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Article Excerpt
Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President By Ralph Nader. Dunne Books, 400 pages, $14.95
Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon By Justin Martin. Perseus Publishing, 288 pages, $26.00
THE CENTRAL ELEMENT OF Ralph Nader's public appeal is, and has always been, honesty. He built his image in the 1960s as an almost comically earnest man, eschewing all worldly comforts and tirelessly uncovering the facts. His most famous campaign advertisement from 2000 contrasted "campaign ads filled with half-truths" with righteous Nader himself, filmed in a cramped office, sleeves rolled up, "finding out the truth," as the narrator explained. And he plays upon this aura in his campaign memoir, subtitled How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President.
For a man in Nader's position, though, this is a less impressive claim than it sounds. Major-party candidates, who aspire to cobble together a governing majority, must shade their views to hold together a diverse coalition of voters with widely divergent views. Candidates who merely aspire to reach some small chunk of the electorate do not face this constraint and thus can eschew the characteristic evasions of modern campaigning and say what they really think. For a candidate such as Nader, whose presidential campaign strove only to win 5 percent of the voters (and achieved just half that), honesty is less a badge of honor than a minimal requirement. If you have only 2.74 percent of the vote to show for your efforts, you better have spoken your mind.
So it particularly damning that Nader fails to clear even this low threshold. His public appearances during the campaign, far from brutally honest, were larded with dissembling, prevarication and demagoguery, empty catchphrases and scripted one-liners. Perhaps you think this was an unavoidable response to the constraints of campaign sound-bite journalism. But when given more than 300 pages to explain his case in depth, Nader merely repeats his tired aphorisms.
Nader is at his slipperiest on the issue of whether his campaign tipped the election to George W. Bush. The evidence that he did so is unambiguous. First, by repeating his charge that there was no significant ideological distance between the two major-party candidates, Nader helped bolster the message of Bush, who sought to blur unpopular Republican positions on key issues. Second, by peeling off substantial blocks of liberals in states such as Oregon, Minnesota and Wisconsin, he forced Al Gore to devote precious time and money to shoring up states that would (if not for Nader) have been safely Democratic, leaving him fewer resources for swing states such as Ohio, Tennessee and Florida. Third, and most directly, Nader won 97,488 votes in Florida. Appearing on a talk show after the election, Nader cited polls that showed that, had he not run, only 38 percent of his voters would have backed Gore versus...
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