A leftwing bookshop cafe is the perfect place in George Bush’s Washington for a conversation about the possibility of a progressive run for the US presidency: it is quiet and virtually deserted.
In a city of steaks and sushi, it also serves Ralph Nader’s sort of food — simple vegetable soups with brown bread, although to his disappointment the lentil is off the menu on this occasion. Nader makes do with split-pea and settles down to explain why American progressives should not make do with the Democrats at this year’s elections.
Corporate America’s nemesis, and the country’s most celebrated and tenacious agitator, Nader will decide at the end of the month, a few weeks before his 70th birthday, whether to run for the presidency once more. But he makes it clear that only wild horses would stop him. Wild horses or their opposite — indifference — which is the more immediate threat.
Nader lost a lot of friends on the left when he stood as a Green party candidate in 2000, winning about 3% of the national vote. Many Democrats and progressives still blame him for putting George Bush in the White House by drawing votes from Al Gore in the knife-edge election.
This time even the Greens have been ambivalent about him. Some wanted another candidate, and some wanted him to restrict his run to ”safe” states, where he could not affect the outcome in the electoral college that ultimately elects the president.
Independent
It is not in Nader’s nature to submit to such constraints, however. ”I don’t believe in being held hostage to the electoral college,” he says. In any case, the Greens are not going to decide whether to field a presidential candidate until the summer, and that, in Nader’s view, is far too late.
If he runs he will do so as an independent, on a radical programme of sealing off government from corporate influence and stripping the military budget to pay for better social services.
He has launched an exploratory committee to look into the feasibility of finding money and backers. Both are in much shorter supply this time round, he admits. The wealthy progressives who signed cheques for his campaign last time are not answering his call, and he has had to go fishing for support in unknown waters.
”It takes a while to tap into the ones who don’t want to support you and then you’ve got to find a new layer of activism,” he says.
Dressed in an overcoat and jumper, he is as reassuringly rumpled as ever, compared with the self-conscious slickness of the other candidates, but he appears more hunched and a couple of degrees less sharp than he did in 2000. His sentences meander more and he says Republican when he means Democrat and vice-versa — a freudian slip, perhaps, as he portrays them both as subsidiaries of a single corporate-run party.
Not only would Nader be campaigning without a party banner or organisation this year, he also has to contemplate the candidacy of Howard Dean, the current frontrunner in the Democratic primaries, who has excited young voters, used the internet to powerful effect and tapped into a deep well of leftwing anger at the state of the country — all trademarks of the 2000 Nader campaign.
Nader has several responses to the Dean phenomenon. First, that the former Vermont governor might not win the nomination. He points out that Wesley Clark, the former Nato general, is rapidly moving up the national polls.
Second, he thinks Dean will soon have to abandon the agenda that has so far appealed to would-be Naderites.
”The question is whether we’ve seen the best of Dean and he’s going to have to move to the right,” says Nader. ”He has to. That’s certainly his record as governor which is far more probative of how he’s going to behave than the last year on the campaign trail. And second, the corporate Democrats will require him to do that as a price of their support.”
The problem is that if Dean does swing to the right it is likely to be when the primaries move to the southern states in early February. Nader needs to find cash and volunteers now.
Still, as he points out on several occasions, ”it’s a big country”. There will be 10-million new young voters on the rolls since 2000. Some of them surely must be interested in the idea of a third-party candidacy on the left.
Self-destruction
Perhaps, but maybe not enough to run a meaningful campaign. Many of the senior staff from the family of activist organisations he founded in Washington have privately urged him not to run.
Michael Moore, the radical author of a string of popular anti-establishment books and films who stood by his side four years ago, put his weight behind last autumn’s push to draft General Clark into the Democratic race.
Micah Sifry, a radical writer and another erstwhile supporter, fears that a Nader campaign would be an act of self-absorption and ultimately self-destruction.
”Apart from risking the re-election of Bush, it would only hurt Nader,” argues Sifry. ”Barring an unforeseen shift in the contours of the election, he would do far worse than the 2,7-million votes he got in 2000. This is not his year.”
The Democrats are clearly taking no chances. They have rehired the man who personally evicted Nader from a 2000 presidential debate in Boston as their security consultant.
The would-be candidate insists that he is undeterred. ”We’re going to run a trim-tab campaign,” he says, using a sailing metaphor referring to the small flaps that can make subtle changes in the direction of boats.
But even a trim-tab is of little use if there is no wind in your sails. – Guardian Unlimited Â