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

[Barium]

On 13 Feb 2022, Rudy Canoza <notg...@gmail.com> posted some
news:rHbOJ.12132$XFM9...@fx18.iad:

> 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/