Nader’s Fade

Indecisive leadership, a weak VP candidate, and a late start doomed Ralph Nader’s campaign from reaching the five percent threshold

By Micah L. Sifry

WHERE’S RALPH: Unlike the two major-party candidates, George W. Bush and Al Gore, Nader couldn’t count on the automatic daily coverage by the media. But he also passed up opportunities to position himself on some high-profile issues.

Two-point-seven percent.

What happened? Why didn’t Ralph Nader get five percent of the vote on November 7? Polls taken as late as the weekend before the election seemed to show that the Green Party candidate would meet that target, which would have made the Green Party eligible for at least $8 million in federal funds in the next presidential race.

But his campaign fell well short of that goal. This failure surprised many people, given everything the Green Party accomplished through Nader’s run for the presidency this year (see “Putting the Greens on the Map,” page 15). To be sure, some of the reasons lay beyond Nader’s and the Green Party’s control. Had there been a genuine four-way race among Nader, Gore, Bush, and Reform Party nominee Pat Buchanan, for example, Nader might have avoided the ugly endgame with the Democrats that dominated his campaign’s final weeks. And the close race between Gore and Bush ultimately depressed Nader’s vote totals. But clearly Nader and a good number of his supporters misjudged the reluctance of many liberals to abandon the Democratic Party, and underestimated the effectiveness of the Gore campaign’s scare tactics in the final weeks of the election.

“The most disappointing thing to me was the way the polls shrank,” says Nader. “They gave every indication to me of holding, going into the last weekend before Election Day, even surging in some places. . . . There’s this psychology among voters not to stray from the major parties.”

Still, a full postmortem requires an honest look at the mistakes that the Nader campaign made on its own: its late start, its weak vice-presidential candidate, and problems created by the Greens, as well as the stumbles of an inexperienced staff that didn’t maximize the campaign’s message. It’s also worth questioning whether Nader was too “left” or too “Green” a candidate to reach most voters — a topic of great importance if Nader and the Greens are to prosper in the future. And finally, it’s important to ask what can be learned from his campaign that can be applied to future progressive third-party efforts.

The first error, and the biggest, was starting the campaign so late. Although Nader had let a few people know (off the record) as early as June of last year that he would run for president, he didn’t begin looking for a campaign manager until early 2000, and his official announcement wasn’t until February 21. The result was a cascading series of blown deadlines and late starts on everything from ballot access to fundraising. All of which were complicated by Nader’s decision to spend most of the first three months of his campaign — from mid-March to mid-June — flying around the country keeping his promise to campaign in all 50 states.

It wasn’t until late July that the funds really started pouring in, enabling campaign manager Theresa Amato to triple the staff to more than 100 by the end of August, and to hire field coordinators in many states. But the Nader campaign didn’t really get out of first gear until Labor Day. When he was asked in mid-October about what he would have done differently, Nader said he might have started campaigning earlier.

“If we had started in November, it would have been better, but I’m not sure the intensity could have been kept up with some people,” he said at the time, adding that it would have been hard to get out the campaign’s radical message so early in the political season — especially during the primaries, when many of the mainstream candidates were touting their reformer credentials. “Too many people were giving [campaign donations] to Bradley and McCain. That opened up substantially after March.”

The consensus of Nader’s inner circle is less sanguine. “Tactically, we were at a disadvantage starting late,” Amato concedes.

A second internal problem was that the campaign had, essentially, a part-time vice-presidential candidate in long-time environmental-justice activist Winona LaDuke, who gave birth to her third child early this year. Her presence on the ticket was obviously reassuring to hardcore Greens concerned that Nader would neglect their broader platform in his effort to focus on corporate-power and democracy issues. But while Nader stood solidly with the Green platform throughout the campaign, LaDuke was nowhere near as active on the campaign trail. Her absence sometimes angered and confused Greens, particularly women, who came to rallies expecting to see her speak.

