A Review by Pat Choate
(The New Press: New York, 2009)
By Theresa Amato
As the 1996 presidential election approached, the Association of State Green Parties was looking for someone to be their candidate for President. The person they drafted was Ralph Nader; one of the most respected persons in the United States.
Although the Greens were able to get Nader on the ballot in 22 states, he never had a chance of winning the presidency. However, presidential campaigns are about far more than winning. Being in a race for the Presidency, a candidate has an opportunity to raise issues with the American public that is nowhere else available. Thus, Nader used the race to highlight policy issues that Bill Clinton, the Democratic candidate, and Robert Dole, the Republican candidate ignored, such as the outsourcing of jobs and industries that was accelerating because of the U.S. participation in the North American Free Trade Agreement. The race was a unique opportunity, and he made good use of it.
Bill Clinton, the sitting President, easily won the election. Nader got 684,000 votes or slightly less than one percent. Yet, something else happened in that election of great significance. The newly formed Reform Party, and its candidate Ross Perot, received slightly more than eight million votes, though Dole and Clinton blocked his participation in the Presidential debates. Under the 1974 Campaign Reform Act if a party secures 5 percent or more of the popular vote, they qualify as a “National Party” and thus public funding for the 2000 Presidential election. Suddenly, the possibility of a real third party challenge to the two major party duopoly on policy issues and even for public office seemed possible.
Following the 1996 election, however, the Reform Party drifted into internal squabbling, fell apart, and by the time of the primaries for the 2000, election had squandered their opportunity.
Ralph Nader and the Green Party picked up the fallen baton. In the 2000 elections, Nader again led the Green ticket, but this time he mounted a serious effort to secure the five percent of the national vote required to make the Greens a national party. Moreover, the Nader campaign was able to get their candidate on the ballot in 44 states. A 5 percent win meant that Nader and this new party would have a national forum for at least four more years from which they could raise the issues the two major parties refused to discuss, plus they could mount state and local campaigns. Overnight, the Greens would be a major rallying point for independents and others who wanted real policy and political change, and public financing in the 2004 Presidential campaign.
The 2000 presidential race was intense and despite a heroic effort, the Greens were unable to reach the five percent mark. However, Nader did get more than 2.8 million votes or 2.7 percent, a strong showing for any third party. Gore, of course, lost though he won the popular vote. Leading Democrats, then as now, claimed that Nader’s success electorate was the cause of Al Gore’s defeat.
Even a superficial review of that election reveals that Gore lost because of his political incompetence. He failed to win his home state, where his family had a long-standing political dynasty. He refused to allow his campaign to actively involve Bill Clinton, who though ethically challenged was nonetheless immensely popular. He dithered on how to handle the Florida recount, eventually allowing the Republicans to take the matter before the GOP-dominated U.S. Supreme Court that stopped the recount in Florida and gave the election to George W. Bush in a 5-4 decision.
With that, the most incompetent President in American history took the office, led the nation into a seemingly endless war in the Mid-East, and precipitated a collapse of the global economy that wiped out almost 40 percent of the national wealth in a span of 18 months.
Which brings us to this magnificent book by Theresa Amato, Ralph Nader’s campaign manager in the 2000 and 2004 election, and the riveting story she tells.
Amato was both Nader’s national presidential campaign manager and in-house counsel for both those elections. She is a graduate of Harvard and holds a law degree from NYY School of Law. She has been a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and at the Harvard Law School. Even better for the reader, she was an insider in those campaigners and knew precisely what happened, plus she is skilled writer and storyteller. While the book covers the 2000 campaign, it is really about the 2004 campaign.
By late 2003, the disaster of the Bush Presidency was obvious to anyone who would look. He had used a tax cuts for the wealthy to convert a budget surplus into a large and mounting deficit, the trade deficit was soaring, the torture of prisoners of war was known, and the turnover over public assets to private corporations was well underway. Many Democrats viewed the defeat of this least articulate of Presidents in 2004 as a real possibility if not a certainty.
Because the Democratic leadership believed that Nader was the cause of Gore’s defeat in 2000, they decided to do everything in their power to keep him off the ballot in 2004. As the book reveals, their obsession with Nader and the vast resources they spend sabotaging his campaign is one of the reasons John Kerry lost the election in 2004.
As with the Reform Party, the Greens had internal conflicts by the time of the 2004 election. Thus, Nader ran as an independent. And as in the two prior elections, he had to mount a massive effort to get on the individual state ballots. This time, however, the full might of the Democratic establishment was put against him and his supporters, led by the Democratic National Committee.
The rules faced by an independent or third party are a mish-mash that vary widely. Plus, any candidate must carefully follow all the rules imposed by the Federal Election Commission, which was created by the 1974 campaign laws. The state and FEC rules, not surprisingly, favor the Democrats and Republican Parties and do so overwhelmingly.
To get on the state ballots, Amato hired professional petitioners who are skilled in securing the required signatures. The Democrats enlisted paid and volunteer lawyers to disrupt the process with any legal technique, proper or not, that they could. In Oregon, a prominent law firm sent petitioners an intimidating letter warning that anyone falsely signing a petition may be convicted of a felony with a fine of up to $100,000 or prison for five years. Then, 30 of the Nader petitioners had an unannounced visit at their homes by two persons identifying themselves as “investigators” who asked information about who had hired them and where they were seeking signatures. Amato, of course, protested such intimidation to the Oregon Secretary of State’s office, which oversees elections, which did nothing. Subsequently, she learned that the lawyer and “investigators” were working for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) using the same thuggish techniques that anti-union employers use against union organizers.
