Take the Nader Super Rally in Denver. What did we get from Panhandle Media? Amy Goodman's Pravda on the Hudson had two hours to fill the day after the Super Rally but no time to even mention it. Long time Nader hater Ruth Conniff wrote what she probably assumed was a 'pithy' post for her ("Last Day In Denver," The Progressive) but was as bad as the worst Elisabeth Bumiller "White House Letters" from the early days of the current administration. She scoffed, she scorned. She trashed Sean Penn (who spoke at the rally) and she trashed Ralph Nader. A little more obviously bitter than when she did her hit-job on Ralph in 2004, Conniff wanted everyone to know how marvelous she thought she was.
What she couldn't or wouldn't tell you is that the rally was a huge success. Unlike Conniff, Jess spoke with the Nader campaign the day before the rally. Ashley Sanders told him the goals for the rally and, guess what, the goals were achieved. Sanders? As Rebecca noted Friday, Ashley Sanders is another huge success from the Nader campaign.
Now might be a good time to talk about the 2000 election. After the Supreme Court decided the election, a number of Nader critics began asking what did Ralph build?
What was the point of his run? What did he build?
In 2000, Ralph Nader was the Green Party candidate. In 2004, he was not their candidate and, if that confuses you, Ralph isn't going to run a safe state strategy, he never has. He's not play acting at a run. He does not do "vanity runs." What did he accomplish?
Ralph challenge the two party dominance and provided the Green Party with their most viable candidate up to that point. (In November, we'll find out whether or not Cynthia McKinney's campaign garnered more votes than Ralph's 2000 run.) Asking, as Robert Scheer has, Ralph what he accomplished confuses Ralph with the Green Party.
It wasn't Ralph's job to build a political party. If the Greens seemed to Scheer to be in disarray in 2007, take it up with the Green Party which made a cowardly and craven decision to curry favor with the Democratic Party in 2004 by running a "safe state" 'strategy.' What that translates as is a national political party telling voters, "Vote for us . . . if you're state will easily go to the Democratic Party but, if not, don't vote for us." In other words, it says: We're not a real political party and we can't do damn thing -- including fight for ourselves -- but if you're not a battleground state, it sure would be nice to have your vote.
Again, Scheer needs to take up the issue with the Green Party. Ralph ran once as their nominee. It was the party's job to utilize the gains he made to advance their party. Ralph's not even a member of the Green Party. We're also not remembering Scheer ever asking what Al Gore did, post 2000 election, to build the Democratic Party or what John Kerry, post 2004 election, did? But somehow it's Ralph's job to build up a political party he's not even a member of and one whose nomination he hasn't had since 2000?
Time has not been kind to Scheer. If you doubt it, check out his current hairdo which makes him look like he should be sitting on the front porch of a southern plantation.
What did Ralph build?
He built a space.
Of those of us writing this piece, no one voted for Nader in 2000. Jess would have but he wasn't old enough to vote that year. But even if everyone had been old to vote in 2000, Jess is the only one who would have voted for Nader that year. It opened a lot of eyes. And it did have an impact. That eight years later all of us endorsing (everyone but Ava and C.I.) can proudly say we're voting for Ralph is a credit to his past runs.
Take Rebecca who voted Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. She scorned Ralph during his 2004 run only to have C.I. break it down for her. "It was the popular thing to do," she says now. "You had The Nation telling him not to run and his 'friends' like Michael Moore and all these other people. Who wanted Ralph to run? C.I. was very direct with me when I was making a joke about Ralph and it boiled down to that if I was making fun of Ralph for daring to run, I was making fun of the democratic system we're supposed to live under. After that, I didn't make any more jokes and I paid attention to the level of the commentary so many offered. It was an eye opener."
And that's one of the many accomplishments Ralph's runs have had.
To break with the two-party controlled system is a big thing and this election year, all of us will be doing so (including Ava and C.I.) and doing so for the first time (except for Jess who is a Green and voted for Ralph in 2004). You're talking about lifelong Democrats who could just avoid the presidential ticket and vote in the other races.
But though Barack's a corporatist War Hawk, it's not all about him. Katrina vanden Heuvel would like you to believe that's the case, that the election is all about Barack. She'd like you to also believe that you only have two voting choices (she doesn't even allow for the right not to vote -- a system that, incidentally, would have caused trouble for her "present" voting Barack when he was in the Illinois legislature) and the only right choice is to vote for Barack.
Panhandle Media has repeatedly scorned Barack. They have ignored him. Last week, Amy Goodman decided to ask him to consider requesting that his supporters in battleground states vote for Barack. Ralph's response to her nonsense bears noting:
I'm not at all impressed by Barack Obama's positions on this so-called bailout. It's just rhetoric. His Senate record has not reflected that at all. As we campaign around the country--we're now in forty-five states plus the District of Columbia, and we're running five, six, seven percent in the polls, which is equivalent to nine, ten million eligible voters--we are going to try to rouse the public in a specific way: laser-beam focus on their senators and representatives. When these senators and representatives, if they allow this bailout deal in this general, vague manner to pass, when they go back home, they're going to hit hornets' nest. This is a situation where it doesn't matter whether the people back home are Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, Nader-Gonzalez supporters. There's such a deep sense of betrayal, of panic, of stampede, of surrender, of cowardliness in Congress, that it's going to affect the election and the turnout. I'd like Barack Obama, actually, to support the Nader-Gonzalez ticket.
