Casinos and gamblers, beware! Ralph Nader's coming to town and he wants a bigger share of your winnings. Resuming his traditional role as Voice in the Wilderness, Nader promises to make Las Vegas one of his campaign stops, sometime in September. The Colorado River doubled as the River Jordan in The Greatest Story Ever Told, so why shouldn't it make as fitting a backdrop for Nader's jeremiads as for those of Charlton Heston's John the Baptist?
One doesn't arrange a telephone interview with Nader so much as play cat and mouse with him. Give him your phone number and he'll call ... perhaps when you least expect. And, as the Weekly's bad luck would have it, no sooner had we begun our 15 precious minutes of Nader's time when the tape recorder went on the fritz. Consequently, the ensuing conversation with the longtime consumer advocate and persistent presidential candidate had to be reconstructed on the fly.
While many wonder at Nader's motivation for mounting yet another presidential tilt (in tandem with would-be veep Peter Camejo), the candidate himself seems to entertain no illusions about his chances. He laughs self-deprecatingly when asked how he would govern without any power base in Congress, allowing that it's an enormous hypothetical leap.
For Nader to be elected, the candidate admits, there would have to be an extraordinary eruption of popular discontent, and that phenomenon itself that would be his leverage (much like the mandate for fiscal responsibility that Ross Perot sought in 1992 and '96). Nader adds that he has existing relationships with members of Congress that he could also draw upon. He points to President Bush's ability to push most of his agenda (up to and including the Iraq War) through a closely divided Congress, figuring that if Bush Jr. could do it, so can he.
Although one independent-party chief executive (Jesse Ventura, in Minnesota) came to grief dealing with a legislature comprised of Democrats and Republicans, Nader maintains that Ventura accomplished some good deeds and was ultimately undermined by personality issues, not policy ones. He points to Maine's Angus King as a third-party governor who is flourishing within the traditional two-party system.
Maine is also one of two states in the U.S. that funds political campaigns with public money (Arizona is the other). Not only does that assist third-party candidates like Gov. King, it has also leveled the playing field between challengers and entrenched incumbents.
Why, then, is Nader not putting his energies into lobbying for publicly financed elections in the other 48 states? Wouldn't this be the more effectual means of achieving one of his goals—loosening the grip on Washington held by what Jerry Brown used to call "the Incumbent Party"? Nader demurs, insisting that the top-down change explicit in his White House run is also encouraging grass-roots candidacies nationwide, boats that would be lifted by the rising tide of a Nader-Camejo campaign.
Nader waxes vague on how he would achieve certain objectives, and says that others (particularly involving taxes) are far too wonky and complicated to delve into. He would pay for his legislative agenda—outlined in 14 broad-brush points at www.votenader.org—by increasing taxes on "things we don't like," ranging from pollution to gambling. A President Nader would also frown upon the proposed mergers of MGM Mirage with Mandalay Resort Group, and Harrah's Entertainment with Caesars Entertainment.
Instead, Nader says, existing antitrust laws should be enforced and no fewer than four companies should ever be allowed to control a supermajority of market share. Although Wall Street's mantra (particularly with regard to gaming) has been "consolidate, consolidate, consolidate," Nader sees sundry anticompetitive perils therein, as well as the potential for "too-big-to-fail companies" that require federal bailouts when trouble strikes.
While the national sales tax proposed last week by Reps. Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay has the potential to highly regressive, Nader is withholding comment until he's had a chance to study it. He adds, "there's many kinds of sales taxes" that could be implemented, including progressive ones, value-added taxes and so forth.
Although Nader disavows groups like the anti-gay-marriage Oregon Family Council, which has collected signatures to get Nader on the election ballot explicitly to help President Bush (by siphoning off votes from the left), he doesn't make it clear whether he disowns the petitions they've collected. (In Maine, temporary workers hired by Adecco solicit signatures for Nader at pro-Bush events.) Nader's campaign maintains that it has no acquaintance with local Republican operative Steve Wark, who takes credit for getting Nader on the Nevada ballot for crypto-Bush purposes (or what the Nixon White House used to call "ratf--king"). It also states that it has not received any of the money Wark claims he's raised to boost the Nader campaign.
Nader reserves his ire for the Democratic Party, which he accuses of underhanded "Watergate-like" subterfuge to keep him off ballots and undermine his campaign. Pressed for specifics, he promises revelations in the near future. Nader also fulminates that he gave Sen. John Kerry a 10-point list of issues that the latter could hammer Bush with, but that Kerry has failed to significantly differentiate himself from the president. What, then, would Nader say if the morning of November 3 brings with it a second term of Bush, his margin of victory provided by Nader voters? The candidate isn't ready to answer that one yet.
Although Nader promises a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq within six months of taking office, when pressed he allows some wiggle room, depending on how quickly internationally monitored elections can be held. He sees no reason, though, that Iraqi plebiscites can't be conducted by mid-2005. Nader adds that it's just good sense to bring the troops home, positing that 40 percent of our active-duty troops are presently committed solely to holding down Iraq's Sunni Triangle.
However, Nader's greater priority is the removal of the interim Allawi government, for which he has no use, and for the reversal of the scores of decrees imposed by Paul Bremer during his stint as America's viceroy of Iraq. These include the resurrection of one of Saddam Hussein's old laws—a 1987 ban on trade unions, as well as an all-but-irreversible decree that all Iraqi industries be privatized. The latter opens the door to 100 percent foreign ownership of businesses which used to be 100 percent Iraqi. As Nader sees it, the Iraqi people don't trust the U.S. or its choice of government in Baghdad, want to be rid of both, and he'll be happy to oblige.
Although Nader is the only one of the three "marquee" candidates explicitly appealing to antiwar sentiment in the U.S., which he gauges as running at 55 percent among the electorate, he doesn't press the issue. Asked whether it's a "hot button" on the campaign trail, he says it depends on whether you're talking to a military family that's contending with an extended deployment or to people who are just struggling to put food on the table. One of the points on which Nader is most vehement is the need for a more-liveable minimum wage of $10 an hour. He's particularly vexed that Kerry has not taken his lead there.
Given the exceptionally polarized condition of the electorate, one exacerbated by the politics of the last four years, there's one tantalizing question that time constraints precluded. Does a second term of Bush work in Nader's ultimate favor? If the economy continues to worsen; if the gap between haves and have-nots continues to widen; if additional military conquests are pursued in the Middle East; if a fundamentalist religious agenda continues to be codified into government policy at home ... some or all these prospects could fuel the electoral unrest that Nader envisions as a precondition for the sweeping, systemic changes he is advocating.
Many, from the center leftwards, argue that the stakes in this election are too high to allow a wild card like Nader into the deck. They fear he'll prove to be the ace up George W. Bush's sleeve. Or, as Howard Dean put it during an NPR face-off with Nader, "When the house is on fire, it's not time to fix the furniture."
However, it's clear that Nader is mightily unhappy with the current state of affairs in America and, at the very least, wants the ear and the attention of the Democratic Party. Does that mean, "Burn, baby, burn"? It just might.