Ralph Nader, America's consumer candidate, is winning few friends, writes Conor O'Clery, North America Editor.
I am about to interview Ralph Nader in the students' union, when an undergraduate with backpack pushes his way forward and insists on shaking the independent candidate's hand. "Mr Nader," he says, "I just wanted to say 'Hello!' because I've never met another Ralph before."
The incident - the student is in earnest - is a devastating comment on the state of Ralph Nader's presidential election campaign. It has come to this. The famed consumer advocate is at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas as part of a swing through college campuses in the American south west. A couple of student volunteers attend a table selling Nader stickers and copies of his book on the 2000 election, Crashing the Party. They cost $15 each, and $25 if signed by the candidate. The book ends with an appeal to young people "who take the risks, who break new ground . . . who think the unthinkable . . . who can be most dissuaded by a sensual, tempting corporate culture" to work to improve the world for future generations.
Rows of metal and plastic seats are arranged in the ballroom for his appearance and a banner hangs over the stage bearing the slogan "Declare Your Independence". The 600 seats are only about one-third filled when Nader arrives to start his speech. For the first 10 minutes he is almost inaudible, but an aide finally climbs on to the stage and switches the microphone on. The applause for Nader's critique of the war in Iraq and the malign influence of big corporations on American life is polite rather than passionate.
Not all are there to support him and one woman sits holding a big "Kerry-Edwards" placard throughout. Nader is the anti-war candidate of 2004: he calls for a "rapid and responsible withdrawal from Iraq", but these are different times, quite unlike the heady Vietnam era when students conducted sometimes violent anti-war protests. In post-9/11 America it is generally accepted, even among students, that Iraq is a disaster but that a precipitous retreat could pose a bigger terrorist threat to America.
It was all so different four years ago when Nader attracted an enthusiastic following as he challenged Al Gore and George W. Bush for the presidency. Some 15,000 fans paid $20 a head to pack New York's Madison Square Garden that year to applaud his assault on big business. Nader was on the ballot in 43 states and won 2.7 per cent of the popular vote.
Attitudes changed when Democrats charged that his presence on the ballot in Florida cost Gore the election and handed the White House to an ideological conservative. Nader got 97,488 votes in Florida where Bush was declared the victor with a lead of less than 1,000. Many Democrats who had a soft spot for Nader as the legendary consumer champion who inspired a generation suddenly saw him as a spoiler.
"We are all spoilers," Nader says when I ask him about this, referring to George Bush, John Kerry and himself. His critics are furious with his decision to run again in a tight race which he could once more help George Bush win. Most of the celebrities who cheered him in Madison Square Garden, including anti-war dissident Prof Noam Chomsky, actors Susan Sarandon and Bill Murray, writer Studs Terkel, and Vermont's famous liberal ice-cream maker, Ben Cohen, have deserted to the Kerry camp in a stop-Bush frenzy. That night in New York, Michael Moore told the crowd to follow their conscience and do the right thing, rather than take the attitude that "if we have a revolution we might get a worse king".
Not any more. On the Bill Maher TV show on HBO a few weeks ago, the maker of Fahrenheit 9/11 fell on his knees and implored Nader to withdraw from the race. Chomsky, the champion of the intellectual left, has also made an impassioned plea to Nader to stand aside this time. "Anyone who says 'I don't care if Bush gets elected' is basically telling poor and working people 'I don't care if your lives are destroyed'," he said recently, adding that he believed Nader's decision to run was a recipe for disaster for those hoping to build a political alternative in America.
I ask Nader whether he felt betrayed by Chomsky and the rest of his erstwhile supporters. "I strongly disagree with them," he says. They have "unconditionally surrendered" to John Kerry who is "a hawk on Iraq, a hawk on military budgets and a hawk on WTO and NAFTA (trade agreements)". Nader has also lost the support of the Green Party, which was unable to stomach the thought of supporting a campaign that might return to office the least environment-friendly president in decades. Among the most enthusiastic supporters of Nader's right to run now are right-wing Republicans, among them the former US ambassador to Ireland, Richard Egan, a major Bush fundraiser.
Around the country, Republican activists helped Nader to gather signatures to get on state ballots. I came across an example of this in New Hampshire, where the Sunday News reported on August 8th that at a Republican barbecue at the Manchester, New Hampshire, home of a state representative, a man adorned with Bush-Cheney campaign stickers moved among the crowd gathering signatures for Nader.
