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Candidate Nader

He may be the most intensely private man ever to seek public office. What 
makes Ralph run?
by Ken Silverstein
July/August 2000

On an unseasonably warm afternoon in March, Ralph Nader stands in the 
gold-domed statehouse in downtown Trenton, New Jersey, and declares his 
intention to run for president on the Green Party ticket. As a speaker, 
Nader is only slightly more riveting than Al Gore, but his message, at 
least, is more provocative. "Over the past 20 years, big business has 
increasingly dominated our political economy," says Nader, dressed in his 
customary dark suit, thin tie, and black shoes. "This control by the 
corporate government over our political government is creating a widening 
'democracy gap.' Active citizens are left shouting their concerns over a 
deep chasm between them and their government."

It's the first day of a campaign swing that takes Nader through New Jersey, 
Pennsylvania, and Delaware. In Wilmington, he urges about 100 people at a 
Unitarian church to reclaim a "government of the General Motors, by the 
Exxons, and for the DuPonts." In Princeton, he holds a fundraiser at a 
natural foods store and spends a minute or two with each of the dozens of 
people who line up to meet him (including a woman whose seven-year-old 
daughter was petrified to attend the event because she thought her mother 
said they were going to meet Darth Vader). In Philadelphia, Nader huddles 
with a group of core supporters at the trendy White Dog Café to plot 
strategy for the coming months.

Ralph Nader on a campaign swing? This is the man who in 1996 spent less 
than $5,000 on his presidential bid, and who wouldn't even allow the Green 
Party to use his name for fundraising. This year, Nader vows things will be 
different. "Last time I stood for president," he says. "This time I'm 
running." Since he announced his candidacy, Nader has hired full-time 
campaign workers, pledged to raise $5 million, and hit the road to stump in 
all 50 states before the Green Party held its convention in June.

But given Nader's noncampaign of '96, questions remain about what he's 
really hoping to accomplish. Is Nader risking his hard-earned reputation as 
an anticorporate crusader by representing a tiny and disorganized third 
party whose other leading contender for the nomination was the former lead 
singer of the Dead Kennedys? In private, even some Nader loyalists 
recognize that their candidate has opened himself up to ridicule. "He's 
running against Jello Biafra," says one, "and he's getting attacked by all 
sorts of people." The skepticism extends to some of the 250,000 members of 
his own party. "Nader could become the Gus Hall of the Greens," warns 
Michael Donnelly of the party's Oregon chapter, recalling the perennial 
Communist Party candidate. "What are they going to do -- nominate him every 
year?"

Nader's stature as a corporate watchdog and consumer advocate is the stuff 
of legend. In 1965, he wrote Unsafe at Any Speed -- demonstrating that 
General Motors covered up safety hazards in the Corvair to protect profits 
-- and he's been taking on big business ever since. Over the years he has 
established dozens of public interest groups like Public Citizen, inspired 
and trained thousands of young activists, and had a hand in the passage of 
hundreds of important laws on such issues as auto safety, nursing home 
abuses, insurance rates, and worker protections. Travelers who are bumped 
from their airline flights receive free tickets and hotel rooms for the 
evening because the same thing once happened to Ralph Nader, and it made 
him very, very mad.

"He's demonstrated that each citizen can have an impact and change the 
government," says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio who has known 
Nader for 25 years. "He's had more of an impact on institutions of 
government and corporate life than many people who have held public office."

As a child, Nader was a baseball fan whose hero was Yankee great Lou 
Gehrig. "He represented stamina -- 2,130 games consecutively played," Nader 
once said. "He was a model of self-control." That's a pretty good 
description of Nader himself. Now 66, he continues to work seven days a 
week, often putting in as many as 80 hours. He may be the most intensely 
private man ever to run for public office. He has never married, and only a 
handful of close friends know the address of his apartment in Washington, 
D.C. Few who know him will speak about him for publication, saying they 
respect his privacy -- and fear the anger he often directs at those he 
feels have wronged him.

The secrecy surrounding his personal life leads to plenty of speculation. 
"He's an icon and a very attractive man, so naturally we hypothesized about 
whether he had a love life," recalls Karen Croft, a writer who worked for 
Nader in the late 1970s at the Center for Study of Responsive Law, which 
continues to serve as his headquarters. "On my last day there, we all went 
out to dinner. I remember thinking to myself, 'Karen, this is your last 
chance.' So I asked him if he had ever considered getting married. He said 
that at a certain point he had to decide whether to have a family or to 
have a career, that he couldn't have both. That's the kind of person he is. 
He couldn't have a wife -- he's up all night reading the Congressional 
Record."

