by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
First up last night was the
latest episode of The Contenders, the surprisingly addictive show on former Presidential candidates
(though the next episode will be a bit of a departure in that it will be about
two failed vice-presidential candidates,
Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin, the only women ever nominated for that position
— though it’s been looking more and more like we’ll have a woman President
before we have a woman Vice-President!) which this time was about “The
Independents,” H. Ross Perot and Ralph Nader. It was impossible to avoid
drawing comparisons between Perot and Donald Trump — both multi-billionaires
who ran against what they perceived to be a rigged system and presented
themselves as expert businessmen who could bring a fresh perspective to
governing the U.S., and both of whom had spectacular mental meltdowns in public
that kept them from doing as well as they might otherwise have done in the
polls. Of course, there were obvious differences too: when the show played a
film clip of Perot saying “diversity is America’s strength” it was impossible
not to realize how utterly unlikely it would be for Trump to say those words!
Still, there were striking similarities between Perot’s appeal and Trump’s;
Perot often said things like, “The party’s over. It’s time for the clean-up
crew,” meaning that Democrats and Republicans had made such a mess of the
country in general and in particular had ran up such a fearsome level of
national debt that it was time to get a new crew in there to clean house and
get the country back on a sound financial footing.
That, of course, is yet
another difference between Perot, who was genuinely concerned about America’s
mounting national debt (and one of the few figures in American politics who
seemed aware of the difference between the budget deficit — which is basically the amount by which the
national debt increases in any given year — and the debt itself) — so much so
that he made it the signature issue of his campaign — and Trump, whose economic
policies would blow a hole in the debt and vastly increase it (as well as
potentially antagonizing the countries, notably China, to whom we owe the debt) in the interest of tax cuts for the
rich. Still, the basic appeal of Perot and Trump was pretty much the same: the
nation is in crisis, the two major parties had run out of ideas to get us out
of it, and only a fresh face untethered to the political establishments of both
Republicans and Democrats could get the country back on track again. Perot won
19 percent of the vote in 1992 despite the spectacular meltdown in which he got
out of the race in July and got back into it in October, giving an interview to
60 Minutes in which he claimed he’d
withdrawn in the first place because the re-election campaign of President
George H. W. Bush had threatened to smear his daughter as a Lesbian on the eve
of her marriage (to a man). Had he stayed in, he could well have carried enough
states to deadlock the Electoral College and throw the election into the House
of Representatives — though the program featured an interview with a former
Perot campaign staff member in which he said actually deadlocking the election
and forcing a constitutional crisis was the last thing he wanted and the real reason he withdrew
(temporarily, as it turned out, because he found the TV networks wouldn’t sell
him half-hour blocks of time for his infomercials about the debt crisis unless
he was an active candidate) was he didn’t want to win the presidency — just to promote public
attention about the debt crisis and make sure either Bush or Bill Clinton,
whoever won, took it seriously.
As things turned out, Clinton won the election
and Perot probably was the
“spoiler” that made it possible — as a graphic shown the night of the election
and reproduced on this program indicated, Clinton carried the state of Texas (a
Democrat actually carried Texas in my lifetime!) by 41 to 40 percent, and Texas would almost
certainly have gone to Bush if Perot hadn’t siphoned 18 percent of the vote.
(One of the things that amused me about the 1992 campaign was that all three
candidates came from the same part of the country — Bush from Texas, Clinton
from Arkansas and Perot from Texarkana, a city so-named because it was on the
Texas-Arkansas border.) At the same time, though he did five percentage points
better than George Wallace had in 1968, he didn’t win any electoral votes
because he didn’t carry any states (Wallace carried five, all in the Deep
South) — proof that the real bias in American politics that prevents alternatives to the Republican
and Democratic parties from competing fairly and effectively is the U.S.
addiction to winner-take-all electoral systems and the law (not part of the Constitution but passed by Congress in
1842) that requires that the House of Representatives be elected from
single-member districts. Certainly both Perot and Nader faced the difficulty of
getting on the ballot at all, let alone in all 50 states (this year, of the two
principal alternative-party candidates for the Presidency, Gary Johnson of the
Libertarian Party is on the
ballot in all 50 states and Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party is on the ballot
in 44), and they also had the problem of getting on the Presidential debate
stage (ordinarily, under the usual rules of the Commission on Presidential
Debates — or, as I call it, the “Commission to Make Sure Americans Don’t Hear from
Anyone Other than Republicans or Democrats in Presidential Debates” — Perot
wouldn’t have qualified for the debate, but Bush insisted that he be let on
because for some reason he thought Perot would hurt Clinton more than he hurt
him), but the real factor that keeps American
political competition so confined to two big parties is the single-member
districts and winner-take-all system that ensure that all you can do by voting
for an alternative-party candidate is help the major-party candidate you like least.