What if someone like African-American scholar and Nader backer Cornel West had stepped in to fill her shoes? The move might have broadened the Greens’ appeal to more people of color. West came out for Nader in August, after having stumped actively for Democrat Bill Bradley. The day before Election Day, after he and Nader spoke at Al Sharpton’s headquarters in New York City, I asked him whether he could imagine running for vice-president with Nader. Laughing heartily, West said, “Now that’s something I could wrap my mind around, my brother!”

Amato doesn’t deny that LaDuke had a part-time role in the campaign. But, Amato says, “she had done more than she had committed to Ralph to do. And she did have other commitments.”

Some of the campaign’s day-to-day difficulties flowed from its relationship with the Greens, who brought their own unique combination of enthusiasm and amateurism to the effort. One close Nader adviser rattles off a quick list of missteps: “First, the timing and location of the convention [in Denver in June] screwed the campaign out of plenty of matching funds [which are available only until a party nominates its presidential candidate]. We could have held it in September. And why not hold it in New York or California, where more people would have attended?

“Second, in lots of places there was little focus on the presidential campaign, with Greens more interested in local issues like animal rights or power lines. Third, the ‘Super Rallies’ were a success despite the Greens. We’d give them a bunch of tickets to sell and they’d stick them on the side of the table. In many places, they haven’t made the transition from being a debating society to being a political party.

“Fourth, I don’t know who put out that statement on the Middle East and what they thought they were doing.”

Indeed. The Association of State Green Parties (ASGP) issued a release on October 24 endorsing a United Nations resolution that condemned Israel’s handling of the Palestinian protests and called for an end to US aid to Israel until the country agrees to withdraw from the occupied territories and recognize the Palestinians’ right of return. The statement went beyond Nader’s own position on the conflict — he is against any immediate aid cutoff and has talked only about phasing down economic aid to the country, citing former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s support for the notion.

Needless to say, the ASGP’s statement quickly became part of anti-Nader propaganda being circulated by some Jewish Democrats — including vicious e-mails that gratuitously emphasized Nader’s Lebanese heritage and claimed that his father had refused to serve Jews at his restaurant in Winsted, Connecticut. The result? According to the Voter News Service exit poll, Nader received only one percent of the vote of a very liberal minority that had earlier supported his candidacy disproportionately.

Then there was the inexperience of the campaign staff, which showed in every department. Some field staffers were hired haphazardly, the campaign’s Web site languished for months, and campaign manager Amato was more of an administrator than a strategist.

These sorts of problems crop up in all kinds of seat-of-their-pants campaigns, and though they’re painful, they don’t have to be fatal. But indecisive leadership and sloppy work in Nader’s headquarters triggered the candidate’s legendary propensity for micro-managing. After some press releases were sent out with typos, for example, Nader insisted on personally approving every outgoing communication — dramatically slowing the campaign’s ability to respond to reporters.

The team’s flaws were most noticeable when it came to getting the campaign’s message out. There’s no question the mainstream media disdained the Nader campaign until the end. With a few exceptions — USA Today, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Hartford Courant, and ABC News — Nader was nothing more than an occasional feature story. The New York Times set the tone with its sneering editorials and skimpy news coverage. But with some creative campaigning, Nader might have been able to break through the media brownout.

Despite pressure from several close supporters and campaign advisers, however, Nader refused to elbow his way into front-page-hogging sagas like the Elián González brouhaha or Texas’s controversial execution of Gary Graham — even though both cases offered an excellent opportunity for him to distinguish his stance on the issues from those of Bush and Gore. For Nader, these stories were distractions from his core message about corporate power and its stranglehold on American life.

Since he couldn’t count on the automatic daily coverage that is a perk of being a major-party candidate, Nader continually needed to find targets that could illustrate his message — i.e., we need to save democracy from corporate power — while also affecting the Gore-Bush horse race upon which nearly all media coverage was focused. He hit the occasional bull’s eye, as in a trip to East Liverpool, Ohio, where for eight years protesters have ripped Al Gore’s broken promise to prevent the opening of an incinerator near a public school. But most of the time Nader’s message was more diffuse and less “newsworthy.”

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