The candidates

...Of course, if we started bombing Vietnam again, it would be the greatest source of a revival in antiwar activity in a generation, too...

...He's linked W. to the inaction of the Republican Congress, which he's called the "do-nothing Congress of the 21st century...

...In the course of his campaign, he's made quite a number of discrete progressive proposals, each of which contrasts sharply with the W.'s proposed policies...

...Gore's challenge this fall may best be visualized if you imagine him as a bowler facing a 7-10 split...

...What changed in Los Angeles was the explicitness with which he took the side of working-class America...

...Politics abhors a vacuum, and both Nader and the Greens have responded to the rightward movement of the Democratic Party by occupying much of the space that the erstwhile party of the New Deal and the Great Society has abandoned...

...As several liberal commentators have noted, it's rather like a family electing to defer purchasing health insurance or saving for the kids' college fund, in order to pay off the mortgage more quickly...

...That doesn't make it a good thing to put in power people who are inclined to do it...

...Truman had to beat back a left-wing challenge from his vice-presidential predecessor, Henry Wallace, who was polling as high as 12 percent in the spring of 1948...

...Attacking oil companies and pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies [coincidentally, industries that are heavy DLC contributors] will not win elections, I guarantee you," Al From recently prophesied...

...IO n DISSENT I Fall 2000...

...In all these particulars, his campaign is a continuation of the Battle of Seattle by other means...

...they are the second coming of the Democratic Party of the Gilded Age—the party rejected by many working men of that time in favor of the socialists or populists...

...Ask him about the difference between a Bush and Gore administration on the question of Supreme Court appointments, and he'll say, as he did in his interview with me, that Republican presidents appointed Earl Warren, William Brennan, John Paul Stevens, Harry 8 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 Blackmun and David Souter, while John Kennedy appointed Byron "Whizzer" White...

...The green eyeshade has been passed—entrusting a raft of social problems, in the absence of government intervention, to the mercies of the market...

...There are the upscale, culturally liberal, economically conservative New Economy voters whom the DLC insists hold the key to both Democratic victory and the Future of History...

...On the other side of the square were college students, come from up and down the East Coast, holding up signs and tooting horns for Bill Bradley...

...To the consternation of both the Bush campaign and the DLC, Gore has recast himself as a neopopulist...

...RALPH NADER'S support this year hasn't reached beyond a narrow slice of the electorate, but his message has broadened well beyond any of the causes with which he's hitherto been identified...

...I'm happy that the stock market has boomed and so many businesses and new enterprises have done well," Gore said in his acceptance speech...

...Asked by a — reporter to name three things he liked about America, he cited as number two the torts system—which I seriously doubt any other left leader in the nation would rank so high...

...In the sense that it relieves us of time we don't have to expend to fight bad things that the Democrats would not initiate, like tort reform...

...From the early eighties through the mid-nineties, the Republicans, and the conservative movement generally, were divided into two camps on economic issues: the deficit hawks and the supply-side tax cutters...

...CAMPAIGN COMMENTARY Nader's last assertion, at least, is incontestable...

...As a general rule, Democrats don't win when it's nap time in America...

...For his part, Gore has gone one step further: telling the Wall Street Journal that he'd not be inclined to run a deficit even during a depression (a proposal that shocked John McCain, whose understanding of Keynesianism seems further along than Gore's...

...In his speech accepting the Greens' nomination, Nader laid out the standard against which to measure the meager level of social provision and rights in America—and it was the welfare states of post–World War II Europe, chiefly the creation of social democratic parties and movements...

...He not only has to reach swing voters but reconnect with voters mulling over the Nader option— that is, carry both the Teamsters and the turtles of American politics...

...Why lesser-evilism is permissible for lesser offices than the presidency is something Nader hasn't explained, though he does assert that Gephardt and whip David Bonior "are a little bit more like traditional liberal Democrats," (considerably understating Bonior's liberal credentials) while "Gore is mush...

...Gore himself is something of an anomaly: a politician who's genuinely uncomfortable around people...

...Weekly...

...He is a clearer thinker than Clinton, but a far less supple one...

