Gore’s Enemy Number One

Ralph Nader, that’s how. 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. 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. Congressmen John Conyers, Robert Wexler, and Barney Frank; senators Ted Kennedy and Paul Wellstone; the entertainers Melissa Etheridge, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, and Robert Redford have been sent on a barnstorming tour of the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest, along with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Gloria Steinem, National Organization for Women president Patricia Ireland, and Kate Michelman of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.

What’s more, intellectuals in sympathy with Gore have launched a letter-writing and propaganda campaign reminiscent of the 1930s. The New 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.” 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. Nader’s past great achievements, and despite the good faith of his rank-and-file supporters, his has now become a wrecking-ball campaign.”

That much is beyond dispute. What remains in question is whether there’s anything a Democrat of Naderite disposition would want to save from the wrecking ball. A closer look at the people the Democrats are sending out reveals what a terrible fix the party is in.

Half of the Democratic anti-Naderites, like Senator Kennedy and the feminists Ireland and Michelman, are directly in Nader’s cross hairs. Kennedy is a campaign-finance abuser of exactly the sort that Nader has attacked over the years. And Nader has assailed the abortion-rights lobby more forcefully than any Republican would ever have dared. 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. (Sullivan was particularly pithy on this last point. “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.”)

But alongside those Democrats who have every self-interested reason to oppose Nader is another, harder-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. 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.

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. If Nader gets 5 percent of the vote nationwide, he gets matching funds for the 2004 elections. 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. What Nader recommends is a globalized leftism, of a sort that has played very well in other advanced economies. Given that the American right has come to terms with the welfare state, American politics looks set to become more European. The European Union is now obsessed with genetics, Internet privacy issues, and various Seattlestyle international labor movements. European Greens are part of the governing coalition in both France and Germany.

In a way, the Democrats’ attacks seem to be working. 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. 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. (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.)

But in another way, the Democrats’ anti-Nader campaign is blowing up in their faces. It’s working institutionally — swaying longtime Democratic moneybags like MacArthur — but not ideologically or electorally. In fact, the prominence such attacks give Nader may be introducing him to voters who didn’t even realize he was on the ballot. Going into the campaign’s final weekend, Republican pollster Ed Goeas was finding that the Nader-is-a-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.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.