Only 50% of Americans vote for the president and the protests outside the Democratic convention explain why
By Duncan Campbell, in Guardian, (London)
Saturday 19 August 2000
Two images stand out from the protests taking place outside the Democrats' convention in Los Angeles this week.
The first was of battalions of riot police, equipped as if for an invasion, standing guard outside the downtown temples of corporate America as demonstrators marched past.
The second was of the mainly Latino workers in the Broadway sweatshops leaning out of windows to cheer on the marchers protesting against "corporate greed" and globalisation.
The images symbolise both what is missing from conventional American politics, what divides the haves and have-nots of the world's richest country and what is fuelling the still unspecific but growing international movement that started in Seattle last year and will be seeking another platform in Prague next month.
Only half of the American electorate vote for the president and the events of the past week in LA have partly served to explain why. The financial clout of the corporations now gives the appearance of having permeated every aspect of policy-making so that it is no longer clear to many people whether their elected representatives are acting in the voters' interests or their backers' interests.
Do politicians shy away from real gun reform because of the gun manufacturers' lobby?
Do they back a judicial system that jails more than 2m Americans because the prison-industrial complex now carries such weight?
Are they helping the Colombian government in a civil war because they want to protect the interests of American oil and because it suits the military-industrial complex?
For many politicians the answer may be no, but the suspicion will remain as long as the race is to the richest. The news this week that George W Bush had now raised $100m for his campaign and his running mate, Dick Cheney, had received a corporate pay-off of $20m further emphasised the great gulf between those inside the safe convention walls and those outside on the streets.
And it is this gut feeling that the corporations and the international financial bodies are now controlling decisions on wages, the environment or immigration, that has helped to mobilise this still loosely-knit confederation of protest.
What fuels it, too, in the United States, is the feeling that neither of the two main parties offer alternatives on what are to some people the most important issues of the day.
One of the angriest demonstrations of the week focused on those on death row and in jail for drug offences. Both Democrats and Republicans back the death penalty and both support the "war on drugs" that has led to the incarceration of so many. Indeed one of Al Gore's pledges during his acceptance speech was for a further 50,000 police officers. Not a further 50,000 teachers for a country with the illiteracy levels similar to those of many third world countries; not a further 50,000 medical workers for a country where 40m are not entitled to healthcare. No wonder some of the placards outside carried the slogan: "Don't incarcerate, educate".
The ghost at the feast this week has been Ralph Nader, the Green party's candidate and now the repository of the hopes of the liberal left outside the Democratic party. His name was written in the heavens by a sky-writing plane on Wednesday and has been on the lips of many throughout the week. Is a vote for Nader a vote for Bush is the question that will be asked many times between now and November, but increasingly the evidence is that the uncommitted, the independents and the disillusioned Democrats will be heading his way. If these votes do indeed lose Gore the election, the next big question will be whether it leads to a larger, more focused movement and whether the Greens are the party best equipped to lead it.
Al Gore and George W Bush may bask in the warm glow of their respective conventions, but outside the air-conditioned halls it is clear that the old order is no longer trusted by the very people - the young, the poor, the Latinos, the blacks - they are claiming to want to help. Somehow, it seems unlikely that many hands would be waving from sweatshop windows if either of the two presidential parties had ventured down Broadway in their limos this week.
duncan.campbell@guardian.co.uk
Nader mounts a fourth presidential bid
(CNN) -- Consumer advocate, lawyer, presidential candidate and critic of Democrats and Republicans alike, Ralph Nader bears many titles. Yet as he mounts his fourth bid for the presidency, Nader's candidacy is shadowed by the 2000 election and whether he helped elect President George W. Bush.
As the Green Party candidate in 2000, Nader won 2.74 percent of the national vote, placing third. But many Democrats blame him for siphoning off votes in key states, especially Florida, that might have gone to Democratic nominee Al Gore. Bush won Florida by 537 votes and won the election after a 5-4 decision in the U.S. Supreme Court settled a protracted dispute over the Florida vote.
The possibility of Nader's candidacy contributing to Bush's re-election fuels a ferocious debate among Democrats, Nader supporters and other liberal activists.
