I am obligated to respond to Jon Holman ’66’s ad hominem attack on Ralph Nader ’55, claiming that Ralph’s candidacy in 2000 cost Al Gore the presidential election (Inbox, March issue). Full disclosure, I worked for Ralph during the 1970s, co-authoring a book with him providing an environmental, economic, and ethical critique of the commercial atomic power industry (and, by the way, the arguments we made then remain valid today, while the industry continues to decline despite massive federal economic support to this day).
But back to Mr. Holman’s attack: I expect that Ralph is capable of defending himself more eloquently than I, but the following factors, outside of any of Ralph’s activities, are relevant, documented in Wikipedia and elsewhere in print and on the web:
- After the election, investigative journalist Greg Palast uncovered an active campaign orchestrated by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his Republican secretary of state, Katherine Harris, to incorrectly purge about 20,000 Democratic voters of color from state voter rolls, and then used their powers to prevent the counting of about another 20,000 votes from Democratic areas.
- The infamous “Brooks Brothers riot,” by Republican staffers and operatives who harassed and threatened election officials in Democratic Miami-Dade County, caused an early end to their recount.
- The infamous “butterfly ballots,” which led Jewish senior citizens, who tend to vote Democratic, to cast ballots by mistake for Pat Buchanan, whose history of antisemitic comments had been documented by the Anti-Defamation League.
- In the infamous Bush v. Gore decision, a majority of U.S. Supreme Court judges appointed by Republican presidents ordered that the Florida recount be stopped.
- A post-election analysis by a media consortium, of ballots collected across the entire state, concluded that if the Florida ballot recount had been continued to completion, Gore would have won Florida, and therefore the presidency, even despite losing his home state of Tennessee and other formerly Democratic states.
- Moreover, national media outlets, as usual, treated the campaign as a “horse race,” in the process failing to challenge Bush’s claim that his tax cuts designed for the wealthiest would benefit the middle class. This only encouraged Cheney/Bush to continue to obfuscate on their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the resulting unrest that continues today.
Lastly, I concur with Mr. Holman that Ralph Nader “deserves much praise” for his lifetime of work. Moreover, that work continues today, including the Ralph Nader Radio Hour that can be found via the web and on Saturdays via YouTube.
I hope this material might be somewhat useful in correcting the record.