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The Nation
Enron? Nader Is Glad You Asked -- by John Nichols
Why, yes, Ralph Nader would be delighted to discuss the Enron
scandal. But don't expect the once and possibly future
presidential candidate to do so with a straight face. "I hate to
say 'I told you so,'" he begins, barely cloaking his glee over
what could be the greatest corporate scandal in the lifetime of
America's greatest corporate critic. "But"--and now the
67-year-old consumer activist pauses with an unexpectedly
theatrical flair--"I told you so!"
With that, Nader rips into the issue that official Washington is
struggling to wrap its spin around. "Enron is our engine for
reform," he says, sounding almost as optimistic as the Harvard
Law School grad who hitchhiked to Washington in the 1960s with
the notion that he could force the auto industry to make safer
cars. After years of warning about the dangers inherent in a
system that permits corporate political action committees to buy
government favors in the form of deregulation, lax regulatory
oversight and economic globalization, suddenly Nader can point to
the Enron mess as Exhibit A. "Enron is the supermarket of
corporate crime for our time," he
announces. "It has embarrassed the hell out of the business
community. It has raised questions about accounting practices.
Investor confidence is severely shaken. The investment bankers
are quaking. The lobbyists are scared. The politicians are
scrambling to explain why they took those checks from [Enron
chief] Ken Lay. I could talk about this from now until 2004."
Even if he still gets the cold shoulder from Washington
Republicans angered by his penchant for calling Bush campaign
contributors "criminals" and Washington Democrats who believe his
renegade 2000 presidential race ushered the criminal coddlers
into the White House, America seems to be listening to what Nader
is saying now. Since the Enron scandal broke, the man who argues
that he was "not silent, but silenced" after the end of his 2000
presidential campaign has gotten quite a hearing. Nader has
appeared on NBC's Meet the Press, ABC's This Week and PBS's
Firing Line. He even stirred it up one morning on Fox News
Channel's Fox and Friends. Nader,
who as a presidential candidate held a press conference to which
no press came, showed up at the National Press Club in January to
pitch a "corporate decency" proposal--a traditional Naderite stew
of more regulation for auditors, independent trustees for pension
plans and restoration of rights for investors to sue
corporations--and was greeted by ten television cameras and four
dozen reporters. Nader's life these days is a city-to-city rush
from television studio to newspaper editorial board to talk-radio
show to crowded auditorium. Theresa Amato, who managed Nader's
Green Party candidacy and now heads an outgrowth of it called
Citizen Works, admits, "There's been so much press demand. I wish
we'd had this during the campaign."
For Nader, who has written an unrepentant recollection of his
candidacy, Crashing the Party: Taking on the Corporate Government
in an Age of Surrender, a January book tour that one critic
suggested should be billed as "coming soon to a small independent
bookstore near you" has turned into a rollicking tour of the
country that gave him a mere 2.7 percent of the presidential vote
in 2000--and, depending on one's analysis of the vote patterns,
the dubious distinction of handing Al Gore's presidency to George
W. Bush. "He's a rock star," said Bob Maull, owner of 23rd Avenue
Books, a Portland bookstore that had to move Nader's reading to a
nearby auditorium, and still turned away 400 people. "I have a
hard time thinking of any other political figure at this point
who would draw this kind of crowd, especially the young people."
Up the West Coast, Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Joel
Connelly--an unusually harsh critic of Nader as a self-absorbed
political dilettante--welcomed the consumer activist with an
admission that "just as this column was ready to get rough on
Ralph Nader, who hits town today to promote a self-celebratory
book on his 2000 presidential campaign, along came twin reminders
of why America needs a burr-in-the-saddle corporate critic."
After reflecting on how Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described
the Enron mess as an example of "the genius of capitalism" and
George W. Bush referred to Enron's CEO as "Kenny Boy," Connelly
acknowledged the unavoidable reality that "Enron's collapse has
renewed Nader." While only a handful of Congressional Democrats
are speaking to him, while his requests to testify before
Congressional committees seldom get a response and while it is
never hard to find a commentator like Joe Klein ready to dismiss
him as "a sour and unrelenting demagogue," Nader is packing
crowds into book signings and "People Have the Power" rallies.
