Nader over the years has come to think that his views determine and are coterminous with the public interest...
...With signed petitions in hand, the PIRG organizers ask university administrations to assess every student a dollar or more each term to finance the local PIRG office...
...Von Hoffman's supportive column was not in complete favor at the Washington Post...
...put it, "If Nader has one overriding asset it is that he is what he says he is...
...It should be distressing to Ralph that he's borrowed a leaf from the book clubs because he, like other consumerists, regards the device as shabby...
...You can take the same data and reach opposite conclusions...
...By 1972 Ralph had come to be listed as the sixth most admired man in the world, falling appropriately between Spiro Agnew and Pope Paul on the Gallup Poll's list...
...The advocate's role is comfortable because it relieves him of the dread responsibility for making difficult choices among alternatives, sacrificing some values in the interest of others...
...Nader said "the administration views you as sheep to be processed day by day, and to be sheared at tuition time...
...And he has lured all kinds of money into the causes he supports...
...We will be supporting [PennPIRG] with staff and resources until it is established...
...Since 1968 he has been the prime mover behind-at least 35 books and reports...
...Evidently Epstein knows Ralph well enough to recognize that Nader considers opposition to his ideas always as personal vendettas (possibly because when someone disagrees with him he launches his own search and destroy operation...
...I had a close friend in the upper reaches of the Volkswagen company and I shared with him my uneasiness about the language of the conclusion...
...But it's a real strain...
...and staff, that he would do in the trustees for' not submitting to PennPIRG...
...Epstein, distressed that Nader had not replied to the substantial points he had raised, was advised not to reply to the Nader column and he agreed not to...
...Dodge's name was put lower on the list of authors...
...PIRGs are independent, student funded and student-run, legal entities backed by students...
...My approach was to write that the Volkswagen is a hazardous car, by any measure that you could usefully apply...
...That asset is buttressed by the alleged uniqueness of the man: according to the Nader Myth, he is selfless, hardworking, modest, devoted to no interest but the public's, disdainful of wealth, personal property, sex, and conventional pleasure...
...He had other things to do and he did not want the controversy to turn into a "personal vendetta...
...I am indebted to Lowell Dodge, the former director of Ralph Nader's Center for Auto Safety, for an example of how, for Nader, advocacy sometimes requires fiddling with the truth...
...But what in fact is the 'public interest,' and where does it lie...
...It seems to me that's long enough for arrogance on the loose...
...Oswald reported to the board that the students disagreed, believing "that this funding mechanism will not assure either sufficient funds or the stability of funds for PIRG to operate...
...I have questions about an organization apparently dedicated on the one hand to improving the lot of the consumer, but on the other hand seemingly pushing for a funding system which will collect from students (consumers) who may be misinformed, uninformed, apathetic, etc...
...For example, 'there are times when people cannot be relied upon to know their own interests'—but these answers do not comport easily with democratic theory, and are always susceptible to abuse...
...All that remained for Nader to do was to coalesce power around himself, articulate issues, recruit troops, and go to town...
...As it is, so many otherwise perceptive people are so totally captivated (and that includes most of the journalists who have written about him) that it is not very likely that Nader will be unperched...
...She also thinks criticizing Ralph is in bad taste...
...Logue, Jr., in a long piece he did for The Chronicle of Higher Education in its July 7, 1975 issue...
...The stand will be taken here at Penn State...
...Student Public Interest Research Groups on college campuses raise more than a million dollars a year for local lobbying projects of the sort Nader approves...
...He was supposed to be listed on the cover as the principal writer, but that was not to happen...
...If PIRG were the Church, Nader would be the Pope...
...In the Post he performed a rhapsody on the educational value of PIRG with barely a jangling note about the negative checkoff, which is what the article Nader was replying to had been about...
...Actually it's six lousy bucks a year—two dollars a term...
...PIRGs are widely claimed to be educational—a sort of noncredit course in political activism—though that purpose is secondary to the main aim of PIRG, which is to create a well-financed legion of citizens in the Nader mold...
