In the wake of the 2000 election, a lot of people blamed you for Al Gore's defeat. Why do you reject that contention, particularly in light of the fact that Florida and New Hampshire, for example, were two states where your presence on the ballot shifted the outcome from Gore to Bush?

First of all, I think Gore did win Florida. So blundering is the Democratic Party that they didn't catch the shenanigans of Katherine Harris before the election, like falsely designating tens of thousands of Floridians ineligible to vote. Then during the voting itself they lost 250,000 registered [Florida] Democrats to Bush. You'd think they'd be concerned about that. Plus, they were abandoned by the Democratic mayor of Miami who had a tiff with the Democratic Party and sat out the election. And then afterward they didn't ask for a full state recount. It's one thing to blame the Greens, but now they're blaming the Greens for not having retrospective clairvoyance to know that the election was stolen from them by the Republicans.

What about the Democratic claim that you're playing the spoiler again this year?

The Democrats should stop their whining and go to work. Stop whining. If we all have an equal right to run, no one would use the word "spoiler." If we all have the right to run, everyone's a spoiler. Everyone's trying to get more votes than everyone else. So the use of the word "spoiler" to a third-party candidate is a scarcely veiled designation of second-class citizenship to the candidate. Which of course is what the two parties have always legislated. They want third-party and independent candidates out. They have all kinds of barriers state after state. But that doesn't mean the rest of us should adopt that classification. Especially since in our history some of the greatest reforms were led by third parties: abolition of slavery, women's right to vote, the trade union movement.

Say we agree with your critique of the Democratic Party. They're whiners, they misplayed their hand, Al Gore was an execrable candidate but should have won handily. Nevertheless he would still be president if you hadn't been running. Isn't that a valid claim?

Well, look, I would have got more votes if [Gore] didn't run either, if the Democrats didn't run. So you come back to the equality issue. You constantly come back to the equality issue. If you want to talk substance, neither of the parties is responding to so many of the needs of the American people as they are responding to the greed of big corporations whose executives are funding their election campaigns. Let's step into the area of substance for a moment. When the Democrats say, "Don't you think there's a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans?" And I say, "Well, tell me."

The Democrats are entirely defined by how bad the Republicans are, not by how good the Democrats are. Not that they're breaking new, pioneering areas in representing the public interest and the nation's interest and the consumer and the worker's interest. No! They stay static, just static enough to keep raising money from all these commercial interests. And then the Republicans can always be relied upon to become worse. So they define themselves by how bad the Republicans are instead of how good they should be, in an ever-evolving fashion. So here's what happens: Today the Democratic Party is far worse than it was 40 years ago, far worse than it was 30 years ago. Worse than it was 20 years ago. It's all been decaying ever since.

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