Nader, The Clintons, Obama, Gore, and Edwards

Thus, ever since John Edwards dropped out of the presidential primaries, I have assumed that I would be voting next November “for” Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to block "Mad Bomber McCain" (as Mike Albert rightly describes the Republican presidential candidate, who was embraced by The Worst President Ever at the White House yesterday) or someone else from the GOP roster.  It was one thing to make Left protest votes when I lived in the “safe[ly Democratic] state” of Illinois, where I chose Ralph Nader in 2000. It's another thing in Iowa.

But now I’m not certain I’ll be punching the Democratic Party’s ticket in the presidential election. According to a recent Des Moines Register poll (EN), the Great BaRockstar (the likely Democratic presidential nominee) beats McCain 53 to 36 percent in Iowa.  That’s a landslide. 

The poll shows McCain beating Hillary 49 to 40 percent – no surprise there (Senator Clinton has been the least elect-able top Democratic presidential candidate from the start).

If Obama gets the nomination (by no means a certainty), maybe I’ll be free to “vote my hopes and not just my fears,” as third party folks like to say.

“I HOPE IT’S JUST A PASSING FANCY”

Whatever, I, like many progressives, am reasonably nauseated by Hillary and Barack’s response to Nader’s recent presidential candidacy announcement. 

Here’s what Hillary said: “That’s really unfortunate.  I remember when he did this before, it didn’t turn out too well, for anyone, especially our country.  I hope it’s just a passing fancy that people won’t take too seriously.” 

The “before” in the first sentence referred to the presidential election of 2000, when Nader’s Florida vote total was much greater than Bush’s official margin of victory over Al Gore.

Obama’s typically arrogant know-it-all Harvard Law commentary went like this: 

“[Nader] thought there was no difference between Al Gore and George Bush and eight years later I think people realize that Ralph did not know what he was talking about….My sense is that Mr. Nader is somebody who, if you don’t listen to and adopt all his policies, thinks you’re not substantive.”

Wow.

SOMETHING THAT “DIDN’T TURN OUT TO WELL FOR OUR COUNTRY:” THE CLINTONS’ CORPORATE NEOLIBERALISM

Let’s start with 2000.  Because of my Bush clan fears, I probably would have voted “for” Gore if I had lived in Florida or in another swing state (like, well, Iowa) in 2000.

Still, it’s not true that Nader claimed there was “no difference” between Gore and Bush.  What Nader really said was that the differences were far too slight because of the Democratic Party and candidates’ abject captivity to corporate power and that a Democratic Party that had the guts and progressive morality to run a genuine peoples’ campaign would and should have no trouble running over the openly plutocratic GOP’s rich-boy from Crawford.

Nader was right about that. This is how Jim Hightower put it at a Nader rally in Seattle, Washington in the fall of 2000:

“Gore and his corporate Democrats say to us that we’re the spoilers.  We’re in Al’s way.  But wait a minute.  We didn’t spoil the Democratic Party with corrupt corporate cash.  We didn’t spoil the Democratic Party by downsizing the middle class and shutting out more than one thousands farmers a week off the land in this country.  We are not the ones who kicked one million low-income moms into the streets saying get a job when we knew there were no jobs with a living wage, no jobs with health care benefits for their children.” 

“I come to you as a Democrat – been elected as such in the state of Texas.  They’re still laughing about it down there.  But I now look up at my party, at the national level, the corporate Democrats, and I see that my party has taken off the old Sears Roebuck work shoes and strapped on the same Guccis and Poochies that the Republicans are running around in.”

Hightower was thinking about a number of “Democratic” policies that “didn’t turn out too well” for many Americans, especially working class and poor Americans. The 1992 Clinton campaign rhetoric contained a “strong streak of populism,” starting with a speech that excoriated the 1980s as “a gilded age of greed.”  Clinton (the “candidate from HOPE, Arkansas”) claimed he would restore “HOPE” in America by “putting people first” over and above the big corporate interests and privileged few.  Contrasting his plebian origins and passionate concern for ordinary working families  with the perceived plutocratic indifference of the arch-aristocratic George H.W. Bush, Clinton promised to strengthen unions, fight poverty, introduce universal health care, and reject the regressive, corporate-globalizationist North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Clinton was going to usher in a new era of national “unity” that would restore the connection between the American people and U.S. politics by elevating shared goals of democracy and equality above partisan divisions, economic privilege, and special interest control.