That, of course, was Nader’s big problem as well
— this program does a good job of telling Nader’s story, from his beginnings to
his rise to prominence over the issue of auto safety in general and the sloppy
suspension design of the Chevrolet Corvair in particular — and the jihad General Motors, makers of the Corvair (and the
Buick Roadmaster, another car Nader singled out for criticism), waged against
him, including hiring women to entrap him in a sex scandal and using private
detectives to follow him around. It turned out to be one of the most
spectacularly counterproductive moves in the history of corporate espionage,
since it transformed Nader from a minor irritant to a major gadfly, caused
sales of his book Unsafe at Any Speed to zoom up and gave Nader the money he need to start the network of
Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG’s) and other organizations that helped
push through laws not only requiring the federal government to regulate auto
safety but protect consumers and the environment generally. Nader is shown on
this program complaining that such legislative triumphs started becoming more
difficult in the early 1980’s when, in order to keep their House of
Representatives majority in the face of Ronald Reagan’s political revolution,
the Democrats cut deals with major corporate donors and essentially abandoned
their pro-consumer, pro-environment agenda in service to their new paymasters —
it’s a major oversimplification but basically accurate analysis — and that’s
what disillusioned him against politics in general and the two-party system in
particular, and led him to a series of Presidential candidates from outside the
two major parties. Of course, the most significant of Nader’s five Presidential
runs was the one in 2000, in which he won 2.7 percent of the vote and pissed
off a lot of his old allies because they were afraid he would take the election
from Democratic candidate Al Gore, Jr. and give it to Republican George W.
Bush. This show takes the position that Nader did just that — the common
perception that Nader was effectively responsible for the Bush Presidency and
all that went wrong with America during it (like the squandering of the
laboriously achieved budget surpluses of the last two years of Bill Clinton’s
Presidency on tax cuts for the rich, and the war in Iraq) has in effect trashed
his legacy to the point where if people hear the name “Ralph Nader” they no
longer think of the consumer advocate without whom we wouldn’t have the federal
regulations protecting auto safety and the air and water, they think of “the
man who made George W. Bush President.”
Nader’s own defense against that
charge, to the extent he ever made one (during the campaign itself he made the
predictable argument that it was a lesser-of-two-evils vote that was the truly
“wasted” one and the vote for one’s conscience that was really consequential),
was that he thought Gore was so much stronger a candidate than Bush he should
have won in a landslide and so a principled vote for Nader wouldn’t (or
shouldn’t) have hurt the Democrat any. As I’ve argued in these pages before,
I’m convinced the real force
that elected George W. Bush President was the National Rifle Association, which
ran so-called “independent” campaigns for Bush in Tennessee and West Virginia,
giving Bush both those states’ electoral votes. The real astonishing fact about the 2000 election was that,
in a race that was otherwise razor-close, Gore became the first major-party
nominee since George McGovern in 1972 to lose his home state (at least in the
other two blowouts in recent history, Barry Goldwater won Arizona in 1964 and
Walter Mondale won Minnesota in 1984), thanks to the NRA — and if Gore had
carried Tennessee, he would have been President and all the fooforaw about
Florida wouldn’t have mattered. What’s more, the Democrats knew it, too; that’s
why gun regulation virtually disappeared from the Democratic issue list for
well over a decade and how the NRA has successfully intimidated politicians
into voting down every attempt at sensible gun legislation ever since. Just as
one can’t watch this program in 2016 without reflecting on the similarities
between H. Ross Perot and Donald Trump, it’s also hard to watch it and not
notice those between Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders: both gadflies whose
attacks on giant corporations and their political power were at the heart of
their appeal, both candidates whose power base was among young white college
students and who never “cracked” the communities of color (the bedrock of
support for Gore in the 2000 general election and for Hillary Clinton in the
2016 Democratic primaries — there’s a comment on this show from an activist of
color who says that white idealists like Nader and Sanders ignore the
communities of color except during election time, then suddenly appear and
expect to be taken seriously without doing the years of hard work needed to
build relationships with community leaders and be taken seriously by them).
The
show also argues that Perot had a lasting impact on the political system while
Nader, at least as a candidate, did not; the budget deficit became a major
concern during Bill Clinton’s administration (even though Perot’s other main
concern — opposition to so-called “free trade” agreements that grease the skids
on which jobs are moved out of country and laws protecting workers and the
environment are systematically trashed — a position shared by Trump, Nader and Sanders — has got exactly nowhere; but then, as I
noted in my last Zenger’s blog post about this year’s election, enmeshing the world in so-called
“free trade” agreements that basically subcontract the governance of the world
economy from nation-states to multinational corporations is such a high
priority of the international ruling class they’re not going to let minor
little details like democracy or public opinion stand in its way) — though the
surprising strength of Sanders’ candidacy within the Democratic Party and its
power to move at least Hillary Clinton’s public positions (as opposed to her
private ones!) strikingly to the Left indicates that Nader’s issues still have
a lot of political resonance. There’s a sense of sadness in this episode of The
Contenders, particularly in the
acknowledgment that even people drawn to movements as strongly opposed to the
shared priorities of the major-party establishments as Perot’s and Nader’s must
now fight their battles within the major parties rather than outside of them — the Republican/Democrat
duopoly and its determination of who’s allowed to be on the ballot and who’s
taken “seriously” by the media (remember the MS-NBC interviewer who asked
Bernie Sanders why he was running as a Democrat rather than as an independent,
to which Sanders replied, “If I were running as an independent, you wouldn’t be
talking to me”) is just too strong to be challenged.