...And Bill McPherson, the book editor, is similarly in Nader's thrall...
...Not bad for the son of a Lebanese immigrant...
...Education editor Noel Epstein had followed the story too and decided to get his two cents in...
...Nader has coopted the press, he has no electorate to answer to, he is accountable to no one...
...The funding device is...
...The government which finances so many of the projects PIRG is opposed to...
...Nader replied quickly and angrily with a phone call to her associate Lowell Dodge in which he said "I do not and will not run my life on the Book of the Month Club system...
...Von Hoffman in one of his columns recounted the circumstances of the PennPIRG conflict and at the same time assisted Nader in his recently declared, vindictive effort to discredit officials of the university...
...If Ralph got what he petulantly demands from Penn State the movement would be annually richer by 270,000 ill-gotten lousy dollars...
...The reason for the difference is obvious: if only students who want to support PIRG contribute, much less will roll in than if one snatches money from lazy, busy, and indifferent students who do not take the trouble to go in for their refund...
...Colman McCarthy, whose columns about saints appear regularly on the editorial page, feels the pain when Nader gets cut...
...One of the first things she did was to phone Lowell Dodge to ask him "do you have anything on paper from Ralph proving that he said that...
...The negative checkoff device has been under attack across the country for several years and the Young Americans for Freedom have campaigned wherever Nader's tentacles extend against the funding scheme, wherever Nader's tentacles extend...
...By July Nader and his Washington PIRG friends seemed to have backed off a bit from their bald threat to get the trustees of Penn State...
...With friends like these at the Post Nader can't understand even an occasional wrist slap of the sort Epstein delivered, and he wasted no time phoning up Philip Geyelin, the editorial page editor, to ask for more than equal space—a column much longer than Epstein's—on the editorial page...
...Beware of Corvair convertible traveling at high speed...
...But in the political world if he can get away with arrogating to himself that emblem I suppose there's nothing wrong with it...
...But there is, nevertheless, an effort being made both to correct the Nader Myth and to subject Nader's workto rigorous analysis...
...Thwarting Ralph Nader, Mr...
...Were the myth correct he would truly be invincible...
...If Nader makes an end run around democratic principles in arriving at the public interest positions that he articulates, he is nonetheless convinced that, elected by no one, he represents the people...
...So much for Nader's culpability, and so much for the truth...
...So, it would seem, does H.E...
...The writer, it turned out, was one Susan Gross, yet another Nader acolyte who thought it a capital joke...
...In his rebuttal, which Geyelin was happy to publish ("It's a free Nader piece," he told someone) Nader disowned PIRG...
...Nader, keenly aware of the decidedly illiberal implications of a priori notions of 'public interest,' claims that the concept is a processual one, referring not to the substance of a particular policy decision, but rather to the conditions and procedures under which decisions are arrived at...
...And if people let him get away with purporting to represent the public interest, it certainly is a very valuable political resource...
...I would advise Mr...
...The advocate can vigorously advance those values he happens to cherish, secure in the knowledge that the moral burden of adjusting the claims of his values with the claims of competing values, will fall upon others...
...in accordance with the will of the majority...
...PIRGs nationally collect more than a million lousy bucks a year...
...The Volkswagen episode and the PIRG story are but two examples of what power has done to Ralph Nader...
...In other words he is said to be all the things the rest of us are not—a freak in the midst of hedonists...
...To set up a PIRG, petitions are circulated on campus seeking support from more than half of a student body...
...Given the existence of a freely elected government with an independent judiciary and a body of duly enacted law, at what point are we justified in concluding that particular policy outcomes are 'not in the public interest' ? What criteria of representativeness, independence, and due process are we to apply in repudiating the handiwork of Congress...
...Anything that has to be won by that kind of tactics make me wonder...
...This report ends with a whimper, Nader said, who wrote this conclusion...
...All of this was in my Post column and it predictably enraged Ralph...
Vol. 9 • December 1975 • No. 3