Once in office, however, Clinton “put Wall Street in charge of national economic strategy,” as Alexander Cockburn noted on the eve of the last big quadrennial election extravaganza. Clinton’s actions most especially reflected not his egalitarian promises but rather his leading role in the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Formed by business-oriented party elites to increase the party’s distance from labor, environmentalism, blacks, and Civil Rights, the DLC’s mission was to steer the Democratic Party closer to the corporate, imperial, southern, suburban, and racially accomodationist center. It’s goal was to advance post-partisan corporate convergence between Democratic and Republican agendas at the elite level and to impose economically and racially regressive polices underneath the cloak of “progressive” strategy and “pragmatic,” “get-things done” realism.   

Described as “recognizably progressive” in Barack Obama’s deeply conservative and mealy-mouthed book The Audacity of Hope (2006), Bill Clinton’s polices and appointments stayed true to his DLC credentials.  They also reflected his captivity to powerful corporate and Wall Street interests that key corporate Clinton advisors (including former Goldman Sachs CEO and Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin) famously instructed him not to buck. After attaining office on the basis of the Democratic Party’s candidates’ standard egalitarian vows, the president “from Hope” quickly defied mainstream public support for socially democratic policies by conducting the public business in regressive accord with the interrelated neoliberal and racially disparate imperatives of empire and inequality. Clinton's domestic agenda was first announced as a gigantic jobs-creation program coupled with a determined effort to guarantee health care for all. But, Howard Zinn notes, Clinton quickly betrayed these declared campaign priorities by concentrating on deficit reduction of the deficit, drastically increased under Reagan and George Bush the First. This emphasis "meant that there would be no bold programs of expenditures for universal health care, education, child care, housing, the environment, the arts, or job creation." Clinton's "small gestures" toward social democracy did "not come close to what was needed in a nation where one-fourth of the children lived in poverty; where homeless people lived on the streets in every major city; where women could not look for work for lack of child care; where the air, the water were deteriorating dangerously."

More than being merely inadequate to the needs of America's millions of truly disadvantaged citizens, the Clinton administration actually attacked the disproportionately non-white poor in numerous interrelated ways. Clinton signed a punitive neoliberal welfare "reform" bill that ended the federal government's guarantee of financial help to impoverished families with dependent children. By forcing poor families getting federal cash assistance (such families were mainly non-white single-parent units) to find employment without establishing concomitant government programs to create or directly provide livable wage jobs, Clinton flooded the nation's low- and poverty-wage and no-benefits job market with hundreds of thousands of defenseless new proletarians. He also scored points with the grinders of the poor by taking welfare benefits away from legal as well as illegal immigrants. It was all done in the name of "Personal Responsibility," "Work Opportunity," and "Reconciliation," to use the key Orwellian phrases of the Clinton-Gingrich welfare-elimination.

Meanwhile, Clinton increased economic insecurity in poor and working-class American communities by signing the investor rights NAFTA bill without requiring that it contain significant labor and environmental requirements to protect American workers and consumers. .NAFTA destroyed tens of thousands of American industrial jobs by tearing down long-established regulatory barriers to the movement of corporate capital and commodities across the U.S.-Mexican border.

Clinton claimed that "the era of big government is over." He was more than content, however, to sustain funding for the regressive, repressive, and militaristic "right hand of the state." His concern with balanced budgets did not extent to the prison- and military- industrial complexes. As Zinn notes, Clinton's federal government "continued to spend at least $250 billion a year to maintain the military machine" and thereby feed the coffers of the rich and powerful “defense” corporations that had long come to rely on the “Pentagon system” to feed investors bottom line. It was only the left hand of the state, the part that serves and poor and non-affluent majority, that Clinton targeted in his quest for deficit reduction.

Ironically (or fittingly) given its insistence on throwing poor people on to the mercies of the "free" labor market, where most Americans obtain (uniquely among industrialized states) their health insurance, the Clinton administration ended without any serious effort to meaningfully deliver on its initial health insurance promises. It also failed to advance any meaningful initiative to protect the beleaguered rights of workers or to increase the woefully inadequate minimum wage. "Both the average wages for non-supervisory workers and the earnings of those in the lowest 10 percent of wage earners," notes Robert Pollin, "not only remained well below those of the Nixon/Ford and Carter administrations, but were actually lower than that even than those of the Reagan/Bush years. Moreover, wage inequality - as measured by the ratio of the 90th to the 10th wage decile - increased sharply during Clinton's tenure in office, even relative to the Republican heyday of the 1980s." To make matters worse, the percentage of Americans living at or below the poverty level during the Clinton administration (13.2) was only minimally smaller than the corresponding statistic for the Reagan/Bush era (14.1). The circumstances of the officially "poor" population actually worsened under Clinton. This partly reflected the Clinton administration's neoliberal slashing of federal family cash assistance for jobless single mothers and its related reliance on the capitalist labor market to improve the conditions of society's most vulnerable.  At the same time, things “turned out” quite “well” indeed for the top 1 percent, beneficiaries of an increasing concentration of wealth in what was already the industrialized world’s most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation by far. 