Some former Nader supporters urged him to skip the 2004 election and are now saying a vote for Nader is a vote to re-elect Bush. Other liberal activists paint Nader as an out-of-touch liberal warrior driven by ego.
Nader disagrees. The Supreme Court, he says, cost Gore the election and he blames the former vice president for running a lackluster campaign.
"The Democrats should stop whining and go to work," he said in a CNN interview on March 30. "They should be landsliding Bush" in 2004.
Bush, he said, has a clear record against workers, consumers and the environment, and is a "big corporation in the White House disguised as a human being."
He contends both parties are captive to corporate interests. When announcing his campaign February 22 on NBC's "Meet The Press," he said he is running to "challenge the two-party duopoly" he believes is damaging American democracy. He also criticized the treatment of third party and independent candidates as "second-class citizens."
In Nader's view, the Democratic Party is part of the problem, having lost touch with its progressive heritage.
"The liberal intelligentsia has allowed its party to become a captive of corporate interests," he said.
A lifetime of advocacyNader was born in Winsted, Connecticut in 1934, one of Rose and Nadra Nader's four children. His father, a Lebanese immigrant, owned and operated a restaurant where Nader worked in his youth. He has spoken Arabic since he was a child.
He attended Princeton University and graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor of arts degree in 1955. He went on to law school at Harvard University, graduating in 1958.
After a six-month stint in the Army in 1959, Nader traveled through Latin America, Africa and Europe. Nader began practicing law in Hartford, Connecticut. His career as a public advocate started with an article in The Nation titled "The Safe Car You Can't Buy." He also lectured on history and government at the University of Hartford from 1961-1963.
He was hired in 1964 by then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a paid consultant to the Labor Department. He worked on a federal government study on auto safety and helped a Senate subcommittee on the same subject.
In May 1965, Nader left the Labor Department to work on a book about auto safety. "Unsafe at Any Speed" launched him into the public spotlight. The book, published in November 1965, documented safety defects in U.S. cars and criticized the automobile industry's safety practices, specifically targeting the Corvair, which was built by General Motors.
Helped by the revelation that General Motors hired a private detective to investigate Nader's private life, the book became a best seller. Nader subsequently sued GM for invasion of privacy and eventually received $425,000 in an out-of-court settlement.
He used the money to expand his advocacy efforts. Nader's research on auto safety and his lobbying in Washington helped push Congress to pass the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. He also lobbied for the 1967 Wholesome Meat Act, which called for federal inspections of beef and poultry and imposed standards on slaughterhouses, the 1967 Freedom of Information Act and the 1970 Clean Air Act.
In 1969, he helped found the Center for Study of Responsive Law (CSRL), a nonprofit organization staffed mostly by college, graduate and law students. Those students became known as "Nader's Raiders" and studied and issued reports on a variety of consumer issues.
The CSRL is now a consortium of a number of nonprofit groups, including the Consumer Project on Technology, Freedom of Information Clearinghouse, and the League of Fans, which examines how sports businesses operate.
In 1971, Nader founded Public Citizen, a nonprofit national consumer advocacy organization that aims to represent consumer interests in Congress, the executive branch and the courts. Public Citizen remains in operation and is now headed by Joan Claybrook, a Nader protégé who headed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 1977 to 1981.
Nader resigned as director of Public Citizen in November 1980 and began to focus on issues relating to trade and corporate power. That same year, he founded the Multinational Monitor, a magazine that examines multinational corporations and their relationship with developing nations, labor and the environment.
The 1980s were a difficult time for Nader. His efforts to convince the federal government to regulate issues in the public interest conflicted with the Reagan administration's efforts to limit the power of federal agencies. Nader's older brother Shafeek died of prostate cancer in 1986. After his death, Nader developed a case of Bell's palsy that paralyzed the left side of his face for several months.
Nader dealt with the paralysis with his deadpan sense of humor, telling audiences at public events that "at least my opponents can't say I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth."
He has written or edited more than 25 books since the publication of "Unsafe At Any Speed." His personal financial disclosure in 2000 listed his net worth at close to $4 million, including $1 million of stock in tech giant Cisco Systems.
