UNITED STATES: Green Party Campaign Passes Quietly

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Nov 7 1996 (IPS) - The Green Party’s candidate for president this year was touted as the hope of leftists: a persistent critic of the nearly indentical economic and political platforms of the two major parties.

But when all the ballots in the 1996 races were counted, Ralph Nader had a grand total of 580,627 votes, or less than one percent of the total.

That result landed him in fourth place, behind incumbent President Bill Clinton, Republican Bob Dole and the Reform Party’s Ross Perot, and only 110,000 votes better than the right-wing Libertarian Party.

“In the annals of American progressivism, it’s not that great,” professor Bob Fitch of New York University said of the showing. He noted that, earlier in this century, socialist candidates Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas attracted more voters, among a much smaller electorate.

Even for the small U.S. left, however, the result was no surprise. A harbinger of the marginal Nader turnout came at his final “campaign rally” last Saturday at a Unitarian church in Washington, where Nader delivered his standard indictment of corporate greed in front of many half-empty pews.

For all that, Nader was at his most persuasive, arguing that Clinton and Dole differed from most policies much as they did on the debate for increasing funds for the Medicare programme: by only one percent. “No wonder people can’t tell the two parties apart,” Nader fumed. “They’re look-alikes.”

In a year in which both parties debated how much of the U.S. welfare system should be preserved, Nader took on corporate welfare, arguing that far more of taxpayers’ money goes to subsidise defense contractors and big business than to maintain poor families on the dole.

But that message didn’t earn many votes, and some activists complain that the Nader campaign was too weak to make much of an impression.

“Nader peeved off a lot of people who felt he wasn’t taking the campaign seriously,” argued Chester Hartman, director of the Washington-based Poverty and Race Research Action Council. “They figured, if he’s not going to go out and campaign, why should they bother to support him?”

“The progressive movement really didn’t have a horse in this race,” agreed Jim Naureckas, a media analyst for the watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). “(Nader’s) campaign did not appear to be a serious effort aimed at getting people actually to vote for him.”

The low-key Nader campaign, added Fitch, never attracted the enthusiasm and degree of commitment that the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition-backed presidential campaigns garnered in 1984 and 1988.

Perhaps the most bewildering aspect of the Green Party candidacy was the fact that, instead of campaigning, Nader avoided public attention in his vow to keep his own campaign costs below a meagre 5,000 dollars. That is the amount above which a candidate must turn over financial data to the Federal Election Commission, which longtime consumer advocate Nader refused to do.

One consequence of Nader’s cost-cutting was his refusal to coordinate a campaign with the environmentalist Greens, whose money to support Nader, he argued, was not sought by him. Nader ended up on ballots in less han half of the 50 U.S. states, leaving him mathematically unable to win the 270 electoral votes needed in theory to clinch the presidency.

For some supporters, the prospect of supporting the man who in the 1970s was the voice for “truth in advertising”, safer automobiles and better product testing, was dashed by the candidate’s obvious desire to spend as little money and effort on the campaign as possible.

Nader’s non-campaign affected his coverage by the media, which all but ignored the Green Party effort in favour of the campaigns by Clinton, Dole and even Perot (whose full-fledged campaign attracted about 12 times as many votes as Nader’s).

Naureckas noted that the New York Times and other New York press neglected Nader’s campaign even though, in the borough of Manhattan, the Green Party standard-bearer outpolled Perot. But he added, “It’s hard to be too critical of the media for not covering a candidate who doesn’t have a mathematical chance of being elected.”

Yet many on the left find it hard to blame Nader for the paltry state of U.S. progressive politics.

“The problem with progressivism is that it’s an extremely shallow coalition of upper-middle-class people,” tied largely to think-tanks and the academy, Fitch argued.

As a result, he contended, the left is dependent on several centrist institutions — notably the Democratic Party and trade unionism — that offer little challenge to corporate power. Several fledgling efforts to form new political parties on the left, including a still-unformed Labour Party, will not change that dependence, he warned.

“There would be a place for Nader as a middle-class reformer if there were a real left in the United States,” Fitch said. As it is, he added, the campaign this year did not constitute a real political movement, although it could herald a new beginning for one still to be built.