Re: The Anti-Democratic Movement Targeted Ralph Nader First. We Should Have Paid More Attention

On 13 Feb 2022, Rudy Canoza <[email protected]> posted some
news:[email protected]: 

> We really should start culling more leftists like Gunner said.  

In the summer of 2004 Theresa Amato, campaign manager of presidential 
candidate Ralph Nader, took out a notebook in preparation for an important 
phone conference.

Her candidate, Nader, had already been subject to an extraordinary — and 
extraordinarily underreported — campaign of litigious harassment at the 
hands of the Democratic Party. John Kerry told Nader he had 2,000 lawyers 
at his disposal and would do “everything within the law” to win. In 
Arizona, Nader opponents filed a 650-page challenge to his attempt to get 
on the ballot, forgetting social justice concerns long enough to complain 
that one of Nader’s petition-circulators was a felon. They demanded ten 
samples of Nader’s own signature, hired a forensic examiner to call others 
into question, and challenged residents of a homeless shelter. The 
Democratic state chairman, Jim Pederson, said outright, “Our first 
objective is to keep [Nader] off the ballot,” because “we think it 
distorts the entire election.”

Now, Amato’s candidate was set to talk with Democratic National Committee 
chairman (and future Virginia governor) Terry McAuliffe. A high-energy, 
Clintonesque schmoozer in public, McAuliffe in private was curt and to the 
point: he didn’t mind Nader running in noncompetitive places, but had an 
“issue” with 19 states where “a vote for you is a vote for [George] Bush.” 
He shifted with impressive nonchalance to offer a bribe.

“If you stay out of my 19 states,” he said, “I will help with resources in 
31 states.” McAuliffe then made a show of pretending to ask an assistant 
about other ballot challenges against Nader, saying he “supported them” 
but wasn’t funding them, a statement ultimately contradicted in court 
testimony by Maine’s State Democratic Party chair. This was just one of 
countless instances in which Democrats hurled billable hours at anyone 
deemed a “threat” to votes they considered theirs.

In 2004, a third party needed to collect 634,727 valid signatures in about 
six and a half months to get on the ballot. If you’ve ever wondered why so 
few third-party candidates run, it’s because this is an extraordinarily 
difficult logistical task, and expensive, requiring services of companies 
that even then charged between $1.00 and $1.50 per signature. (Ross Perot 
reportedly spent $18 million to get on the ballot in 1992.) The process 
gets more cumbersome when you’re forced to account for “spoilage,” i.e. 
how many signatures you’ll lose in the face of challenges from a 
determined opponent, in Nader’s case from Democrats and affiliated groups.

Nader lost signatures that were allegedly signed in the wrong county (an 
irony given recent events, as we’ll see), due to “unwritten rules” that a 
collector’s signature must be legible even if his or her name is printed 
underneath it, because signatories no longer lived at the addresses where 
they were registered, because signatures were printed instead of signed, 
because additional information like the date was included next to 
signatures, and so on, and so on, and so on.

“We had more than two dozen lawsuits complaints filed against us in a 
massive effort to disenfranchise the people who wanted to see him on the 
ballot,” Amato says now.

Amato later wrote a book, Grand Illusion, documenting the Democrats’ plan 
to keep Nader’s meager resources “tied up mentally, emotionally, and 
financially in courtroom after courtroom,” violating rules themselves 
while using the press to smear Nader as the cheat. “I wrote a whole book 
precisely because I didn’t want the history to be lost, of what the Nader 
campaigns went through,” she says now.

A subtext of Grand Illusion is how Democrats showed great creativity when 
seeking ways to keep Nader off the ballot, but almost none when it came to 
examining possible reasons it might be underperforming. Kerry in 2004 was 
fatally flawed because he had no position on this central issue of the 
campaign, the Iraq war. He tried simultaneously to be against it 
(“Invading Iraq has created a crisis of historic proportions”) and for it 
(pledging to “hunt down and kill the terrorists”), while running all year 
from the fact that he voted for Bush’s war resolution.

This complex non-position not only created a clear rationale for a third-
party run in a year when support for the war dropped as low as 45%, it was 
a major factor in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 general election loss, when 
Donald Trump won 57% of military households vs Clinton’s 39%. Had the 
party shown a fraction of the backbone on the Iraq issue during the 
crucial October 2002 vote that it showed in bollocking Nader all through 
the 2004 cycle, it’s possible Trump never would have been president.

Twenty years and multiple political upheavals later, the Democrats are 
taking the sabotage game it played in 2004 up a notch or ten. It’s taken 
the position that all of Joe Biden’s potential challengers within the 
party and without are, in effect, new Naders, whose presences are 
“distorting” the real election. The major difference between 2004 and now 
is that thanks to major changes in both the Democratic and Republican 
parties, current Democrats have the money and institutional capacity to 
attempt a legal campaign to “Naderize” even the likely GOP nominee, Trump, 
essentially seeking to ballot-block their way to victory.

