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.
