Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President. . - Books - book review

Progressive, The, April, 2002 by Ruth Conniff

by Ralph Nader St. Martin's Press. 383 pages. $24.95.

Finally, after the weirdest Presidential election in history and the endless aftermath, during which Ralph Nader took a long drubbing from former friends and colleagues, the Green Party candidate speaks out. Is he sorry about the results of his campaign? Is he repentant for running in a year when there was such a close call between Bush and Gore? Does he now acknowledge that there are deep and serious differences between Republican and Democratic Presidents?

No way! In 318 pages plus appendices, Nader does acknowledge a single lasting regret: not enough photo ops. Instead of blowing off the baby-kissing style of more mainstream pols, he should have let reporters snap pictures of him with coal miners and other beleaguered citizens. Well, there's always 2004.

Democrats who blame Nader for Bush II will want to turn to the index and find out what the Green man has to say in response to Jesse Jackson, Gloria Steinem, Anthony Lewis, The New York Times editorial board, Barney Frank, and the many other liberals who mounted a national counter-attack on his insurgent campaign, sounding the alarms that a vote for Nader could help elect Bush. Nader names names and swings back. It must have been thrilling, he notes dryly, for so many progressives to get so much attention from the Democratic Party leadership--being dispatched across the country to denounce him--after being shut out by Clinton-Gore for the preceding eight years. If they'd devoted more energy to attacking the Republicans, instead of attacking Nader, and to courting instead of bashing leftists and Greens, Gore might have won.

His reply to the Times is the strongest, demonstrating how columnist Anthony Lewis changed Nader's assertion that there were "few major differences" between the two parties to "no major differences," setting up a straw man who would be endlessly flogged for the rest of the campaign and beyond. He juxtaposes the Times's editorials supporting John Anderson's effort to get into the Presidential debates in 1980, which said his presence would help broaden political discussion, with its increasingly angry attacks on Nader for muddying "a clear up-or-down vote between Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore." He eviscerates a callow Dana Milbank of The Washingrton Post, who set out to do a hit piece on Nader and couldn't be bothered to stick around to watch him campaign. (Milbank cut out early to have beers with some college buddies, Nader says, and wrote a story about the vegan food at the one event he saw.) Nader's longest reply to a pro-Gore opponent is to Steinem, whom he describes as distorting his record and abusing an earlier friendship. Though he seems stung by some of the more aggressive attacks from such former friends, surprisingly he doesn't sound embittered. Instead, his book reminded me of the energy that made Nader's campaign so fascinating--his unfailing, almost unreasonable optimism in the face of so much material for cynicism and despair.

The first half of the book is a rather exhaustive campaign diary, not nearly as good as the rousing second half. Nader covers everything--dwelling lovingly on a few good meals and quoting his own speeches and conversations (applying awkward quotation marks around his own words). You don't get the sense of his more endearing, lighter side. Following him on the campaign trail, I was often caught off guard by his wry sense of humor and deft asides. But in the book, the stand-up comedy is missing from his speeches, as when he would mimic a local TV weatherperson who would give the temperature from fifteen surrounding towns and it would vary by only a degree or two.

He unrepentantly recounts his sometimes maddening quirks, including his refusal, despite the pleading of his staff, to make himself more telegenic by cutting down his lengthy, fact-laden speeches. At the Green Party convention, he writes, he was asked to keep his nationally broadcast remarks to forty minutes. He spoke for ninety minutes instead, leading with "what could be the longest acceptance sentence yet delivered." Oy.

Repelled by the mob-like behavior of crowds cheering for him, he writes, he deliberately didn't adopt a rousing, crowd-pleasing cadence and style. He seems inordinately proud of rejecting the chant at rallies, "Go, Ralph, Go," changing it instead to "Go, We, Go," a pro-democracy grammatical puzzler.

He also serves up a little fodder for his enemies. Take, for example, this passage defending himself against charges of callousness to women's issues: "In the early sixties, I started collecting materials for a book on discrimination against women in the United States, only to open the newspaper one day to see that Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique did it better than I ever could." Hard to imagine Nader's version.

But these are small criticisms in the scheme of things. The lasting value of Crashing the Party is that it lays out the reasons for Nader's historic campaign, marshaling ample evidence of the Democrats' collapse as a bulwark against increasingly bold business interests intruding on public policymaking. He makes a cogent case that now is the time to begin reclaiming our government from this menacing corporate takeover. The current Enron debacle is a timely backdrop to these arguments.