from tikkun.org & Common Dreams
Like many people who campaigned and voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, the upcoming tenth anniversary of that disastrous election and awareness of the tragic results continues to haunt me. While it was perhaps the most serious political misjudgment I have ever made, it is important to recognize why at the time it seemed to be a quite rational course of action. It is also important to recognize what both the Democratic Party as well as progressives who are tempted to support left alternatives to the Democrats can learn from it.
It should be emphasized at the outset that Nader did not cause George W. Bush to be elected president. Bush was not elected president. The election was stolen. In addition to the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority that blocked the recount that would have provided Gore with a victory in Florida thereby giving him a majority of the electoral college, many hundreds of predominantly African-American voters - the vast majority of whom would have voted for Gore - were denied the right to vote because their names were similar to convicted felons who had been disenfranchised because of their crimes. It is also noteworthy that a 1996 crime bill pushed by then-Vice-President Gore dramatically increased the number of crimes considered felonies and thereby the number of convicted felons, the majority of whom in Florida are poor minorities who would have much more likely supported Gore over Bush had they (and the non-felons with similar names) been allowed to vote, thereby providing the Democratic nominee with a comfortable margin.
It is also important to emphasize that, even if Bush had fairly won Florida's electoral votes, Gore received a solid majority of the popular vote nationally, outpolling Bush by more than a half million votes. Nader and the Green Party oppose the Electoral College and support presidential elections based upon a popular nationwide vote. Gore and the Democrats, by contrast, supported the archaic and undemocratic Electoral College system. It is ironic, then, that the Democrats continue to blame Nader and the Greens for Bush's election that came as a result of an unfair electoral system that they supported and Greens opposed.
At the same time, there is little question that had Nader's name not been on the ballot in Florida, enough Green voters would have probably cast their ballots Democratic instead, raising Gore's margin over Bush high enough so that the Republicans could have not gotten away with the fraud that tilted the balance.
How Gore's Politics Alienated the Democratic Base
This then raises the question as to why so many people like me, who previously and subsequently voted Democratic in presidential elections, chose to vote for the Green Party in 2000.
Many people have forgotten that before Al Gore became a progressive hero as the most visible leader of the movement to curb climate change - perhaps the biggest single issue of our day and for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize-he was widely-recognized as being on the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. As one of the three finalists in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, Gore positioned himself clearly on the right, with Jesse Jackson on the left and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis - the eventual nominee - in the center.
Gore was one of the most ardent Democratic supporters of Reagan's right-wing foreign policy agenda, supporting such dangerous and destabilizing Pentagon boondoggles as the B-1 and B-2 bombers and the Trident II, cruise and Pershing missiles, all of which significantly raised the threat of nuclear war. He also supported U.S. funding and training of the Contra terrorists attacking Nicaragua and the murderous junta in El Salvador. In 1991, he was among the minority of Senate Democrats who supported the Gulf War. He was an outspoken supporter of a series of right-wing Israeli governments, opposing the Palestinians' right to statehood alongside Israel or even allowing Palestinians into the peace process.
As the Democratic presidential nominee in 2000, his hawkish world view did not seem to wane. Even with the end of the Cold War, he supported increasing the already-bloated U.S. military budget. He was apparently ready to tear up the SALT I treaty - negotiated by Nixon and Kissinger and long the foundation of nuclear arms control - in order to pursue a dubious missile defense strategy. He opposed human rights provisions for trade agreements and even for arms transfers. He opposed the treaty banning land mines. He supported laws that threatened jail and fines for Americans simply for travelling to Cuba. He defended the ongoing bombing of Iraq and the starving of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through draconian sanctions. He strongly supported efforts by the Word Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund to weaken environmental laws, consumer protection and labor rights in the name of "free trade," and was the administration's most visible advocate of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA.)
His positions weren't much better on domestic issues. He opposed raising the minimum wage to match the cost of living. He not only supported the death penalty, but made it far more difficult falsely convicted death row inmates to appeal their cases in federal courts. He supported the repeal of federal guarantees of assistance to poor children. He supported Federal Reserve policies of keeping wages low to prop up stock prices and taxing earnings from the stock market at lower rates then income from actual work. He supported the repeal of Depression-era banking regulations designed to protect small depositors and restrictions on derivatives that helped lead to the current financial crisis for which scores of Democrats are now being punished at the polls. He supported the Defense of Marriage Act in an effort to prevent gay and lesbian couples from having equal rights. (Earlier in his career, he referred to homosexuality as "abnormal sexual behavior" and voted against a bill that would protect patients with HIV from discrimination.) Even on environmental issues, his record was mixed, supporting efforts to undermine the endangered species act, pushing for nuclear power, and supporting an increase in clear-cut logging of old growth forests.
While most of us who supported Nader did not expect to agree with the Democratic nominee for president on every issue in order to vote for him, the fact that Gore took positions which only a few years earlier would have been considered to be in the mainstream of the Republican Party was simply too much to bear.
When he received the Democratic presidential nomination in July of 2000, there was hope that he would try to reassure the party's disillusioned base by choosing a more liberal vice-presidential running mate. Instead, he chose Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, who had the most conservative voting record of any Democrat in the Senate. Indeed, Lieberman was to the right of the Republican incumbent he defeated when first elected in 1988, quit the Democratic Party in 2006, and endorsed Republican senator John McCain for president in 2008. There was no reason to think that Gore's appointments for cabinet posts and other key positions in his administration would be any better.
It cannot be stressed enough that had Gore instead embraced an even slightly more progressive agenda, he would not have lost so many Democratic voters to Nader. Rather than modify his positions more in line with the party's more liberal base, however, Gore initially worked to keep Nader off the ballot in a number of states to prevent voters from even having the choice. And, while Gore was willing to debate Bush, the opponent on his right, he refused to debate his opponent on his left, apparently fearing how voters might react if they were able to compare his positions with those of the well-respected consumer advocate. In the final week of the campaign, recognizing that he was losing liberal voters to his Green Party challenger, Gore did shift the tone of his campaign somewhat to the left, spouting more populist themes. In those final days, polls showed he gained three percentage points, finally pulling slightly ahead of Bush, while Nader dropped from 6% to 3%.
But it was too little too late. So many of us were so disgusted with eight years of center-right governance of the Clinton Administration and the prospects of more under Al Gore, we just could not stomach voting Democratic, even though it was apparent that the election was very close. After eight years of bitter disappointment with Clinton and Gore in power in Washington, it felt cynical and self-defeating to once again vote for a lesser evil, which seemingly would only contribute to the downward spiral which was taking the Democratic Party further and further away from its progressive heyday with the nomination of George McGovern in 1972. In many ways, then, Nader was a symptom, not a cause, of the large-scale alienation with Gore.
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