To all appearances, Nader is next to Mao Tse-tung in regard to personal 
abstinence. When in Washington, he eats almost daily at a modest Middle 
Eastern restaurant down the street from his office, because customers get a 
free meal after dining there five times. He doesn't own a car, keeps nearly 
a dozen manual typewriters stashed away so he'll never be forced to use a 
computer, and has a wardrobe, if that term can be used, that looks like it 
was last updated in the 1960s.

With his ethic of everything for the cause, nothing for the self, Nader can 
be almost comically single-minded. He once stunned guests at a D.C. wedding 
by using his turn in the reception line to buttonhole the bride and groom 
about supporting his cause du jour. At a tribute a few years ago for his 
longtime aide John Richard, friends and co-workers regaled the audience 
with funny and moving stories about the guest of honor. The last spot on 
the program was reserved for Nader, who gave the flattest speech of the 
night, unable to summon up a compelling anecdote or emotion about a man who 
had served him loyally for a quarter century.

Within his inner circle, Nader sometimes manages to loosen up. Joe Page, a 
Georgetown law professor who attended Harvard Law School with Nader, 
recalls encountering a mutual friend who was studying the sounds whales 
make. "Ralph got very enthusiastic about this, even though it had nothing 
to do with his usual crusades," says Page. "We were at a dinner party and 
he was sitting at the table imitating whale sounds."

On the campaign trail, though, Nader isn't known for his sense of humor. As 
a progressive crusader, he lacks the charisma of a Jesse Jackson. His 
appeal lies in his substance, not his style. At stop after stop, Nader 
carefully outlines the antidemocratic nature of globalization and corporate 
welfare, and issues reasoned calls for universal health care, fair lending 
laws, and tougher protections for tenants. The speeches are dense and dry 
-- but they seldom fail to draw respectable crowds. College students born 
nearly two decades after Nader burst on the scene turn out in large numbers 
to hear him speak. At his alma mater, Princeton, a university not known as 
a left-wing stronghold, Nader drew several hundred students to a talk at 
McCosh Hall. "I never knew there were so many liberals here!" a 
preppy-looking student said to a friend as they passed the long line that 
had formed outside.

It will take more than college students, of course, for Nader to meet his 
stated goal of winning 5 percent of the popular vote -- the threshold 
needed to qualify the Green Party for millions in federal campaign matching 
funds. It will take at least 5 million votes, more than five times the 
number Nader received the last time he ran. Nevertheless, he insists his 
campaign is no quixotic quest. "Every major movement for social justice in 
this country started with a handful of people, and we are more than a 
handful," he says at one campaign stop. "The modern civil rights movement 
began when Rosa Parks refused to sit down in the back of the bus. It makes 
us look like jerks for saying there's nothing we can do."

As Nader sees it, the biggest obstacle he faces is the united front that 
the two major parties and the media form to lock third-party candidates out 
of the electoral process. By way of illustration, he points to the 
Commission on Presidential Debates, which is in charge of setting up a 
series of televised encounters between the candidates this fall. The 
commission was created by the two big parties and is headed by two 
corporate lobbyists and former party chairmen, Democrat Paul Kirk and 
Republican Frank Fahrenkopf. The debates are underwritten by corporate 
money -- Anheuser-Busch is putting up $550,000 to pay for a scheduled 
affair in St. Louis -- and only candidates with at least 15 percent 
support, as determined by five media polling organizations, are allowed to 
participate. "All three networks had cameras on hand when I announced that 
I was running for president, but there was nothing on the news about it 
that night," Nader says with a laugh. "By not covering the campaign, they 
ensure that we don't come close to the 15 percent. It goes beyond caricature."

Not all of the hurdles faced by Nader are external to the campaign. So far, 
the Green Party has not demonstrated much ability to reach beyond its core 
constituency. Nader's audiences are often overwhelmingly white and 
disproportionately filled with practitioners of decidedly alternative 
lifestyles. At campaign events, tables are invariably stuffed with 
literature on animal liberation and vegan nutrition, issues that are 
unlikely to play in Peoria.

On the March swing, an oppressive air of virtue and clean living hung over 
many campaign events. At the Whole Earth Center in Princeton, for instance, 
the crowd gathered among shelves laden with whole-wheat spinach pies, 
organic soy-nut crunchies, and unsulphured, unsweetened pineapple rings. At 
many events, not a drop of booze, not even a beer, was available. The 
puritanism comes from Nader as well as the Greens. A vegetarian, he has 
been acutely health conscious, especially since his brother Shafeek died of 
cancer in 1986. At the office, Nader employees who grab lunch at McDonald's 
have been known to eat their food on the sly, careful not to let the boss 
catch them with a Big Mac.