...The notion that stately, deliberate Al Gore has it within himself to rouse a nation seems—well, improbable, though not impossible...

...If the Democrats newfound abhorrence of all CAMPAIGN COMMENTARY debt makes it difficult for the party to deliver on programs that its core constituencies support, its ongoing infatuation with free trade is a direct affront to those constituencies—and to white working-class voters who are the swing voters Gore will need this November...

...Clinton then agreed to Republican demands to eliminate the deficit, so long as he could protect Medicare and several other popular programs from further GOP cutbacks—by so doing, putting the Gingrichites on the defensive...

...Traditionally, Nader has been uncomfortable discussing subjects much beyond those related to corporate power, but he has come to understand that a presidential candidate must address a wider range of concerns...

...In his convention acceptance speech, Vice President Gore dared to suggest that the most significant Al in his life may not be Democratic Leadership Council president Al From, but his father, New Dealer Albert Gore...

...Ed...

...In the year 2000, the real dividing line in the Democratic Party, so to speak, isn't vertical, between presidential candidates...

...Gore's not been shy about attacking Bush or trying out some populist themes, but he cannot yet (I'm writing just before the Republican Convention) be said to have a message or to have excited any constituency (for that matter, any individual) I know of...

...his manner more prophetic...

...It's horizontal, dividing the party's financial superstructure—and its presidential nominee—from its activist base...

...There's never been a retrenchment in civil rights since the Dred Scott decision," he continued...

...His stump speech calls for cutting the Pentagon budget...

...He is proposing a prescription drug benefit here, a patients' bill of rights there, making carefully targeted attacks on carefully targeted industries...

...Nader has a range of responses when people ask him to assess the risk of denying Gore the presidency...

...about the literal dehumanization of services accessed by telephone...

...In a sense, he is transforming himself from Thurgood Marshall to Martin Luther King, Jr., which can't be easy...

...This is a highly selective list, of course, and hardly an assurance that the W.—a Texas conservative who chose Dick Cheney as his running mate, and whose favorite current justice is Antonin Scalia—will go with a moderate...

...The reason the AFL-CIO endorsed Gore in October of last year, one former federation official told me at the time, wasn't that Gore was terrific—he wasn't—but rather that, "if Bush wins, we're in a world of shit...

...So we have the candidate who articulates and personifies the spirit of Seattle...

...Gore was already espousing these positions in the weeks before the convention...

...Plus which, there isn't a Texas Republican alive who doesn't hate unions...

...Gore, in short, is something new in the political firmament: an Andrew Mellon Democrat...

...A campaign that emphasizes the Clinton-Gore boom isn't likely to swell inner-city turnout or convert wavering Naderites...

...No other shot can get Gore both the pins he needs...

...Now, Gore's family-style populism seems to have wooed them away: the great majority of Gore's post-convention surge has come among women voters in households making between $20,000 and $50,000 annually...

...Two years ago, as the deficit turned to a surplus, Clinton came forth with a strategy to fend off proposed Republican tax cuts: a proposal, Heisenbergian in its incomprehensibility, to protect Social Security by paying down the debt...

...The Social Security part of the proposal went nowhere, but today, retiring the debt by 2012—as opposed, say, to establishing universal health insurance—has emerged as the cornerstone of Clinton-Gore fiscal policy...

...Gore is the legitimate heir to a party that has grown far too comfortable with capitalism and its values at the very moment that those values threaten to eclipse all others, reducing citizens to consumers, discourse to advertising...

...The Ralph Nader who is running for president this year is not the Ralph Nader of 1996 or before...

...We have people in Congress who want to federalize the common law of torts, make it controlled by PAC-greased senators and legislators who never see a client, the people in court, the way the judges and juries do...

...Indeed, he seems the one political figure in America who's even more uncomfortable around people than Al Gore...

...Above all, for all those on the left seeking a reason to go for Gore, there is the prospect of a Bush presidency...

...The problem is what gets broken in the process...

...The Clinton administration's war on the deficit began with the 1993 budget, which quite commendably raised taxes on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans...

...Thus 6 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 have tactical ploys devised to derail Republican folly become the holy grail of modern Democratic economics...