If Panhandle Media had done that, they might have more influence because their audiences wouldn't have shrunk. Like their candidate, they fail to grasp that the people expected information from them, not lectures and orders. As one reader noted in an e-mail Thursday on why she'd finally let her subscription to The Nation lapse, "I'm supposed to fork over nearly a hundred bucks for the magazine and also to be talked down to as if I'm a child who can't make a decision on my own?"
Ralph's achievements this year including raising the issue of ballot access which so many of us know so little about. The Democratic and Republican parties get on the ballot automatically. They don't have to fight for a spot and, judging by the decision of the Texas Supreme Court, they don't even have to meet the filing deadline. But an independent or third party candidate has to jump through hoops. It's not merely the filing fees or collecting the required number of signatures, it's also going over that number because as Pennsylvania's 2004 Ballot-Gate demonstrates, the Democratic Party will do anything they think they can get away with in order to keep others off the ballot.
Despite all these hurdles, the campaign set the goal at 45 states and they met it. Ralph Nader is on the ballot in 45 states and in DC. In addition, the citizens of four other states can write his name in when they vote. The only state he's not on the ballot for and cannot be written in is Oklahoma.
This is the most states that Ralph has been on the ballot for in any run.
That's not the end of his accomplishments. Marcia recalls, "The first time I heard him talking this year, I wondered, 'What the heck is Taft-Hartley?' I had never heard of it." The Taft-Hartley Act, as many of you know thanks to Nader's campaign, is also known as the Labor-Management Relations Act. It severely restricted labors right to organize and strike and it was vetoed by President Harry S. Truman but the Congress overrode his veto.
A big accomplishment for many is that Nader campaigned in Hawaii. In doing so last July, he became the first presidential nominee to campaign in the state since the 1960 election. Hawaii (and Alaska) have long been ignored in the presidential campaigns. At best, a name surrogate goes out. At worst, they get nothing. That wasn't the end of the campaign trail for Ralph. He continues to campaign state to state.
Along with ballot access, the campaign has also highlighted other ugly realities. There's certainly the silence from All Things Media Big and Small that most Americans wouldn't have expected in a country with not only an allegedly free press but a supposed thriving 'independent' one. There's the silence from many pollsters who don't even include him as one of the options on their surveys.
And there's the biggest silence: the debates.
The debates started on Friday and all Americans are supposed to be overjoyed and ecstatic that they have the opportunity to watch the two most covered presidential candidates stand up on the stage and say the same thing they've said in interview after interview. Apparently, the novelty is supposed to come via the fact that they're standing on the same stage.
Who are the debates for? Supposedly, the debates are to inform the voters where the candidates stand on the issue. If that were truly the case, then all the candidates would be invited. They're not invited. So it appears that "debate" has come to mean "infomercial for the Democratic and Republican Parties."
In one of the strongest moments of illumination, we notice that FAIR -- longtime champion of 'open the debates!' -- has not issued that cry this year and hasn't even registered an objection to the debates shutting out Ralph, Cynthia, Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin. This is the same FAIR which not only advocated for Ralph to be included in 2000 but also advocated for Pat Buchanan to be included in 2000. Back then, they attempted to appear fair and non-partisan. These days, it's nothing but sweaty palms and hands shoved down pants in jubilation over Barack.
It's certainly not very fair.
Can Ralph win the 2008 election?
Yes. Until the votes are counted, no one has anything but a guess as to who will win the election. But he's already won a great deal this go round.
And so has America. They've seen a candidate who refuses to back down even when supposed friends stab him in the back. They've seen a candidate who gets shut out by All Things Media Big and Small and doesn't let that stop him. Hillary Clinton put 18,000,000 cracks in the glass ceiling and we do not underestimate that fact. She deserves tremendous credit and praise. But, as a Democrat, as hard as her road was, it was easier than if she'd been an independent or third party candidate. Ralph's putting his own cracks in the ceiling -- the two-party system ceiling.
Though he's lost a number of the 'big names' backing him in 2000 (if you pay attention, they aren't 'big names' anymore -- call it karmic payback for not having a spine), he's set for his best run ever. And, yes, it could land him in the White House. No one will be happier if that happens than us (including Ava and C.I.). But he's already accomplished a great deal in the lead up. He has fought political bigotry and he has widened the space for others who are not part of a two-party system.
What Hillary's run did indisputably and what Sarah Palin's current run does, is demonstrate to every American child that gender is not an obstacle. Ralph does something similar by pushing the country's notion of politics beyond the two-party limits.