Democrats first disenfranchised internal party challengers like Marianne 
Williamson, Dean Phillips, and (initially) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. through 
tactics like declaring the New Hampshire primary “non-compliant” and 
“meaningless” and canceling the Florida primary. Then, when Dr. Cornel 
West, Kennedy, and a new party called “No Labels” decided to seek third-
party ballot access, money from LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman, former 
“Right-wing hit man” turned Clintonian organizational assassin David 
Brock, and a group fronted by former presidential candidate Dick Gephardt 
was quickly deployed, leading to a meeting of Biden advocacy groups in 
which one of the participants warned potential third party entrants, “If 
you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will 
find it… We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find.”

Lieberman on January 16th sent a separate letter to his former Senate 
colleague Biden, saying, “I respectfully ask you to help put an end to 
this shameful attempt to silence voters and prevent choice and competition 
in the upcoming election.” Obviously, this fell on deaf ears. Two days 
later word came out that American Bridge hired former Hillary Clinton 
campaign attorney Marc Elias to help “thwart” third-party bids.

In essence, Democrats first prevented politicians or interest groups from 
attempting to influence their platform by running in primaries, then used 
scorched-earth tactics to head off potential third-party runs, leaving 
only the Republicans an alternative —except of course they’re using Death 
Star tactics to try to disqualify that party’s candidate, too.

Amato’s Grand Illusion described the evolving hypocrisy, cynicism, and 
ruthlessness of the Democratic Party a dozen years before Trump. It’s a 
story to which we should have paid more attention, because the Sun Tzu 
tactics unveiled against Ralph Nader are now clearly the strategic model 
for the whole party. Had the Republicans not suffered a major intramural 
collapse in 2016, Grand Illusion today might read like a cautionary tale 
about the anti-democratic tendencies baked into the two-party system. The 
Republicans, after all, have their own history of ballot-pruning tactics, 
for example working behind the scenes to suppress the candidacy of 
Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2012.

But since Trump steamrolled the GOP clown car in 2016, establishment 
politics has increasingly consolidated under the umbrella of the one party 
that (just barely) succeeded in fighting off its populist challenger, the 
Democrats. The return to the Democratic tent of once-hated neocons like 
Bill Kristol (who was reportedly in attendance at the anti-No Labels 
meeting described by Semafor) has helped revamp the blue-party 
institutional space into something like a permanent Washington-against-
the-world war council, fueled by an aristocratic contempt whose intensity 
is almost beyond comprehension.

These people reordered the geography of the world, blithely moved whole 
manufacturing sectors from one continent to another, started moronic wars 
that pointlessly killed millions and created millions more refugees, 
bailed out corrupt banks while whole regions went into foreclosure, and 
failed to accomplish much but a growing sense of foreboding and decline 
despite decades of promises to the contrary. Still, they feel sincere rage 
at the idea that they should have to earn votes.

The special anger Nader inspired came from his refusal to just “send a 
message,” saying things like “Isn’t that what candidates try to do to one 
another—take votes?” when Democrats suggested he stop “taking” votes from 
Al Gore or John Kerry, and run in “safe” states only. Again, never mind 
that they could have altered their own fortunes easily by prioritizing 
voters over donors just a little more. In their minds, this was not 
Nader’s call to make. In the minds of early 2000s Democrats, voters never 
elected Republicans. Ralph Nader did.

Headlines like “Ralph Nader Was Indispensable To The Republican Party” 
(HuffingtonPost) and “Ralph Nader Still Refuses to Admit He Elected Bush” 
(the indispensable Jon Chait of New York, who recently insisted Joe 
Biden’s 2020 election inspired the “greatest outpouring of joy since V-J 
day”) still trickle out, as reminders that such grudges are never 
forgotten. The hyper-combative, winning-is-everything mindset of the new 
“lawfare” era was probably born in that 2000 loss, a “direct outcome of 
the 2000 Nader campaign,” as Amato puts it. This is true even though, as 
Amato notes, there were eight minor candidates on the 2000 Florida ballot, 
and all eight got more than the infamous “margin of difference” of 537 
votes.

In the age of Nader, the rage was directed at anyone who suggested the 
Democrats should have to face competition from more than one direction. 
The updated idea in the Trump era is that they should not have to face 
competition at all.

Back in 2016, when I disliked Trump enough to write Insane Clown 
President, I was still naive enough to puzzled by the stream of headlines 
describing his win as a “failure of democracy.” It was anything but. The 
presidency had long been stage-managed to absurdity, with candidates 
needing the backing of one of the two parties, the press, and corporate 
donors to gain the White House. The whole idea of this oligarchical ADT 
system was to guarantee the president arrived in the Oval Office a 
political debtor, while keeping anyone with aspirations to independence 
out. This was the clear lesson of the Nader episode.

Trump broke through all these barriers as an unapproved “fringe” 
candidate, making his win an extraordinary blow for democracy, or so I 
thought, even though I couldn’t stand him. If he could win, anyone could, 
and this was good news for those of us who thought the system’s corrupt 
features might never be fixed.

https://floppingaces.net/most-wanted/the-anti-democratic-movement-
targeted-ralph-nader-first-we-should-have-paid-more-attention/