As Pollin showed in his excellent study of Clintonomics, The Contours of Descent (Verso, 2003), following the testimony of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, the leading explanation for the exceptionally low level of wage growth that occurred even amidst a tightening labor market during the 1990s was the reluctance of workers to demand higher incomes. This reluctance emerged from the weakness of labor's bargaining power in an increasingly global economy where employers widely and quite credibly threaten to close their shops and relocate if workers voted to unionize. It also emerged from the neoliberal pro-corporate-globalization stance of the Clinton administration, which did virtually nothing to enhance workers' bargaining power vis-à-vis business, thereby making it certain that the "traumatized [American] worker" (as Greenspan described American working people to Congress in 1997) would accept only minor wage increases during the 1990s boom.

The “recognizably progressive” (according to Obama) Clinton administration’s heralded fiscal transformation (from deficit to surplus) was achieved only at extraordinary public cost. The single leading factor behind this transformation, Pollin shows, was neither faster economic growth nor the Clinton administration's modest reversal of massive Reagan-Bush tax cuts for the wealthy but the significant reduction of federal government spending as a percentage of American GDP from 22% in 1992 to 18% in 2000. While post-Cold war cuts in military spending explained apart of this reduction, a bigger share came through significant declines in federal spending on education, poverty-reduction, environmental protection, economic regulation, and equity promotion - all while wealth exploded at the top and the "poverty gap" (the amount of money required to bring all poor people exactly up to the official poverty line) rose from $1,538 to $1,620 from 1993 to 1999. At the same time, Pollin notes, the U.S. military budget remained "more than the amount spent by all the rest of NATO plus Russia, plus all the countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including Israel, combined."

The significant, albeit limited and uneven, economic expansion that occurred under Clinton was purchased against the future. It was fueled primarily by an inherently tenuous, debt-financed stock market bubble that fed mainly upper class consumption and which inevitably burst, with recessionary consequences passed on to the presidency of Bush II. The dramatic and dangerous over-escalation of stock prices could have been stemmed with elementary regulatory measures the Clinton administration refused to undertake because of its allegiance to neoliberal prescriptions against government intervention in the workings of the "free market" to limits the excesses of private economic elites. This performance made a mockery of Clinton's 1992 campaign slogans. 

The neoliberal deal had been sealed early on.  “By the end of May 1993,” Alexander Cockburn noted in 2004, in a book titled A Dime’s Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils, “as any kind of progressive challenge to business-as-usual, the Clinton presidency had failed, even by the measure of its own timid promises.  The recruitment of the old Nixon/Reagan/Bush hand David Gergen as the president’s new public relations director signaled the surrender.”

A VERY BAD GORE CAMPAIGN PLUS RACIST DISENFRANCHISEMENT OUTSTRIPPED BIG BAD RALPH IN 2000

Seven years later, moreover, Clintonian neoliberalism helped compromise the Democratic Party’s positions during the 2000 presidential election, when Al Gore could see nothing better to do with Clinton's federal surplus than to pay down the national debt even as nearly 700,000 African-American children lived in "deep poverty” – at  less than half of the nation's notoriously inadequate poverty level). The centrist, corporate-neoliberal Gore campaign ran in strict, depressing accord with the Clinton record and Hightower’s commentary.  It failed miserably to offer a substantive progressive counter to the “compassionate conservativism” of Bush the Lesser.

As Katha Pollit, a self described “Naderskeptic” put it in a Nation column titled “Don’t Blame Ralph,” written right before (and published right after) the 2000 election:

“If Gore wants to defuse Nader, why doesn't he fire back on a whole range of substantive issues instead of acting like Nader has stolen votes that somehow belong to Gore by right? Gore has a record as Vice President, and he presumably believes in the positions that drive Naderites wild--for NAFTA, for military interventions around the globe, for welfare reform, for ladling vast sums of money into the Pentagon. He could take the trouble to explain why he is right and Nader is wrong on the issues that divide them, or why he is being wrongly blamed for policies that were actually the work of a Republican.”