Such revelations prompted critics to label Nader a hypocrite for railing against corporations while personally profiting from its success. But in his disclosure, Nader said that aside from "modest personal expenses," he uses his income as a "de facto philanthropic fund" for his projects. He also said that he has consistently donated 50 percent of his adjusted gross income to charitable institutions, amounting to several million dollars since 1967.
"In short, monies I earn are for strengthening civil society," he said.
Nader is well known for his modest lifestyle. He lives alone in a Washington apartment and does not own a car. He never married and has no children. He told The New York Times in 1995 that he didn't want to be an absentee father or husband. "That would have been terrible," he said.
Activist turned candidateAlways registered as an independent, Nader first entered the political arena as a candidate in 1992 as a write-in candidate for president. In 1996, he agreed to run as the Green Party's candidate for president. He hardly campaigned or raised money, and received 685,128 votes, or 0.71 percent of the national popular vote.
Nader was the Green Party nominee again in 2000. He actively campaigned and raised money, and was supported by several high-profile celebrities. He significantly increased his national vote total, receiving 2,882,955 votes, or 2.74 percent. But it was the 97,488 votes Nader received in Florida that brought him the wrath of Democrats once Gore lost the state and the election.
Nader's campaign Web site lists multiple explanations for Gore's loss, including Bush's recount strategy in Florida, the controversial butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County, the purging of tens of thousands of non-ex-felons from the Florida voter rolls, and Gore's campaign.
"Gore beat Gore," Nader said in a December 2003 CNN interview. "He didn't get Tennessee, his home state. That would have made him president. And he blundered in Florida and didn't ask for a statewide recount."
Nader says his 2004 candidacy will act as a "second front" against Bush and attract Republican voters angry with Bush over issues like corporate responsibility and the rising federal deficit.
"There's a real revolt brewing in conservative circles," Nader said in a CNN interview after he announced he was running. "And then there's ... the liberal Republicans, who never liked Bush to begin with."
Levels of supportHowever, Nader may not have the level of support among liberal activists that he received in 2000. The editors of The Nation published an open letter to Nader in the February 16, 2004, issue urging him not to run.
RalphDontRun.net, a Web site that originally urged him not to run, now urges potential Nader voters to vote for Democratic nominee John Kerry instead.
John Pearce, a Democrat who helped create the Web site, said in a CNN interview that the issues at stake in this election -- Bush's tax cuts, the budget deficit, the potential to nominate a Supreme Court justice -- are too much for progressive voters to risk voting for Nader.
"These are the kinds of issues that unify not just progressives, but centrists, and really are alarming such a wide range of people, that any risk of peeling off a million votes for a Ralph Nader candidacy from a Democratic candidate is something people just aren't willing to even consider this time around," he said.
Even former President Jimmy Carter -- who said Nader was such a trusted friend that he was once allowed to umpire a Carter family softball game down in Georgia -- urged him to get out of the race.
"When I was president, he gave me a lot of advice. And tonight, I want to return the favor by giving him some advice. Ralph, go back to umpiring softball games or examining the rear end of automobiles, and don't risk costing the Democrats the White House this year as you did four years ago," Carter said at a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser in March.
Nader dismisses these arguments as well as other criticism of him as an ego-driven candidate.
"That means they're out of arguments," he said March 30 on CNN. "My compass comes from 45 million Americans who don't have health care after all these years."
Nader says his candidacy is simply another way to advocate issues that he has made his life's work.
"This is a commitment to justice," he said. "I've been working for 40 years on behalf of the health, safety and economic well being of the American people. I don't like citizen groups being shut out by both parties in this city, corporate occupied territory, not having a chance to improve their country."
Election Turnout in 2004 Was Highest Since 1968
Still paying attention, Obama? Nowhere to go? Fast foreword to 2008:
Principles give way to politics as Obama courts mid-America
The Observer,
Sunday June 29, 2008
During the Democratic primary season, all those eons ago, Barack Obama deployed no more powerful line against Hillary Clinton than his insistence that 'we can't just tell people what they want to hear. We need to tell them what they need to hear'. More than just a catchy couplet, the phrase was a deadly arrow into the heart of Clintonism.