Despite the intimidation, the Nader campaign submitted 28,000 signatures, while he only needed 15,306 to get on the ballot. Although all the signatures had been validated by county elections officers, who signed and dated every sheet with an affidavit of authenticity, the Secretary of State’s Office created some “unwritten rules” to disqualify signatures. One new rule was that every signature on a sheet, which may have 50 or more signatures, must be legible. If even one was ruled illegible, the Secretary of State discarded the entire sheet and all the voter signatures. Another “unwritten” rule was that any correction of a date by a single person on the sheet, such as changing a 7 to an 8, meant that the entire sheet and all the signatures were also discarded. After all these new unwritten rules were applied, Nader had a final tally of 15,088 signatures – 258 short.
Ray Bradbury -- the Oregon Secretary of State, a Kerry supporter, and the Democratic candidate in 2004 for reelection to the position– sent out a letter after his decision bragging about how he had kept Nader off the ticket, while asking the recipients for campaign contributions to fund his own reelection. Kathleen Harris, the former Secretary of State in Florida who botched the 2000 Florida recount, looks positively competent in comparison with Bradbury and dozens of other state election officials that Amato identifies in this book. Voters should return all these hacks to private life.
The Nader campaign immediately appealed Bradbury’s decision to the Marion County Circuit Court, which ruled in Nader’s favor and ordered his name put onto the ballot. The Secretary of State appealed the decision at the Oregon Supreme Court, which ruled that Bradbury had the authority to make up “unwritten rules” and thus ordered Nader’s name taken off the ballot. Amato appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. It refused to hear the case.
Over the next several months, the Nader campaign faced 24 similar actions in 17 other states. Repeatedly, they would petition the U.S. Supreme Court for what were obvious constitutional violations and always the Justices rejected their request for a hearing. Perhaps no one should be surprised that a Court that would stop a voter recount and declare the winner of a Presidential election by a 5-4 vote would ignore the pleas of a third party candidate. Legal discrimination comes not just against race, gender, sexual preference, religion, or national origin. Political preference is one of the last places where the courts still tolerate blatant discrimination.
The corruption of the democratic process, as Amato documents, did not end at state and local levels; it ran right to the top of the Democratic Party and Kerry campaign. Terry McAuliffe, head of the Democratic National Committee, was the leading the challenge to Nader’s campaign. When Nader called to protest, McAuliffe said, “Ralph, I would love for you to be running for President in 31 states; the issue is these 19 states” where “a vote for you is a vote for Bush.” He then offered that, “if you stay out of my 19 states I will help with resources in 31 states.” He demanded of Nader, “Stay out of the South.”
Nader, of course, refused the deal.
The goal of McAuliffe’s DNC campaign was to soak up Nader’s limited campaign funds and wear down the campaign staff with lawsuits. They were partially successful. Nonetheless, Nader got 411,000 votes, which was one percent of the total.
As Amato describes, the obstacles placed in the way of candidates who wish to run as an independent or on a third party ticket are virtually impossible to surmount. Ross Perot’s deep pockets enabled him to get on the ballot of all states twice, but in 1996 the two major parties kept him out of the Presidential debate, which effectively killed his chance to be elected. In 2000, the Buchanan campaign faced precisely the same obstacles Nader did in 2004, the only differences being the Bush campaign and the GOP were the culprits.
This lock on public office held by the two major parties is the ultimate source of political corruption in the United States. The corruptors simply buy off each party. The financial industry, for instance, contributed more than $1.7 billion in campaign contributions to Congressional Democrats and Republicans and paid out almost $3.3 billion in lobbying in the period 1998-2008. What they got for their money is deregulation and then a bailout of their industry when their gambles failed. The two largest recipients of those funds in the 2008 election cycle were Barack Obama and John McCain.
For the corporations, buying elected officials is just another business expense. For the political operatives and lobbyists, it is a plush living. For the rest of America, it is political servitude under a corporate-controlled government.
Amato gives a comprehensive menu of political remedies, beginning with the elimination of the Electoral College, standardized federal election rules and federal oversight. The alternative is our present electoral system where most absentee and military ballots are never counted, and as many as six million votes for President are “lost.”
As for Nader, his goal was to use the Presidential elections as a forum to discuss issues that the two major party candidates would not. But in the process, he became involved in something more important – battling and exposing a corruption political process that denied all Americans but the leaders and financiers of the two major parties a voice in the decisions of their own nation. The expose’ of what happened in 2004 and the lengths to which a major political party will go to pervert the election process is one of Nader’s major accomplishments.
Hopefully, other nations will take note of what Nader has done and this book because this corruption greatly affects them. This political duopoly has increased U.S. military expenditures despite the end of the Cold War and ever subservient to the military-industrial complex keeps Americans at war and perpetually search for ways to sustain arms sales. An unregulated financial industry collapsed the world economy, an act that will take years to overcome. Politically connected polluting industries are destroying the world in which we live. And, so the list goes. America’s electoral corruption affects everyone, anywhere in the world. If the United States is to have a competitive democracy, where the highest corporate bidder cannot buy policy decisions, election reform is required.
Unfortunately, as Amato documents, the national media – Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, New York Times, CBS, NBC, FOX, ABC – are not part of the solution. Neither are the federal and state courts.
A traditional way that other nations have taken to alert the American people about domestic issues of great importance is through international acknowledgement of someone’s work. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Martin Luther King, for example, highlighted the plight of American Negroes. The award of a similar Nobel Prize to Ralph Nader for his battle against electoral corruption would bring the issue to the forefront of U.S. political debate in a way that nothing else could.
Similarly, the grant of the Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award to Theresa Amato would be both appropriate and useful in putting this issue before the American people. The book merits either or both.
In sum, this beautifully written, fast-paced, thoroughly-documented book brings a message about a vital problem – the corrupt two-party dominance of our democracy -- that the American people urgently need to understand and correct.
______________________
Pat Choate is an economist and author. In 1996, he was Ross Perot’s running mate.
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