“According to a group of seven academic political forecasters, Gore is supposed to win because the man and the campaign and the issues are unimportant: Whether the incumbent party stays in the White House all depends on the state of the economy, both actual and perceived. This alone can explain the outcome of every election since 1948. If Gore loses despite his tremendous structural advantages, what can you say except he screwed up monumentally? Clinton triangulated against the left, but Gore acted as if the left didn't exist. You can't blame the left if it came back to bite him on the behind” (K. Pollit, “Don’t Blame Ralph,” The Nation, November 20, 2000).

The centrist Gore’s really bad campaign plus the massive bipartisan and racist disenfranchisement of black voters with felony records – and thousands of black Americans falsely accused of possessing such records – in Florida did more than big bad Ralph Nader to cost Gore the 2000 election.  As social scientists Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza and author Greg Palast have shown beyond the shadow of reasonable doubt, the ethnic cleansing of Florida’s voting rolls was sufficient in and of itself to saddle America and the world with the terrible regime of Bush the Lesser.  But for that policy, Gore would have picked up 60,000 additional votes in Florida, home to 1,088,667 ex-felons and 293,396 current felons in the fall of 2000.  This was more than enough to have pre-empted the subsequent melodramas over “hanging chads,” Jewish votes for Buchanan, baffling butterfly ballots, and the allegedly perfidious role of Nader’s candidacy

And, oh by the way, there were those illegal vote count shenanigans with James Baker, Jeb Bush, and the U.S. Supreme Court – a transparent election theft (a judicial coup) that liberal authorities from Clinton and Gore himself to The New York Times failed to meaningfully confront during and after November-December 2000. 

No, it “didn’t turn out very well” for “our country,” though the wealthy few have made out well enough (contrary to Hillary’s formulation).  But Nader’s candidacy was a relatively minor – it should have been irrelevant, if Democrats had acted differently – part of what went wrong.

ALL RALPH NEEDED TO STAY OUT WAS JOHN EDWARDS

As for Obama’s claim that Nader dismisses candidates who don’t “listen to and accept all his policies,” that’s a bald-faced lie, kind of like Obama’s claims: 

* to have consistently opposed the Iraq War “from the beginning”

* to have passed federal legislation instituting strong regulations on nuclear plant radiation leaks (readers MUST see Mike McIntire, “Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama,” New York Times, 3 February, 2008, section 1, p. 1.

* to honor a pledge to stay within the spending limits imposed by the U.S. public presidential financing system if his Republican opponent will do the same.

* to stand above “ideology” and big money special interest influence in the crafting of his voting record and policy platform.

As the Kansas Progressive Democratic activist Kelly Gerling recently noted on CommonDreams.org, Obama’s charge “is false.  Nader was clear that he supported John Edwards and would not run if Edwards was the candidate, not because [Edwards] adopted ‘all’ of [Nader]’s policies but because [Edwards] inched over on domestic and anti-corporate rhetoric (Edwards was and still is militaristic and pro-empire on foreign policy).  “Today on NPR,” Gerling added (on February 25th), “Nader stated that he has been trying to get a meeting with Obama for months.  Obama won’t meet with him.” 

Obama didn’t have to be a Nader-ite to keep Nader out of the presidential race.  You only have to be as progressive as the mildly populist John Edwards (1). 

Obama knows this. Just like he knows he never lifted a finger for the Maytag workers in Galesburg, Illinois he constantly claimed to care so deeply about during the presidential primary campaign in Iowa (you really must see Bob Secter, “Obama’s Fundraising, Rhetoric Collide,” Chicago Tribune, February 2008, sec.1, p.7). . Just like he knows that his top economic advisor really did tell the Canadian ambassador to the U.S. not to pay attention to Obama’s anti-NAFTA “campaign rhetoric” in Ohio – something that Obama falsely denied before his defeats in the Ohio and Texas primaries of March 4th.

As Obama also knows, there’s nothing mysterious or absolutist about Nader’s problem with Hillary and Obama.  It isn’t that Ralph finds either of them “unsubstantial.”  It’s that he agrees with Edwards’ repeated description of them both as “corporate Democrats” during the long contest leading up to the Iowa Caucus. He thinks – well, knows, if my current research is any indication (for a quicker summary see the Matt Gonzales essay cited above) – that they are both substantively corporate-neoliberal, subordinating themselves to the ongoing deep spoliation of the Democratic Party by concentrated wealth. 

