Nader Could Be A Danger To Clinton
Say what you like about Ralph Nader, he is an American authentic: iconoclastic, fearless, media-savvy, often wrongheaded, but - as the man responsible for safety devices like air bags - a public citizen who has saved thousands of lives.
Come November, the original consumer activist could possibly be saving Bob Dole in California. Next Tuesday Nader will be chosen candidate for president on the Green Party’s line, lending the power of name recognition to this agglomeration of environmentalists, vegetarians and consumerists.
Don’t laugh. The Los Angeles Times poll shows him already pulling 7 percent of the vote from Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, and the White House is alarmed. California is essential to the president’s re-election. Clinton has been to California more times than Warren Christopher has been to Syria. The president knows that every vote for Nader would come out of Clinton’s lead.
That’s what has the contingency-fee lawyers’ lobby in such a sweat. Those trial lawyers all but own Clinton. They have been among his biggest contributors from the start, and Clinton regularly double-crosses his own party to protect their big fees. He vetoed a bill to curb stockholder suits (which the Democratic chairman, Chris Dodd, helped override) and is preparing to veto the bipartisan tort reform that the Democrat Jay Rockefeller won Senate cloture on Wednesday. Clinton will protect those contingency fees till the last dog dies.
The only person as close to the heart of trial lawyers as Bill Clinton is Ralph Nader. His consumerism has long been the lawyers’ gravy train. Nader inveighs, the lawyers sue; he gets principled satisfaction, they get filthy rich.
White House operatives are asking the lawyers: Why can’t you get Nader off the ticket in California? Doesn’t he realize he’s helping Dole, and Dole wants a cap on your multimillion-dollar settlements?
“I don’t just hear from trial lawyers,” said Nader over a bowl of oatmeal with skimmed milk on Wednesday. “I’m getting calls from members of Congress and all sorts of emissaries. But I’m in this campaign to stay. Only proves I let the chips fall where they may.”
At 62, Nader now has iron-gray hair, but his familiar face retains its boyish asceticism. “I know I can’t win. This is to break the paradigm, to end the two-party duopoly.”
What about Ross Perot, who de-duopolized our political system in 1992, and - to White House delight and GOP dismay backhandedly announced his 1996 availability the other day?
“Perot doesn’t go deep enough,” says Nader of the billionaire activist-come-lately. “His is more a protest than a movement, and it’s too knee-jerk anti-government. There’s been a backlash to that, in defense of government, from the Homestead Act to the G.I. Bill.”
Forget fund raising: “I’ll get on the air free, people can make tapes, pass them around.”
Nor will Nader adopt the platform of the Green Party, though its stand for same-sex marriage would boost his ratings in Northern California: “Not interested in gonadal politics.” Nor will he be smoked out on such issues as immigration or affirmative action, preferring his own turf: restraining corporate power, term limits, public campaign financing, product safety and “a new model of electoral politics.”
This early opponent of the North American Free Trade Agreement thinks Perot will run and not do as well as last time, and that Buchanan may bolt the Republican Convention but will not try to start his own party, looking instead to a takeover of the GOP in harder times. Good punditry.
Will the Nader factor make a difference this fall? Only if the election is tight in California and only if the Green Party gets on the ballot, as it expects to, in Maine, Colorado, New Mexico and a dozen other states.
Republicans worry about giving Ross Perot equal status in the Presidential debates, which built him up to Bush’s detriment last time out. If Nader or any other lefty were to become a factor, the GOP could insist on a four-way debate (with Perot cutting into Dole’s support and Nader cutting into Clinton’s) - or offer to limit the debate to Dole and Clinton. Which Clinton, who needs Perot, would probably turn down. Which would be fine with Dole, whose debating style is unsafe at any speed.
No wonder Clinton wants his contingency-fee crowd to twist Nader’s arm to get out of the race.
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