...And we have the movement that was the linchpin of the Seattle coalition, that has become the sine qua non of American progressivism today, which fears it will be fiercely attacked—just as it's getting off its deathbed—unless Al Gore defeats George W. Bush...

...ORE BROADLY, Nader lacks the courage of his conviction in the indistinguishability of the two parties, because he also argues that his campaign will help the Democrats retake the House by bringing out voters who'll vote for him and vote Democratic on the down-ticket offices...

...Calvin Coolidge could not have said it better...

...He concedes that it makes a difference whether Tom DeLay or Dick Gephardt runs the House: "Not in anything affirmative...

...As Nicholas Lemann has noted, he veers between two very distinct modes of behavior: painstaking precision and propriety (the slow-speaking Gore) and hail-fellow folksiness (the g-droppin' Gore...

...it was for them that all this compassionate conservative stuff was cranked out...

...the public Gore knows no other way to conduct himself...

...this he did by running a surprisingly populist and liberal campaign...

...The two groups jockeyed warily for position, but after a while they started talking and discovered that they agreed with each other—and disagreed with their respective candidates— on trade...

...In the case of the W., a quiet candidacy makes perfect sense...

...He is the candidate who favors preserving universal (that is, middle-class) entitlements...

...In the case of Al Gore, however, such silence equals political death...

...If I have to choose—and I do—I think the left can survive a poor finish by its candidate a lot more easily than it can survive its most important movement coming under fierce, just possibly terminal, attack...

...and in an interview I conducted with him shortly before the Green Party Convention, he advocated both civilian review boards and particular kinds of training as means to remedy the police misconduct that DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 7 CAMPAIGN COMMENTARY has shaken numerous American cities...

...But my focus is on working families—people trying to make house payments and car payments, working overtime to save for college and do right by their kids...

...These, apparently, exhaust his behavioral repertoire...

...Where a more adept politician like Bill Clinton can claim to have synthesized Old and New Democratic beliefs in the third way, Gore simply zips between one and the other...

...One can only hope that he harbors a faint ancestral memory of progressive-populism, that it's encoded, somewhere, in his genes...

...It's true that on traderelated matters, Gore doesn't look much better than Bush—but on every other union-related matter, they are poles apart...

...These things are not going to be pulled back—and if they are, it would probably be the greatest source of a revival in civic action in our generation...

...about the trivialization of ratings-driven newscasts and the waning of the public sphere...

...And Gore clearly has not sewn up his base—polls show him drawing between 70 percent and 80 percent of Democrats...

...Mellon was Herbert Hoover's treasury secretary, who counseled Hoover to slash spending as the depression deepened, and advised business to "Liquidate capital, liquidate assets, liquidate men...

...I T'S WHEN he ponders the really big questions that Gore is at his worst...

...THERE is, as I've noted, good reason to be far less sanguine about Bush's court picks than Nader suggests...

...The Bush campaign has also long viewed these voters as the crucial swing constituency...

...Gore calls for tripling damages on employers who violate labor laws to thwart union organizing drives and has endeavored to curtail federal contracts to companies that engage in such practices...

...There are also the downscale voters of the white working class, who remain, as Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers demonstrate in their new book, America's Forgotten Majority, much the largest bloc of voters even amid the current prosperity...

...Thus he's gone after industries like pharmaceuticals that are poll-tested bad guys...

...The phrase, of course, comes from Harry Truman, and if Gore is echoing Truman, that's because he finds himself in much the same predicament Truman did during his 1948 campaign...

...Don't we want states' rights in the torts system...

...On Social Security, Bush would allow workers to put some of their payroll tax into private retirement accounts—thereby reducing the fund for current retirees' benefits by an estimated $1 trillion in the first ten years...

...If the ten-pin that Gore targets is the upscale independent, however, he cannot knock down the seven-pin, too...

...Indeed, in the seven key states in the Jersey City-toKansas City belt, where Gore will either win or lose the election—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin— fifty-two out of fifty-six House Democrats opposed the administration's bill to grant permanent normalized trade status to China this spring...

...The setting was the town square in Nashua, New Hampshire, on the Saturday before February's primary...