Few things crippled Hillary's campaign like the belief that she would say or do anything to get elected, from supporting the Iraq War to claiming she'd dodged sniper fire at Tuzla. In Obama, Democrats seemed to have found something refreshing: a brave truth-teller unmoored to pollsters such as Mark Penn, someone who had spoken out against Iraq the war and could at last restore integrity and honesty to Washington politics.
But since Obama dispatched Clinton, he has seemed rather more attuned to what the people want to hear or perhaps he has simply traded the wants of a liberal audience for those of a more moderate one. Either way, he is treading that reliably time-worn path every nominee follows to the political centre. And the question for Democrats is whether to applaud Obama as a cunning politician who knows how to win or fret that he's given undecided voters reason to think his 'politics of hope' are just politics as usual.
First, let us count the repositionings. This past week, Obama expressed surprising disagreement with a Supreme Court ruling that outlawed the death penalty for child rapists (he had previously questioned the rationale of capital punishment). He resisted criticising another high court ruling that affirmed gun owners' rights, even though he had previously seemed to support the gun-control measure at issue.
Obama also dropped his once-stern opposition to a Congressional measure, despised on the left, that would legally shield telecommunications companies that co-operated with extra-legal US government eavesdropping. To some, even the contents of Obama's iPod, recently revealed to Rolling Stone, smacked of political calculation, combining as it did Baby Boomer classics (Stones, Springsteen, Dylan) with highbrow jazz (Coltrane, Miles Davis) mindless top 40 pop (Sheryl Crow) and edgy-but-not-too-edgy hip hop (Jay-Z, Ludacris). Perhaps this playlist should be titled 'Majority Coalition'.
In truth, Obama has been creeping towards the sanitised centre for a while. After disdaining American flag lapel pins last year, he now wears one regularly. When Jeremiah Wright, his controversial former pastor, provoked outrage in March, Obama insisted he could not 'disown' him, but proceeded to do so just a few weeks later with a public condemnation.
Obama now concedes that his sharp criticism of free trade agreements such as Nafta before industrial-area primary voters might have been 'overheated'. He's toughened his talk on Iran and in favour of Israel. He's even shaded his rhetoric on Iraq, downplaying his primary season vow to withdraw all US combat troops within 16 months for more careful talk of a gradual and 'responsible' exit.
Each of these positions has been generally consistent with the prevailing views of the swing voters Obama will need to win in November: independents, liberal Republicans and moderate Democrats whose votes are still up for grabs. After all, Obama has already locked down most core Democrats, who wouldn't think of staying home or voting for the pro-war McCain. But according to an early June Gallup poll, McCain is beating Obama among independents who don't lean toward either party.
McCain campaign operatives have welcomed these interesting new dimensions of Obama's profile. Their core argument, after all, is that Obama is a charlatan - not a harbinger of new politics but a typical pol who has never taken real risks (unlike McCain, who defied his party on campaign finance reform in the late 1990s and recent public opinion over the Iraq War). Obama, they say, is a just another unprincipled flip-flopper: 'John Kerry with a tan,' as prominent conservative activist Grover Norquist recently put it, in a formulation of questionable taste. (Never mind that McCain himself revamped core positions on issues ranging from immigration to tax cuts to secure the Republican nomination.)
That Obama is not the living incarnation of pure principle should be no shock; his vaunted political courage has always been overstated. While prescient, his famous 2002 speech opposing the Iraq War, for instance, was hardly a political risk. Obama represented Chicago's highly liberal Hyde Park area as a state senator and was counting on a similarly anti-war coalition of African-Americans and white liberals in his upcoming US Senate candidacy. And while taking on the Clintons may have been audacious, it was also opportunistic. He did not feel 'the fierce urgency of now' until after the expected challenger to Hillary's crown, former Virginia governor Mark Warner, abandoned his candidacy at the last minute. Savvy Democrats understand that there was always a certain genius to Obama's positioning, that to some degree his talk of changing politics was itself a skilful pose which turned Clinton into a reactionary foil. They will appreciate his awareness for what it takes to get elected. Democrats have long believed that their side practises politics less skilfully, less ruthlessly, than the Republicans. Hence one of Clinton's main promises to Democrats was that she could beat the Republicans at their own cynical game.
