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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
After working closely with the old family friend, Moffett ran for Congress from Connecticut in 1974 and won. "Three months after I was elected, [Nader] attacked me," says Moffett. "So our relationship began to sour pretty quickly."
According to Moffett, Nader launched the first of numerous attacks against him over an aircraft noise reduction bill. While the bill stipulated that noise reduction measures would be funded mostly by the airlines, they were also to be subsidized by a tax on airplane travelers -- not the general public -- which Nader dismissed as a corporate handout. Moffett, along with nearly every environmental group, supported the bill. "It was an important piece of legislation that was supported by a coalition of progressive members of Congress, and it passed. Of course, now the Bush administration is tearing it apart."
Nader continued to criticize Moffett during his four terms in Congress, which was disturbing enough, but as with Al Gore, Nader would eventually play a crucial part in ending Moffett's career in elective office. After a fourth term in the House, Moffett ran for the Senate against Lowell Weicker, a Republican, in 1982. "My opponent was running these ads attacking me; the [National Rifle Association] was hammering me from the right," says Moffett. "And then Ralph Nader came up [to Connecticut] and endorsed him. I lost by a very slim margin. My family and I, and my supporters, we just had this blind rage and fury about it. So what he did in 2000 was no shock to me. And what he's doing now is no shock. It's always been about him and his ego."
"He has no interest in being a constructive part of anything," continues Moffett. "No one can name a coalition he has been in where he really rolled his sleeves up and tried to get [something] done. He's shown no interest in anything that could be construed as incremental change. [But] he has had success in empowering people, like Joan Claybrook and others. That's the legacy."
Claybrook is the president of Public Citizen, an organization that Nader founded in 1971. After Ted Jacobs left his position with Nader, Claybrook took over as Nader's right-hand person, and she remained his closest associate until she was appointed by President Carter to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which was created in the wake of Nader's auto safety campaign of the 1960s.
Within months of her appointment to the government agency, Nader attacked Claybrook. According to a biography of Nader by Justin Martin, "Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon," Nader wrote a vitriolic 11-page, single-spaced letter that was ostensibly addressed to Claybrook but was in fact distributed widely to the media; Claybrook herself didn't even get a copy.
The letter, parts of which were published in the Washington Post, complained about delays in air bag safety regulation, certainly a legitimate concern. However, Nader went on to berate her for what he perceived as her many shortcomings, and even accused her of being more beholden to the auto industry than to consumers. She felt compelled to call a press conference to address the accusations, and Nader showed up and proceeded to badger her.
Claybrook did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Rather than capitalizing on his unparalleled access to the Carter administration through the dozens of Raiders and other allies working for the administration, Nader adopted a harshly adversarial stance. While many activists find it easier to criticize a conservative administration than to work with a sympathetic one, what's different about Nader, observes one of his former supporters (who does not want to be named), is that his righteous view of himself "translates into a deeply pathological approach to targeting his allies."
Of course, his attacks on Claybrook and other progressives during the late 1970s were outlandish. But given the effectiveness of his uncompromising positions up to that point, his behavior was mostly tolerated and sometimes forgiven. In fact, Claybrook eventually went back to work for Nader after leaving the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Fast-forward to the Clinton administration, however, and not much had changed. Despite having little influence during the Reagan and Bush I administrations, he picked up where he left off by attacking both people inside the Clinton White House and advocates who were trying to influence its policies.
"We worked with him on [the Clinton] healthcare initiative," recalls a left-leaning activist who now works as a staff member for a Democratic congressman. She asked not to be identified because of Nader's penchant for retribution. "While we didn't necessarily endorse the Clinton plan, we worked hard to make sure it had a single-payer option. Ralph disagreed with us, completely disagreed with us, and spent time attacking us for selling out. It was a very bitter period of time. If you disagreed with him, you could very quickly become a target even if you were fighting for the same thing."
"His organization has always been top-down," she continues. "He has been able to say, 'This is what it should be,' rather than having to be accountable to people who want to move the ball forward without scoring a goal every time. We had to decide how to respond to the Clinton healthcare bill, so we had a meeting and people argued it out and then we arrived at a position. Ralph [just] sat in a room with two people and said, 'This is what we're going to do.'"
"He lobbied me, or maybe I should say threatened me," says a senior official in the Clinton administration, who also asked not to be identified. "That's what he does. He will meet with you, you'll have a nice discussion about a policy issue, and you'll agree on goals and debate the means, and then he'll go out and say you're a traitor, that you're not a real Democrat. He's made a career out of it. It's never constructive, but it gets him lots of attention. The right wing, of course, loves it."
"Ralph in practice has been tougher on his friends than on his enemies," offers another Clinton administration staffer diplomatically, despite having been on the receiving end of Nader's condemnation. "He has seen his role to be the last honest man."