One $10-a-ticket event on January 26 in Austin, Texas, drew 5,000
people and reunited the supposed persona non grata of American
politics with Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins, Jackson Browne and
Patti Smith. "America is starting to understand what Ralph has
been trying to tell them all these years," says Smith, the most
loyal of Nader's superrally compatriots. "People don't trust
Washington, but they trust Ralph Nader."
Her point is well taken. As Democrats in Washington scramble to
make the case that they were less in hock to Enron than the
GOP--noting the corporation's contributions favored Republicans
by a 3-to-1 ratio--Nader declares "a pox on both their houses."
He announced in Portland, "The prospect of reform is eviscerated
because of both parties' sticky hands. That is what is so
disgusting. The Democrats can't really go after this scandal
because so many of them look like hypocrites. They took as much
money as they could get from Enron, and they keep raising money
from corporate PACs."
For all of his current Green trappings, Nader still pours
enormous energy into the thankless work of "inserting a spine
into the Democratic Party." Rare is the conversation in which
Nader does not settle into a fierce rant about his disappointment
with a party that no longer seems capable of mustering the
righteous indignation he remembers coming from its previous
generations; his comments are peppered with references to former
California Congressman John Moss, former Oregon Senator Wayne
Morse and other now-gone legislators. "If Democrats were saying
the kinds of things that we are saying about Enron, this scandal
would be blowing wide open," he says. "But they are not saying
much, are they? That's how bad it's gotten: They cannot even
seize an issue like Enron."
Nader's fury with the Democrats can bring out his poetic side:
"They have decided to risk losing through cowardliness, rather
than to risk winning through valor." But it can also get the best
of him. The weakest sections of Crashing the Party recount,
often at great length, the slights Nader and his campaign
suffered at the hands of Democrats and progressives he once
worked with: folks like Representative John Conyers Jr., onetime
"Nader Raider" Toby Moffett and Gloria Steinem. In a book that is
thick with engaging anecdotes and optimistic outlines for a
renewal of citizenship, these pages read bitter. "I wanted to
show how totally inflexible most of the Democrats in Washington
are, and how they haven't learned a single lesson," says Nader.
"There are exceptions, like Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney
and Jesse Jackson Jr. They're saying, 'Look, we're going to lose
more voters if we don't change course and adopt a more
progressive agenda.' But they're not getting anywhere, nowhere at
all." He adds, "The corporate Democratic grip of the Democratic
Leadership Council is absolutely ironclad."
Nader criticizes the Democrats for allowing the Bush
Administration a free hand not just on military issues but on
domestic matters since the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Republicans, he says, have treated the war as "manna from Heaven,
a perfect excuse for drilling in the Alaskan wilderness, tort
deform, fast track, corporate welfare," while Democrats like
Senate majority leader Tom Daschle have looked at Bush's high
poll numbers and decided to give him whatever he wants. Says
Nader, "Bush has used the war to advance a domestic policy that
is all about increasing the strength of the commercial
militarists, the autocratic ideologues and the corporate
greedhounds. He has attacked our civil liberties. For this, he is
praised by Democrats? It's amazing."
In Nader's view, if Democrats fail to challenge Bush
aggressively, not just on Enron but on a host of issues in coming
months, they could destroy the party's prospects for years to
come--guaranteeing the loss of the Senate and the House this fall
and the presidency in 2004.
The only prominent Democrat who Nader seems to believe offers the
party any chance for redemption is Russ Feingold, the maverick
senator from Wisconsin who cast a lonely vote against the Bush
Administration's antiterrorism legislation. Feingold is a rare
Democrat who consistently says things like, "Ralph Nader is
talking about issues Democrats should be talking about." But the
mutual admiration goes only so far. Nader rejects the idea of
backing a Feingold run for the 2004 Democratic presidential
nomination. "I'll say a lot of good things about him, but we're
not trying to build the same party," he says.