It’s not that Nader thinks Obama is empty. It’s about Nader’s accurate observation that Obama is following Hillary and Bill Clinton and the rest of the top Democrats in taking their considerable political power and substance and putting it to work for the privileged elite they deceptively claim to oppose on the pseudo-populist pandering campaign trail that defines the Democratic primary season every four years.

Anyone who wants to read a very useful summary of Obama’s audacious corporate-friendly voting record in the U.S. can have a look at Matt Gonzales, “The Obama Craze: Count Me Out,” BeyondChron: San Francisco’s Online Daily (February 28 2008) read online at www.beyondchron.org/articles/index.php?itemid=5413#more.

Obama appears to be the most likely candidate to go up against Mad Bomber McCain.  It would be nice if he would dial down the level of his maddening attachment to bullshitting voters - an attachment that may (as with his NAFTA-Canada nonsense in Ohio) admittedly undermine his ability to win the nomination.  

In any event, I have a reason I’d not anticipated for wanting him to stay strong in Iowa.  If Obama can keep going with a sixteen point lead or more over the scary G.O.P. guy in my state, I can be considerably less afraid to vote for Nader or a different Green or other left candidate.

How strange. If the Democrats end up going with their most thoroughly corporate and militarist candidate (Hillary) – a person McCain can beat within and beyond Iowa – it will increase the likelihood I’ll have to make a fear-based vote for their party. If they go with Mr. HOPE, maybe I can make a vote closer to my own concept of hope, and it won’t be Obama – not by a long shot.

Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is a veteran radical historian and independent author, activist, researcher, and journalist in Iowa City, IA.  He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm 2005); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Routledge 2005): and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman&Littlefied 2007).  Street is currently completing a book on U.S. political culture and the Barack Obama phenomenon.

NOTES

1. Speaking of John Edwards, here’s something to reflect on after Mad Bomber McCain takes up residence in the White House: Edwards was actually the most elect-able of the top three Democrats - something that will be unsurprising to left analysts given his greater willingness to speak about and against class inequality. According to a mid December social-scientific telephone survey of 1,092 adults Americans conducted for CNN by the Opinion Research Corporation (ORC) – the last meaningful  match-up poll when Edwards was still viably in the primary contest -  “Edwards perform[ed] the best” of all the top three Democratic candidates “against each of the leading Republicans.” Besides being the only Democratic candidate to defeat all Republicans, Edwards’ margins over the Republicans the other Democrats beat are considerably higher.  Here were the CNN/ORC findings (please note the divergent numbers against John McCain):

EDWARDS

- beat Guliani by 9 points (53% to 44%)

- beat Romney by 22 points (59 to 37)

- beat McCain by 8 points (52 to 44)

- beat Huckabee by 25 (60 to 35)

OBAMA

- beat Guliani by 7 points (52 to 45)

- beat Romney by 13 (54 to 41)

- DID NOT BEAT McCain (48 to 48)

- beat Huckabee by 15 (55 to 40)

HILLARY

- beat Guliani by 6 (51 to 45)

- beat Romney by 11 (54 to 43)

- LOST to McCain (48 to 50)

- beat Huckabee by just 10 (54 to 44)

The Democratic margins of victory broke down like this:

Over Guliani: Edwards by 9; Obama by 7; Hillary by 6.

Over Romney: Edwards (22); Obama (13); Hillary (11)

Over McCain: Edwards (8); Obama (none: TIED); Hillary (none: LOST)

Over Huckabee: Edwards (25); Obama (15); Hillary (10).

CNN/ORC’s numbers understated the Edwards elect-ability advantage since they were aggregate national statistics. They did not reflect Edwards’ especially superior performance over Hillary and Obama in pivotal battleground and swing states and in the disproportionately rural “red” states that are over-represented in the United States’ anachronistic Electoral College tally.  It was characteristic of dominant media’s distaste for Edwards’ “populism” that the online CNN story in which the above (remarkable) data appears was titled “Poll: Huckabee Would Lose to Top Democrats by Double Digits” instead of, say, “Poll: Edwards the Most Electable of All Presidential Candidates.” The CNN poll was posted at Alexander Mooney, “Poll: Huckabee Would Lose to Top Democrats By Double Digits” at www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/10/poll.head.to.head/index.html#cnnSTCText