To hear his critics go crazy on him, a steam vent in hell would be too nice a place for Ralph Nader to pay penance if Al Gore ends up losing to George W. Bush. One by one, Democrats and activists eagerly lined up for batting practice last week on the rumpled old consumer advocate and Green Party nominee.
"He cost him the election," Delaware Senator Joseph Biden ranted, saying that enough of Nader's nearly 100,000 votes in Florida would have gone Gore's way to make him President. "Whatever mistakes Gore made, we wouldn't even be talking about it if Nader hadn't run... God spare me the purists." Deb Callahan, president of the League of Conservation Voters, said the Nader biography has to be rewritten. "This changes his legacy as a person." What really rankled them, critics said when they paused to catch their breath, was Nader's glib insistence throughout his campaign that there was no significant difference between Bush and Gore, whom he called Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
"There was such a contrast between the two [on labor issues]," said an angry John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO. Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, said Nader "cavalierly dismissed the threat to women's rights as the result of a George W. Bush election. Ralph Nader is no friend of American women."
It was quite a show, so many lefties ganging up on a guy for having the gall to act like--how best to describe it?--such an old-fashioned Democrat. You might expect the target of such vitriol to be squirreled away in a bunker somewhere. But Nader seemed no more folded in on himself than usual. Visited several blocks from the White House in the dumpy town house that served as his campaign headquarters, he was unrepentant and unsurprised. "Well-intentioned cowards," he called his critics, whom he finds unforgivably tolerant of a poisoned system in which both major candidates dance on strings controlled by corporate villains. "They're otherwise good people. They just don't have the courage of their forebears."
The only critic who got under his skin, it seems, was the wife of the current President. Nader saw a Washington Post quote from media executive Harry Evans, who reportedly exclaimed at a party celebrating Hillary Clinton's U.S. Senate win in New York, "I want to kill Nader." Hillary, affirming her support for capital punishment, reportedly responded, "That's not a bad idea!" Nader said Evans had apologized to him but Clinton hadn't returned his call.
For all the frenzy to string him up, Nader said, only one person will have cost Gore the election if he loses it: Gore himself. Nader wondered, with a gleam in his eye that has begun to scare people, why no one is asking the Vice President why he cost Ralph Nader the election.
That is precisely the kind of hubris that drove some people out of the Green Party, says Seattle city councilwoman Judy Nicastro, who quit the Greens two weeks before the election. "What was all this work for?" Nicastro wonders, saying the Nader candidacy became an egomaniacal crusade that failed in every one of its objectives. Nader did not get the 5% of the vote needed for the party to get federal funding; the Green Party is splintered; Bush might be President. Says Nicastro: "It could overturn so many of the things Ralph Nader has fought for, which makes it perverse."