For now, they will have to hope that Obama hasn't gone too far. An ever-confounding question of politics is to know at what point a shift to a more majority position is outweighed by the disillusionment and scorn of flip-flopping. Wherever that tipping point is, however, Obama hasn't yet reached it. He is still better off with his current stances than he would be, say, explaining why he doesn't believe that child rapists deserve to die.
It's an unfortunate reality of politics that voters don't want to hear what they need to hear. We want to hear what we want to hear. Obama's recognition of that is a testament that he is, for better or worse, a shrewd, if far from pure, politician. Somewhere Hillary Clinton must be chuckling ruefully.
· Michael Crowley is senior editor at New Republic magazine and The Observer's chief American commentator
Obama Backlash in His Online Backyard
Updated | 4:20 p.m. The Obama campaign’s willingness to have supporters communicate and strategize with each other online, rather than wait for commands from on high, has been credited with giving him a crucial advantage over opponents who favor more traditional political tools. Nothing better typifies this strategy of letting the grass-roots grow on the campaign headquarters’ front lawn than its popular Web portal, my.barackobama.com, where supporters can form groups and create blogs.
But in the last week, my.barackobama.com has also become an excellent place for supporters to gather and discuss their disappointment with their candidate, surely a new development for a campaign fueled by popular enthusiasm, particularly online.
The rallying cry has been Mr. Obama’s support for a revised version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that includes immunity to lawsuits for phone companies over their role in assisting in the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.
A group on my.barackobama.com with the polite name “Senator Obama Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity – Get FISA Right” is now the fourth-largest public group at the portal, and it is growing fast. The mission statement on my.barackobama.com is, as follows: “We are a proud group of your supporters who believe in your call for hope and a new kind of politics. Please reject the politics of fear on national security, vote against this bill and lead other Democrats to do the same!”
The vote on FISA in the Senate has been delayed until after the July Fourth holiday.
The group, created on Wednesday, has more than 8,000 members, and recently passed the group “Women for Obama.” (On Monday morning, there were barely 4,000 members of the anti-FISA group.)
It is worth noting, however, that much of the networking among Mr. Obama’s supporters lives outside of the campaign’s walls. The largest group on my.barackobama.com, Action Wire, has about 13,400 members, while Mr. Obama’s Facebook page has more than 1 million supporters.
The entire episode shows the potential complications of an open site becoming an enabler of criticism from ardent supporters, let alone from opponents in disguise, so-called “concern trolls.” But the campaign said it wouldn’t have it any other way.
In an e-mail message, Tommy Vietor, an Obama campaign spokesperson, wrote: “This campaign has an extraordinary group of committed supporters, and we greatly appreciate their willingness to share their time and ideas with us. We believe that an open dialogue is an important part of any campaign, and are happy that my.barackobama.com has become a vehicle for that conversation.”
The group was conceived on a listserv for progressive, politically active people, said Mike Stark, an activist who is a law student at the University of Virginia. He wrote an initial e-mail to the group arguing: “Obama is getting mad props for social networking, why don’t we use social networking to let him know that he can’t keep elbowing his progressive base — the people who got him the nomination — away from the policy table?”
One of the recipients, who was already a member of my.barackobama.com, created the group. There were bumps in membership when various blogs wrote sympathetically, Mr. Stark said, but, “the biggest bump was from the members themselves.” He called it “the networking effect.”
The idea that the site would reject the sub-group never occurred to him, he said, because of Mr. Obama’s commitment to using the Internet to bring more transparency to government. “One of his key things is a five-day comment period before he signs noncritical legislation, and not all of that comment will be favorable,” he said. “It’s a test run to see what his presidency might look like.”
Mr. Stark said he was thinking beyond the FISA vote, which he concedes is all but lost. He said he planned to change the group’s name to Barack’s Better Angels, and linger at the site until the election as a meeting place for “progressives who won’t accept being pushed away from the table.”