...I have never been a fan of third-party ventures, nor am I much of a Nader fan even now...

...The only option left to Gore is a moderately populist campaign that addresses itself both to liberal desires and downscale needs: to creating a prescription drug benefit and greater health coverage, to attacking pharmaceutical companies and HMOs...

...He's surely right that Gore's appointments would be uniformly centrist, but that's no assurance that Bush's would be...

...Gore is indeed mush, the Democrats have indeed lost their ideological compass and are increasingly embracing the values of the market— though there are, of course, numerous Democratic exceptions to this rule...

...Today's Democrats," the document reads, "believe we should pay down the debt every year until we can give our children the independence, self-sufficiency and prosperity that will come from an America that is debt free...

...Moreover, Nader's candidacy has already forced Gore to take a more populist tack—which is likely to help Gore come November...

...Note: See "Fool's Gold of the Left," by Ruy Teixeira, Dissent, Summer 2000...

...It's not just that the BushCheney ticket has won more business support than any ticket in years...

...Gore's Democratic Party (as distinct, say, from David Bonior's) is more deeply indebted to corporate and financial interests than any party in human history, with the possible exception of Bush's Republicans...

...Gore must beat back a similar challenge from Ralph Nader, who has double-digit polling in several key states...

...Bush would change it to a system that subsidizes the recipients' purchase of cheap health insurance, but only partially subsidizes their purchase of really good health insurance...

...Even before he started droppin' more "g"s, Gore was promoting a number of policies that stood in sharp contrast to those of the W. He is the candidate of cultural liberalism or, more precisely, the cultural liberalism of the uppermiddle class...

...Unions also mobilize more members and exhibit more smarts than any other constituency in the Democrats' orbit...

...The key constituency targeted by Gore's strategists (most especially Stan Greenberg, his new pollster) is white working-class women: thus his campaign's other emphasis, on Gore as the model husband and pop...

...Postscript: Well, maybe it is encoded in his genes...

...He talks about the effect of marketing on children...

...The W.'s calling card is his affability, which he can reaffirm daily with a brief, genial appearance...

...Then again, Nader is shifting gears, rather late in his career, from an advocate and public interest lobbyist (who once said he'd rather have ten good lawyers working for him than a thousand untrained volunteers) to a movement leader despite himself...

...He campaigns not simply against global capital but against what capitalism has done to us, against the commodification of everything...

...Consider, by the way, the evolution of the policy debate here...

...Whether Gore could prevail even if Nader were not in the race remains a very iffy question...

...This has greatly upset the W.'s handlers, but their anxiety is as nothing next to the DLC's, whose entire cosmology is threatened by a successful Democratic campaign not targeted to wired workers...

...Even putting aside his belief that the proper role of government is to grow a recession, Gore's emphasis on debt retirement over, say, comprehensive health care or more classrooms, is bizarre...

...and by curtailing the unions' campaigns, a Bush administration would cripple the electoral capacity of the Democratic Party...

...Many came to this position out of sincere belief, but surely all were aware that the administration's position was overwhelmingly unpopular in their districts...

...This latest transformation may tell us hardly anything about the shape of a Gore presidency, but it tells us a great deal about the shape of Gore's candidacy—particularly since DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 9 CAMPAIGN COMMENTARY it seems to have given him a lead over the W. for the first time ever...

...In 1998, he raised funds to defeat California's Proposition 226, which would have greatly curtailed union political action programs (and, yes, hurt the Democrats at the polls, but I see nothing wrong with Gore asserting his self-interest when it coincides with that of working people...

...But not enough of one...

...Gore would expand Medicare to cover prescription drugs...

...He's long since sewn up his GOP base—polls show him drawing more than 90 percent Republican support— which frees him to focus solely on moderates and independents, taking care not to startle them with right-wing rhetoric or sudden loud noises...

...At the same time, his broad economic vision is sharply at odds with both past and present elements of Democratic economics...

...When I asked Nader if he was concerned that the court, in a series of five-to-four decisions, was increasingly nullifying federal legislation granting rights to certain categories of people because they thought this was properly the business of state governments, Nader responded with an unusual defense of states' rights...