Democrats have retaliated, picketing Nader venues and appealing to Nader supporters not to do anything that would only hand a tight race to Bush. An anti-Bush organisation, TheNaderFactor.com, has run TV ads saying Republicans were helping Nader get on the ballot in Oregon, Nevada, Michigan, Iowa, New Hampshire, even Florida, "because the right wing believes that helping Ralph Nader helps George Bush".
Nader dismisses the stories of Republican support. "If Republicans wanted to get us on the ballot they could have done it with a fifth of the money used by the Democrats to keep me off the ballot," he says. "The two parties rig the system and they don't want competition. They have deprived the people of more choices and voices. If you don't get big money the media doesn't cover you and in a number of major states it is increasingly expensive just to get on the ballot. "
Nader has managed to get on the ballot in 34 states and the District of Columbia this time and is fighting legal challenges in five more states. On Wednesday, just after he addressed the Las Vegas students, he learned that in the battleground state of Pennsylvania a court had ruled that he could not appear on the ballot after thousands of signatures on his petition were ruled invalid: they included Mickey Mouse and Fred Flintstone. The legal action against Nader was taken by the Democratic Party which has challenged his attempts to get on the ballot in practically every state capital.
The dynamic of the 2004 elections has produced the irony of the consumer candidate attracting the approval of big business and of the Democratic Party fighting to keep a candidate from giving people a greater democratic choice. It all goes back to Florida and their conviction that Bush would have lost if Nader had not been on the ballot. Nader points out that Democrats did not cry foul when Ross Perot damaged Geroge H.W. Bush in the 1992 election that Bill Clinton won. The independent also says exit polls showed half of his supporters in Florida would not have voted if he was not on the ballot and a quarter would have supported Bush, leaving the result unaffected. He makes the point that Gore beat himself by failing to take even his home state of Tennessee, which would have won him the White House.
Nader states that his support today is taken evenly from Republicans and Democrats, but a survey of 121 opinion polls taken before August by Pollwatch 04 shows this to be dubious. It found that of the average 4.3 per cent Nader got in recent opinion polls, more than 2.5 per cent came from Kerry voters and 0.9 per cent from Bush voters. Since the race tightened and Kerry took a more critical attitude on the Iraq war, Nader's support has dropped to 1 per cent in some more recent polls. It is still enough to decide the outcome and if it pushesBush over the line, the consequences for Nader's role in American history would be far-reaching.
It is a tragic turnaround for one of America's most passionate social critics and lifelong crusaders against the arrogant abuse of corporate power. Nader, 70, attributes his passion for civic responsibility to his father, an immigrant from Lebanon who owned a restaurant in Connecticut.
He is fond of telling an anecdote that helped shape his activism. As a student at Princeton he saw groundsmen spraying roses with DDT and next day found dead birds in the flower bed. When he suggested to the Princeton newspasper that they write about it they said if there was a connection between DDT and the birds' death the scientists at the university would surely know about it.
Nader began agitating as a full-time consumer activist in Washington four decades ago. He published a devastating critique of the Chevrolet Corvair in a book entitled Unsafe at Any Speed. General Motors hired a private eye to spy on him. When he set up his advocacy group, "Public Citizen", and challenged big business in Washington, he attracted legions of idealistic young people who became known as Nader's Raiders. Since then he has created or inspired hundreds of consumer organizations. Water pollution, abuses in mental hospitals, big business corruption, all became his targets.
Spurred on by Nader, a supportive media Congress passed new laws on freedom of information and motor safety. Thanks largely to him, car makers in the US were required to install seat belts and air bags. He led the fight for the proper labelling of food. As his fame grew, Nader continued to live modestly in a small Washington apartment.
He got interested in politics in 1992 when he campaigned in two primary elections for write-in votes with the aim of promoting public discussion on his ideas for democratic government. Ten years ago, after the surge in support for Ross Perot, he predicted the emergence of a third party in US politics, but said he would not be a candidate, preferring to build a democratic infrastructure from the outside.
Why did he change his mind, I ask. Because in Washington the politicians shut out activism and the big business lobbyists dominated the system, he says. "People in America have lost power to big corporations," he adds. "We got safer cars, clean air, clean water and Freedom of Information but we can't do that sort of thing any more." If we vote now on the least worse basis, "it's as if they put a ring in our nose."