...Party nominees (from wikipedia, 2008, presidential ballots)
(Please note that the Green Party will nominate it's presidential and vice-presidential candidates at it's Chicago convention in July. Popular in many countries around the world, the "Greens" have the most ballot access as a liberal third party.--java)
Those who are on the ballot in enough states to theoretically win a majority in the U.S. Electoral College are marked in bold. Candidates who are known to have appeared on at least two states' ballots are marked in italic. TBD means "to be determined".
| Presidential candidate | Party | Running mate | Campaign site |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gene Amondson | Prohibition | Leroy Pletten | |
| Chuck Baldwin | Constitution | Darrell Castle | baldwin2008.com |
| Bob Barr | Libertarian | Wayne Allyn Root | bobbarr2008.com |
| Róger Calero | Socialist Workers | Alyson Kennedy | |
| Gloria La Riva | Socialism & Liberation | Eugene Puryear | votepsl.org |
| John McCain (presumptive nominee) | Republican | TBD | johnmccain.com |
| Brian Moore | Socialist | Stewart Alexander | votesocialist2008.org |
| Ralph Nader | Independent | Matt Gonzalez | votenader.org |
| Barack Obama (presumptive nominee) | Democratic | TBD | barackobama.com |
| TBD | Green | TBD |
Ballot access
The two major parties in the United States are the Democratic and the Republican parties which are on the ballot in all fifty States and the District of Columbia.
The table below shows which third-party candidates have been able to gain ballot access in each State. In some States, these candidates are on the ballot as independents, or on the ballot lines of different parties.
| EV | Lib. | Green | Const. | Nader | Soc.& Lib. | Soc. | Soc. Wk. | Others | |
| States | 51 | 31 | 22 | 20 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 2 | |
| Electoral Votes | 538 | 386 | 241 | 197 | 49 | 50 | 39 | 36 | |
| Percent of EVs | 100% | 71.7% | 44.8% | 36.6% | 9.1% | 9.3% | 7.2% | 6.7% | |
| Alabama | 9 | ||||||||
| Alaska | 3 | ||||||||
| Arizona | 10 | ||||||||
| Arkansas | 6 | ||||||||
| California | 55 | ||||||||
| Colorado | 9 | BTP, Keyes, Pro. | |||||||
| Connecticut | 7 | ||||||||
| Delaware | 3 | ||||||||
| Florida | 27 | ||||||||
| Georgia | 15 | ||||||||
| Hawaii | 4 | ||||||||
| Idaho | 4 | ||||||||
| Illinois | 21 | ||||||||
| Indiana | 11 | ||||||||
| Iowa | 7 | ||||||||
| Kansas | 6 | ||||||||
| Kentucky | 8 | ||||||||
| Louisiana | 9 | ||||||||
| Maine | 4 | ||||||||
| Maryland | 10 | ||||||||
| Massachusetts | 12 | ||||||||
| Michigan | 17 | ||||||||
| Minnesota | 10 | ||||||||
| Mississippi | 6 | ||||||||
| Missouri | 11 | ||||||||
| Montana | 3 | ||||||||
| Nebraska | 5 | ||||||||
| Nevada | 5 | ||||||||
| New Hampshire | 4 | ||||||||
| New Jersey | 15 | ||||||||
| New Mexico | 5 | ||||||||
| New York | 31 | ||||||||
| North Carolina | 15 | ||||||||
| North Dakota | 3 | ||||||||
| Ohio | 20 | ||||||||
| Oklahoma | 7 | ||||||||
| Oregon | 7 | ||||||||
| Pennsylvania | 21 | ||||||||
| Rhode Island | 4 | ||||||||
| South Carolina | 8 | ||||||||
| South Dakota | 3 | ||||||||
| Tennessee | 11 | ||||||||
| Texas | 34 | ||||||||
| Utah | 5 | ||||||||
| Vermont | 3 | ||||||||
| Virginia | 13 | ||||||||
| Washington | 11 | ||||||||
| West Virginia | 5 | ||||||||
| Wisconsin | 10 | ||||||||
| Wyoming | 3 | ||||||||
| District of Columbia | 3 |
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