Word: nader
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...fair to ask why, if Gore were so vastly superior a candidate, the sniveling public-interest groups didn't do a better job of getting their constituents off the davenport to go vote for him. Election calculus is fuzzy math, to borrow a phrase, but it is possible, as Nader suggests, that fear of his threat to Gore actually got more people out to vote for the Vice President than otherwise would have. And Nader volunteer James Williamson, 49, of Cambridge, Mass., says he is offended by the suggestion that his vote for Nader should have been traded...
That is precisely the kind of hubris that drove some people out of the Green Party, says Seattle city councilwoman Judy Nicastro, who quit the Greens two weeks before the election. "What was all this work for?" Nicastro wonders, saying the Nader candidacy became an egomaniacal crusade that failed in every one of its objectives. Nader did not get the 5% of the vote needed for the party to get federal funding; the Green Party is splintered; Bush might be President. Says Nicastro: "It could overturn so many of the things Ralph Nader has fought for, which makes it perverse...
...When Nader hears this kind of thing, he starts rattling off such names as Rosa Parks and Thomas Jefferson. What's happened to dissent in this country? he wonders. The issue, he says, is that neither Bush nor Gore will run Washington. "The decisions in this town are made by the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, 22,000 corporate lobbyists and 9,000 PACs who have their grip on every department in government. Who do you think is the most powerful force on the auto-safety agency? It's the auto companies. Food and drug, aviation...
...Nader admits a little too reluctantly, there are some differences between Gore and Bush--but not on things that matter most. And spare him the clatter about politics as the art of compromise. "Politics is the art of transforming leadership, and a transforming leader is a person who says, This is the right thing to do, and I'm going to help mobilize the American people to counteract the special interests...
...Nader has never been more noble or more naive. There is no place for uncompromised idealism in politics, or for anyone who knows exactly who he is. Some of his former friends wanted nothing more than for him to admit that Gore and Bush are like night and day in many ways, and Nader might still have their respect if he had. But the fight goes on, with or without them. "If you believe you're right," Nader says before disappearing through a door in the dim light of the quiet house, "you never lose the election...