“What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
— Georg Hegel

Hegel would no doubt be little surprised to read that longtime consumer advocate and Washington gadfly supreme Ralph Nader announced in late February that he’ll run in this year’s presidential election as an Independent.
With few exceptions, third-party candidates are doomed to be the dust bunnies behind the rococo armoire of the American presidency — Ross Perot has all but dropped out of the American political consciousness. Heard of John Anderson? Not unless you’re a poli-sci wonk. He scraped together 6.6 percent of the popular vote in 1980’s Ronald Reagan-Jimmy Carter contest. Even Strom Thurmond’s 1948 bid remained a long-forgotten footnote until Trent Lott’s 2002 endorsement of the campaign landed him in hot water with Republican and Democratic politicians alike.
But, as even casual political observers know, 2000 was different. After officials tallied results, the current presidency hinged on Florida’s 25 electoral votes. After the Supreme Court settled the recount challenges, Texas Gov. George W. Bush bested Vice President Al Gore by a margin of 537 votes in a state where nearly six million had visited the polls. The left-leaning Nader had drawn over 97,000 votes in the state.
Mainstream leftists were up in arms. In a futile challenge to the political duopoly that critics have lambasted as “self-righteous” and “egomaniacal,” this outsider — who had culled only 0.7 percent of the 1996 popular vote — managed to draw enough votes away from their just-left-of-center candidate, returning the White House to the Republicans for the first time since 1993.
In a November 2000 letter to Salon.com, reader Stephanie Richmond wrote, “I hope all you Naderites are satisfied now. While I admired Ralph Nader’s work in the past, now I only have contempt for him for handing over the presidency to George W. Bush. I hope Nader never gets funding to run in 2004 or ever again after this irresponsible, unthinking, self-serving campaign which has set our country back more than he could ever imagine.”
Nader naturally rejects the responsibility for Bush’s victory that many Dem pundits readily assigned him. Properly speaking, he’s not responsible. The electorates in key swing states are. Florida is a case in point; in New Hampshire, Bush defeated Gore by a margin of 7,211 votes; there were 22,198 Nader votes.
Left voters played a dangerous game in other states, too. In Iowa, Gore topped Bush by 4,144 votes, and there were 29,374 Nader votes; in Wisconsin, Gore won by margin of 5,708, and there were 94,070 Nader votes; in New Mexico, he won by the paper-thin margin of 366 votes in a state with 21,251 Nader votes. And yes, Gore took Oregon by a margin of 6,765 votes, in a state where 77,357 turned out for Nader.
But Nader dismisses responsibility, too, in the more general sense in which he is very much culpable: That if he hadn’t run in 2000, Gore certainly would have won the election. Nader appeals instead, even today, to the tired claim that a politicized Supreme Court ruled in favor of its favorite candidate, staining democratic integrity in the process.
“After careful thought and desire to retire our supremely elected president,” he began his announcement on NBC, “I’ve decided to run as an Independent candidate for president.”
While grumblings of philosophically mangled Supreme jurisprudence will no doubt linger on college campuses for years, Nader’s appeal misses the point, instead offering a non sequitur that could prove costly for the left-of-center. At best, his bid will make the presidency marginally more difficult for the Dems to grab; at worst, Democrats fear they’ll see a repeat of 2000.
Even Terry McAuliffe, the usually sunny Democratic National Committee chairman, lamented Nader’s bid as “very unfortunate” on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” but added that Nader’s 2004 candidacy will be “very different” from his last go-round.
As if Nader’s electoral myopia wasn’t troubling enough, he doesn’t worry about wooing left votes away, arguing in interviews that he’ll instead mostly appeal to disillusioned Republicans. But this fantasy is about as likely as the 2000 proposition that Democrats disenchanted by Clintonian sexual improprieties would vote en masse for the socially super-conservative Pat Buchanan. Indeed, according to a poll in Newsweek conducted April 8-9, if voters had to choose between Bush and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., 50 percent would vote for Kerry and 43 would vote for Bush. If Nader joins the fray, Kerry’s lead drops to 46-42, a margin equal to the survey’s 4 percent margin of error.
The Dems might have some reason for optimism, though. In 1992, Perot won 18.9 percent of the popular vote; in 1996, major candidates mined the no-chance votes and Perot managed less than half that. But Nader isn’t just a fading improbability like Perot was — in some circles, he’s openly resented.
Still, Nader altered the outcome of the 2000 election by winning only 2.7 percent of the popular vote; and this year’s election is shaping up to be so close, half that figure might just tips the scales again. If you’re a Nader fan and live in a swing state like Oregon, consider your vote this fall carefully — it counts.