...Unfortunately, Gore's politics are just as unintegrated as his public personalities...

...For his part, Nader is espousing a panoply of viewpoints and positions with which the readers of Dissent (and the author of this piece) surely agree, and his candidacy is an all-too-rare opportunity to put those perspectives before the American people (well, some of the American people, since most of them aren't listening to Gore and Bush, who get a lot more coverage than Nader...

...There is, in short, a realpolitik justification for the Nader candidacy...

...they are the reason the Democrats have crept steadily back from the wipe-out of 1994...

...That's a ratio of thirteen to one...

...At once diffident and arrogant, Nader has about as unpolitical a manner and personality as anyone in public life...

...The two parties, he asserts, are a duopoly, barely distinguishable from one another...

...On the left side of the lane is the Democratic base, which the veep needs to prod into action, along with a couple of million voters still choosing between Gore and Nader...

...Despite his party's and his own surrender DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 5 CAMPAIGN COMMENTARY to the spell of the market, Gore has been compelled by his inability to nail down his own base to sound more populist notes...

...Yet I find the choice between Gore and Nader a much closer call than I could have imagined even a year ago...

...HAROLD MEYERSON is editor of the L.A...

...The rightward stampede of the Democratic Party is accelerating...

...And there is in this election a clear social-democratic alternative to Gore...

...he began...

...Gore would leave Social Security intact, but establish a new program enabling workers to set aside additional money in taxfree accounts that the government would more than match for the poorest workers and partially match for more affluent ones...

...Democrats don't win unless their base is ablaze with passion, unless unionists and students and enviros have taken to the streets on their behalf...

...Nor has the W. proposed any way to make good on that annoying trillion...

...His critique has become more systemic...

...One cannot reasonably anticipate that Al Gore will govern as a latter-day William Jennings Bryan...

...The Gore platform also pledges that the party will continue its support for free trade— even though the clear majority of the party surely does not support the continuation of free trade...

...But simply by upsetting Al From, he has already exceeded expectation...

...Consider, for instance, the strange case of the vanishing debt...

...As for Bush, it's clear that the chief strategic political goal of his administration would be to bust unions...

...More important, Nader's critique of what ails us goes beyond his old attacks on the corporate sector to a scathing indictment of the entire money culture...

...At some point this summer, the realization that Gore needed a more populist message— that wearin' work clothes would not in itself be sufficient—seemed finally to have penetrated his campaign's strategic thinking, which throughout the spring wasn't so much misguided as it was nonexistent...

...This perspective of debt avoidance iiber alles has now been enshrined in Al Gore's Democratic platform...

...a respectable showing by Nader could just possibly partially brake it...

...The candidate of choice for a sleepy-time nation is the W., himself a proud and accomplished napper...

...On less global matters, Gore does distance himself from Republican positions in general and the W.'s positions in particular...

...Today, what was once an internal Republican debate has become a debate between deficithawk [now, debt-hawk] Democrats and taxcutting Republicans...

...One scene I witnessed this winter manages to illustrate the Democrats'—and Gore's—dilemma...

...ADER STILL retains his idiosyncrasies, both political and personal...

...Second, and just as important, is the difference between the two main candidates on the subject of unions...

...The Democrats are less neoliberal than they are neo-indentured...

...Hence, he is the one candidate in the field who attacks the feasibility, the wisdom, and the very idea of building an antimissile system...

...More immediately, since John Sweeney won the AFL-CIO presidency in 1995, the unions' political action programs have become tremendously more effective, mobilizing more members and exhibiting more smarts than labor has in decades...

...On one side of the square were United Auto Worker activists (chiefly retirees: there are no better Democratic activists than the old Reutherites), holding up signs and blowing whistles for Al Gore...

...As I write, in the summer of our content, the nation seems blissfully oblivious of the presidential campaign, and the candidates themselves are doing little to rouse it from its rest...

...On the right side of the lane, equally as critical to Gore's chances, are swing voters—more precisely, two different groups of swing voters...

...The very thought, say, of Bush appointees to the Supreme Court or the Bush administration's policy toward unions should chill any progressive heart...