The (non-)confessions of St. Ralph

Nader himself is more admirable, but there's still something off in the way he tried to make himself over as a political leader. He seems to be doing a rather stiff impression of a politician, rather than actually being one. (Gore wasn't much better.) Early on in "Crashing the Party," there's a perhaps unintentionally revealing chapter in which Nader describes his father driving him around their Connecticut town, showing him the community institutions -- libraries, schools, public buildings -- built by the wealthy. He was raised to make that kind of individual contribution, he tells us, rather than to be a politician. There's a term for that kind of civic leadership, of course, and it's noblesse oblige, though Nader never uses the words. Noblesse oblige wasn't all bad; it was certainly better than the ethic of selfishness and entitlement embraced by so many of the wealthy today. But it's the kiss of death for a politician. Nader can't help the way his innate elitism shows through. I know he's of Lebanese ancestry, but he often seems like a Yankee WASP (and he doesn't add to his populist street cred by referring regularly in the book to old friends and supporters from his Princeton and Yale days).

Just as damningly, Nader's discomfort with the personal touch that leadership requires fairly jumps off the page. He himself stiffly puts it this way: "Running for president requires a level and intensity of political ego that I do not find congenial." It's not exactly ego he lacks -- the book confirms that much of Nader's pique at Clinton and Gore arose from their failure to meet with him as requested; he perceives Gore's offer to talk by phone as an insult. He's got plenty of ego, and is entitled to it; what Nader really dislikes is the sweaty, messy, hands-on business of politics -- and he confesses as much.

Before his big Madison Square Garden super-rally, he admits: "I have a visceral aversion to addressing very large audiences as if they were a crowd. In college, I read books on crowd psychology, how speakers mesmerize masses with tested propaganda cant, verbal incitations, and the more silent language of gestures and voice modulations. I dislike these methods." He approvingly quotes Noam Chomsky, who wouldn't go on television to debate the Vietnam War because its sound-bite format favored the right, letting it win the debate with formulations like "Peace through strength." So he doesn't like speeches to big crowds, and he doesn't like TV sound bites. What does he like? He says he liked the fact that raising money as the Green Party candidate for president, "nobody I called wanted anything in return, which frequently would have been the case were I running as a Democrat." Of course, that would have been the case if Nader had any prayer of political success, in any party -- that's what politics is about. People want something, and they turn to politics, and politicians, in order to get it. But our hero seems to prefer political failure -- it keeps his hands clean, and it's better for his soul.

In the end, though, the book's most shattering revelation is that Nader and the Green Party have absolutely no idea how to build a left-wing alternative to the Democrats, and no feel for the issues that would move them toward majority. Toward the conclusion of "Crashing the Party," as he surveys the political landscape for hopeful signs, he tells us that youth will be the vanguard of any new movement, and notes that America was founded by comparative youngsters: Thomas Jefferson was 32 in 1776, he points out, James Madison 35, and George Washington "was only 44." Of course, they were actually geezers, since life expectancy in 1776 was only 35. It's a small point, but it's typical of the way Nader lacks a convincing analysis of what's necessary for leftward political change.

A more damning omission in the book -- and one that should disqualify Nader from running for president again -- is its complete neglect of foreign policy. There's exactly one citation under "foreign policy" in the index, and that points to a section in which he urges the Defense Department to take the lead in infectious disease eradication. I'm not kidding. There are no entries under "terrorism," "Israel," "Iran" or "Iraq," though his indexers missed a reference I found to "cruel" U.S. sanctions against Saddam Hussein's nation. To be fair to Nader, foreign policy got relatively scant attention by Bush and Gore during the 2000 campaign, a stunning omission, in hindsight, thanks to the wisdom bestowed on all of us, left right and center, by Sept. 11. But he hasn't used the last four months to formulate a platform either. Asked by Fox's Bill O'Reilly how he'd respond to the terror that killed 3,000 Americans, he spent most of his time fulminating against "autocratic ideologues" and "corporate greed mongers" in the U.S. who he thinks have taken advantage of the threat to restrict our liberties and profiteer.

Finally, "Crashing the Party" never takes on what I believe is the most damning argument against his cause: That in a non-parliamentary, winner-take-all system, there's nothing a third party can do but play spoiler to the mainstream party that's closest to it ideologically. Again and again, he quotes left-wing Democrats who admire his history of activism begging him to run in the Democratic Party, and he rejects their advice with little respect or reflection -- he's so convinced of the rightness of his cause. He doesn't even consider the fact that a strong showing in the primaries might have forced a chastened Al Gore to bargain with Nader and support some of his causes.

In that scenario, however, Nader would have had two obvious problems. The first is the fact that his campaign failed to identify one or two crucial issues worth compromising to achieve. The campaign amounted to a tedious assortment of grievances and complaints, with some good ideas and some nutty ones side by side. To be fair, the Greens are great on campaign finance reform and reducing obstacles to voter participation -- but on those issues, Gore at least said the right things, and the most serious obstacle has been the GOP. Nader's book only underscores the party's failure to develop coherent, persuasive programs and policies. It features three pages on legalizing the hemp industry, for instance, but nothing substantive about how to reform the welfare system; it's got lots of references to opposing educational testing and developing a democracy curriculum for the public schools, and nothing about teacher shortages, crumbling school buildings and unconscionably high dropout rates. And the Greens don't have a platform they could have bargained with Gore about: Befitting their holier-than-thou approach to politics, they offer voters a list of 10 "key values" rather than a series of planks and positions, including "ecological wisdom," "feminism," "nonviolence," and, um, "future focus and sustainability."

The second problem with a scenario in which Nader ran as a Democrat and tried to bargain with party leaders is that he would have had to leave the safety of his clean Green sanctuary, in which "nobody I called wanted anything in return." He'd have had to haggle and compromise, maybe even get his hands dirty; noblesse oblige won't take you far in Democratic primaries. Maybe most important, he'd no longer be the revered party leader who always has the last word; he'd be just another Democrat with a sharp mind, a way with words and his own brand of charisma, who'd have to convince others he was right in order to get his way. Until Nader decides he'd rather be effective than pure, he won't amount to anything more than a bumper sticker specially designed for the holier-than-thou.

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