For now, Nader says, he is determined to beef up the Greens. "The
failure of the Democrats to fight Bush on most of the major
issues has created a vacuum that can be filled by a party that is
willing to take a stand. And the Greens have taken a stand in
their positions--on civil liberties, on the bombing of
Afghanistan," says Nader, the party's 1996 and 2000 presidential
nominee. "Greens have been calling on senators who took Enron
money to recuse themselves from the investigation. Do you think
Democrats would ever do that?"
But are the Greens really a viable alternative? The party has
never won a Congressional election, and looks unlikely to do so
this year. While it has a greater presence at the local level,
its entire class of elected officials numbers roughly 130. The
party even faces sniping from the Libertarian Party, to the
effect that were it not for the strength Nader showed in 2000,
the Greens would actually rank as America's fourth party. Nader
admits he experiences "lots" of frustration with the Greens. He
warns that the party is not running enough candidates to achieve
critical mass at election time, and he says it must do so--even
where that means challenging relatively liberal Democrats. He
frets that some state parties remain mired in internecine
"bickering, trivia and process-mania" that make them unappealing
to grassroots Americans who simply want to put a few hours a week
into building a political alternative. "The Greens are terrific
in a lot of states," Nader explains. "But in a few states there
are longtime Greens who, if they are not careful, are going to
turn away the vast numbers of people who are going to make their
party into something."
Nader's impatience with some Greens is paralleled by impatience
on the part of some Greens with Nader. During a
question-and-answer session in Portland, a veteran West Coast
Green activist, Robin Denburg, rose to repeat a not uncommon
complaint that Nader's Washington-based aides have approached
independent-minded Green activists and groups less as political
partners than as affiliates of "Team Nader." Yet Nader remains
enormously popular with the Green cadres--people like Pacific
Greens campaigner Jennifer Malidore, who after Nader's Portland
talk
announced, "He really is the heart of this party. He's our
national presence. I would love to see him run again in 2004."
Will he?
"I am thinking about how to do it," says Nader, as he reviews the
mistakes of the 2000 campaign: starting late, putting too little
money into the development of a grassroots organization and
get-out-the-vote drives. Nader goes on to describe how he has
been encouraged not just to mount another Green candidacy but to
enter the Democratic primaries or even to run as what he actually
is: a confirmed independent. The discussion is serious and
detail-oriented, so much so that Nader finally interrupts
himself. "This is not like a sure thing in 2004. There are a lot
of things you have to see in order to make a decision like that,"
he says. But, he explains, before reflecting on how a third
presidential run would need to expand dramatically beyond a base
that remains too white, too middle-class and too frequently
clustered in college towns, "if a decision is made, it is going
to be a campaign that no one has ever seen--in terms of its
strategy and diversity."
Does Nader worry, even just a little bit, that another candidacy
might divide progressives and produce another Bush presidency?
"Look, I'd rather be engaged in the nonpartisan work of building
a civil society. For me, there has been a gradual commitment to
getting involved in the electoral process, and I still cling to
this civic, nonpartisan vision of how to do things," Nader says.
"But if you do an acute analysis of why things don't change in
this country, you come back to what has happened to the
Democratic Party. When I look at how the Democrats have responded
to Enron so far, it seems to me that we all have a responsibility
to try to jolt them into an understanding of what is at stake. If
Democrats respond effectively, there will not be much point to me
or anyone else challenging them. But if they do not, something
has to give. People realize that. People know what the Enron
scandal means. This is a test. Are Democrats capable of
addressing massive corporate crimes effectively? If Democrats
cannot, if they are in such a routinized rut that they are
incapable of responding, then how could anyone make a case that
they should be given deference at the ballot box?"
John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, has covered
progressive politics and activism in the United States and abroad
for more than a decade. Formerly a writer and editor for The
Toledo Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspapers, he is now
editorial page editor for The Capital Times in Madison,
Wisconsin.
� 2002 The Nation Company, L.P.
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