Gore's Enemy Number One
Caldwell, Christopher
Gore's Enemy Number One How Nader became the Gore campaign's worst nightmare. BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL The mathematics of this presidential election is as confusing as any since 1968. If one truth...
...It's working institutionally—swaying longtime Democratic moneybags like MacArthur—but not ideologically or electorally...
...Going into the campaign's final weekend, Republican pollster Ed Goeas was finding that the Nader-isa-wasted-vote effort was actually shoring up Nader's support, particularly among those die-hard Democrats who have come to consider their soft-money-abusing, corporation-coddling, promise-breaking party unsafe at any speed...
...the entertainers Melissa Etheridge, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, and Robert Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Ralph Nader, that's how...
...What remains in question is whether there's anything a Democrat of Naderite disposition would want to save from the wrecking ball...
...Given that the American right has come to terms with the welfare state, American politics looks set to become more European...
...A closer look at the people the Democrats are sending out reveals what a terrible fix the party is in...
...Redford have been sent on a barnstorming tour of the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest, along with the Rev...
...What Nader recommends is a globalized leftism, of a sort that has played very well in other advanced economies...
...The N^'w Republic attacked Andrew Sullivan, one of its own editors, for so much as musing, "If I were a leftist, I'd vote for Nader in a heartbeat...
...In a way, the Democrats' attacks seem to be working...
...He now says he'll continue to spend money for Nader, but only in states where such spending doesn't threaten to throw the election to Bush...
...But alongside those Democrats who have every self-interested reason to oppose Nader is another, hard-er-to-understand group: those, like Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, who are considerably more in sympathy with Nader's hyperregulatory, environmental-extremist views than with Gore's welfare-reforming, free-trading ones...
...Notwithstanding the mess Pat Buchanan has made of the booty left him by Ross Perot's back-to-back electoral successes with the Reform party, the prospects for a well-funded Green party look good over the long term...
...These are now battleground states, and Democrats have brought out their heaviest artillery in an unprecedented suppress-the-vote operation aimed at keeping Nader from playing havoc with Al Gore's campaign...
...The European Union is now obsessed with genetics, Internet privacy issues, and various Seattlestyle international labor movements...
...Yet some polls in the final days had him losing Florida and winning the presidency...
...And Nader has assailed the abortion-rights lobby more forcefully than any Republican would ever have dared...
...That much is beyond dispute...
...What's more, intellectuals in sympathy with Gore have launched a letter-writing and propaganda campaign reminiscent of the 1930s...
...European Greens are part of the governing coalition in both France and Germany...
...Paul Berman, Ronald Dworkin, John Judis, and Sean Wilentz were among the thinkers who bought space in dozens of college newspapers to urge that "despite Mr...
...Congressmen John Conyers, Robert Wexler, and Barney Frank...
...Naderites, however, have gotten funding from an unexpected source: the moderate Republican Leadership Council, which is now bankrolling his ad campaigns in Wisconsin, Oregon, and Washington...
...In fact, the prominence such attacks give Nader may be introducing him to voters who didn't even realize he was on the ballot...
...How'd that happen...
...Jesse Jackson, Gloria Steinem, National Organization for Women president Patricia Ireland, and Kate Michelman of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League...
...Leftist billionaire Greg MacArthur had donated several hundred thousand dollars to getting Nader on the air in California...
...Once Bush appeared to be tightening the race there, thanks to his own ads, and once Democrats began to fret publicly over the prospect of Nader's costing Gore the election, MacArthur pulled the plug...
...The Green party is hovering between 4 percent and 8 percent in several states that looked either safe or promising for Gore—Oregon, Washington, California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Maine...
...Kennedy is a campaign-finance abuser of exactly the sort that Nader has attacked over the years...
...The notion that Nader is meaningless because he doesn't have the official backing of groups like NARAL and the Human Rights Campaign is particularly dumb," he wrote...
...These groups represent no one but professional fund-raisers and Washington plutocrats...
...senators Ted Kennedy and Paul Wellstone...
...Sullivan was particularly pithy on this last point...
...But in another way, the Democrats' anti-Nader campaign is blowing up in their faces...
...If one truth was held to be self-evident at the start of this campaign, it was that George W. Bush could not lose Florida and win the presidency...
...While the Kennedys and Michelmans and Irelands can make the simple argument that Gore is a better candidate for "progressives," the Wellstones are stuck arguing that a vote for Nader is a "wasted" one that risks electing George Bush president...
...Nader's past great achievements, and despite the good faith of his rank-and-file supporters, his has now become a wrecking-ball campaign...
...Half of the Democratic anti-Naderites, like Senator Kennedy and the feminists Ireland and Michelman, are directly in Nader's cross hairs...
...If Nader gets 5 percent of the vote nationwide, he gets matching funds for the 2004 elections...
...He has called it little more than a gussied-up fund-raising operation, which fraudulently raises the specter of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in a way that may glorify NOW and NARAL but diverts voter attention and party resources from real problems, like the predicament of unorganized labor in a global economy...
...The problem is that, for true radicals of the left, the argument doesn't hold water, thanks to the arcane campaign-finance rules of the Federal Election Commission...
Vol. 6 • November 2000 • No. 9
