This is excellent, from the NYTimes today:
Mr. Nader’s Unforgivable Wrong
By
Ron Klain
With
Ralph Nader’s announcement of a fourth (or maybe fifth) run for president, it is worth taking a minute to recall his most infamous previous campaign: his 2000 presidential bid. The rosy and imprecise glow of memory might lead one to remember it as a well-intentioned effort to make a point that simply went awry. But such a view is far, far more benign than the reality of the Nader 2000 campaign, and therefore a review of that effort is in order to put his current campaign in context.
When I made a passing, disparaging reference to Mr. Nader’s 2000 campaign in an earlier post on this blog, it drew a lot of negative comments, accusing me of wrongly blaming Mr. Nader for the Bush presidency. As a logical matter, in an election as close as 2000, and decided as oddly as it was, it is hard to point to any one thing as the “but for” cause of the result.
But the fact that the Nader vote was larger than the Gore-Bush margin of difference — not just in Florida, but also in New Hampshire — is grating and significant. So let’s just put it this way, as neutrally as possible: while there are several reasons why Al Gore was not sworn in on Jan. 20, 2001, one of them certainly is because Ralph Nader drew votes that would have given Mr. Gore the election — in not just one state, but two — making Katherine Harris, dimpled chads and the Supreme Court wholly irrelevant.
But, some Nader sympathizers object, who could have known back then that Mr. Nader’s campaign would help throw the presidency to George Bush? Who could have seen it coming? The answer is that Mr. Nader did, which is why he initially promised supporters that he would not campaign in swing states or take other steps that might make him the “spoiler” in the race –
a promise he inexplicably broke, to the chagrin of many environmentalists, in the final weeks of the campaign.
The risk that Mr. Nader might cost Mr. Gore the election was so well understood that one of the country’s most creative progressives, Jamin Raskin,
hatched an elaborate plan to try to minimize this risk while preserving a chance for Naderites to make their voices heard —
a plan that Mr. Nader refused to back. There’s simply no escaping the fact that Mr. Nader knew the risks he was taking, and did not care, believing that
a vote for Mr. Gore was a vote for Mr. Bush, and that there were
“few major differences” between the two major party candidates.
And that’s not the worst of it.
Even more inexcusably, there were indications that Mr. Nader not only knew that his campaign might throw the election to Mr. Bush, he actually preferred this result. As he told The Times, in a piece that ran on Nov. 1, 2000, under the headline
“Nader Sees a Bright Side to a Bush Victory,” Mr. Nader believed that a “bumbling Texas governor would galvanize the environmental community as never before.” He said that “the Sierra Club doubled its membership under James Watt.” This view, which was
rejected by the president of the Sierra Club,
nonetheless won some credence among Nader followers, making
the recent efforts by Mr. Nader to reject any responsibility for President Bush’s victory in 2000 all the more disingenuous and incredible.
And still, that’s not the worst of it.
For what remains unforgivable in my view are the harsh, mean-spirited, hugely wrong and unfair things he told voters about Al Gore in 2000. Even if one believes that Mr. Nader’s electoral impact was an unintended result, his words in the 2000 campaign were carefully chosen weapons and horribly deceptive ones. They included:
These statements weren’t accidents or unintended consequences: they were wrong in 2000 and are unbelievably wrong today. Of course,
given the acclaim by the world community, Al Gore hardly needs me to defend his record.
Even Mr. Nader must know in his heart that he was wrong about Mr. Gore eight years ago. And yet, as far as I know, Mr. Nader has never retracted his earlier statements, never apologized, never admitted error. Why any voter would listen to a candidate today who was so profoundly misguided before is beyond me.
There was a time when Ralph Nader was my hero. As a young staffer on Capitol Hill in the early 1980s, I was working on a pro-consumer amendment to telecommunications legislation when my phone rang. Ralph Nader was on the line. I was awestruck.
“You’re doing great work,” he told me, “keep doing the right thing.”
Ralph Nader should heed that same advice now and abandon his futile and convoluted 2008 campaign. And whatever else he does this year, an apology for the misguided direction he gave in 2000 is the very least he owes the nearly three million voters who supported him — and the rest of us who have lived with the consequences ever since