Critics on the right have long castigated Nader for what they see as his 
moral absolutism, and for the support his nonprofit groups receive from 
trial lawyers. "Ralph thinks the corporations are big and greedy, and the 
trial lawyers are out to do good," says Victor Schwartz of the American 
Tort Reform Association, a business-backed outfit that wants to limit 
lawsuits against companies that make defective or dangerous products. "The 
people I work with have their self-interest -- they want to make a profit, 
sure. But so do the trial lawyers."

But some progressives also dislike the way Nader focuses on corporate power 
to the exclusion of almost all other issues. Katha Pollitt of The Nation 
has condemned Nader for failing to speak out aggressively on topics like 
race, abortion, and civil rights. During the 1996 campaign, she points out, 
Nader dismissed internal Green Party debate about same-sex marriage as 
"gonadal politics." "A third party needs to get people excited so they go 
out and vote, but he hardly mentions issues that are vital to many of us," 
Pollitt says. "It's amazing that he's so diffident."

Nader's agenda does tend to be as dry and unemotional as his personality. 
Asked about social issues like racism and sexism -- which involve messy 
interactions between human beings -- Nader reduces them to clear-cut 
economics. Social issues "must be addressed from a class perspective," he 
says, and lays down what could well serve as the guiding principle of his 
campaign: "Whatever your issue is, whether it's racism or homophobia or 
policy issues or taxes or urban decay or health care, you're not going to 
go anywhere with it if we don't focus on the concentration of power."

This time around, Nader has been careful not to dismiss the parts of the 
Green agenda that he considers secondary. To some extent, he and the party 
are using each other: The Greens are capitalizing on his name, and he's 
tapping them as an established, if marginal, political entity with 
organizers able to get his name on the ballot in 45 states. Nader claims he 
has no problem with the party's stance on social issues, only with the way 
it presents itself. He recalls hearing one Green leader lecturing about the 
evils of "patriarchy," which Nader says is an example of "jargon that I 
hope they're gonna replace with more understandable terms. What that means 
is that women and men should have the same rights. Why don't you say it 
that way instead of using sociological gobbledygoop?"

Nader says he respects the consumer and environmental battles waged by the 
Greens, whom he sees as a social movement as much as a political party. In 
Connecticut, he notes, local Greens have fought nuclear power, opposed 
utility deregulation, and blocked the use of taxpayer money to build a 
football stadium. "Small as it is, that's the party that's on the 
ramparts," Nader says. "The two other parties are nowhere to be seen, 
except in salons collecting money for the next campaign."

Though he won't say so directly, Nader knows he's not going to be sworn in 
as president next January. He is running, in part, because of his 
deep-seated anger at the way President Clinton and the Democrats have 
favored big business at the expense of ordinary citizens. The party of FDR, 
he says, is "incapable of being internally regenerated." To a man whose 
entire life has been devoted to the proposition that democratic government 
should regulate corporate excesses to protect workers and consumers, 
Clinton's famous declaration that "the era of big government is over" was 
nothing short of a complete capitulation. Nader is withering in his 
assessment of Clinton -- or "George Ronald Clinton," as he calls him -- and 
believes that Al Gore and George W. Bush are political clones. "Look back 
and you'll see that liberal Republicans of the 1970s were better than most 
Democrats today," Nader says. "That's what we've gotten by voting for the 
lesser of two evils; it just legitimizes the downward slide of our 
political system."

Many liberals and progressives applaud Nader for giving voters a meaningful 
choice in November. "He's offering an alternative to the major parties," 
says Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States."This 
will give him an opportunity to bring the issue of corporate power to a 
larger audience." But others worry that in a close race, Nader could simply 
take votes away from Gore (especially in key states like California) and 
swing the election to Bush. Come Election Day, many people who support what 
Nader stands for will no doubt hold their noses and vote for Gore. "There's 
a reason that school teachers and union members usually vote for the 
Democrats," says Pollitt. "Hey, I can make my protest vote and help the 
Greens get millions of dollars, but I can also help elect George Bush 
president. Maybe that risk is worth taking, but the risk is there."

Whatever the criticisms of his strategy or agenda, however, no one who 
knows Nader questions his sincerity or integrity. For him, running for 
president is no ego trip -- it's simply a continuation of his life's work. 
The man Life magazine named one of the 100 most influential people of the 
last century is beginning the new one doing the same things he's always 
done, day in and day out: traveling, giving speeches, bashing big business, 
urging citizens to make a difference. If he is risking his reputation on a 
hopeless cause, he does so with the same determination that he has brought 
to dozens of other campaigns over the years. Some of those causes were 
hopeless, too, before Nader got involved. 




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