Just when you think you've read all the shameless bullshit imaginable for one day, and you're about to get to the real news, you open up something like the Washington Post and there it is, more shameless bullshit.

In the Sept. 3 edition, the Post's ombudsman—"the representative of the people," or what passes for it in medialand—gets around to answering a reader letter of July 8 complaining about the dearth of Nader coverage. (Is two months a little too long to wait in an election season, or what?) Our Fearless Ombudsman hastens to assure us that there have, truly, been mentions of Nader in the Post: "Up until [July 8], Campaign 2000 coverage of Ralph Nader consisted mainly of a mention here and there, including the television listings for Sunday talk shows; a Style piece on Web sites that match voters with the candidate who best reflects their views; a Metro news brief about Nader's accusation that Virginia's governor had made the state corporation-friendly at the expense of consumers and taxpayers; a letter to the editor; an op-ed column and an Outlook piece on why neither Al Gore nor George W. Bush wanted Nader, the Green Party standard bearer, or Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party to participate in fall presidential debates; and an editorial advising Bush and Gore to address the issues Nader and Buchanan were raising." In other words, we got fluff, filler, sound-bites, or free advertising for Bush and Gore that take as their excuse for existence Nader as object of someone else's opinion. Followed up with an editorial demanding that the major party candidates "address" issues the Post can't bring itself to report on.

The honor roll continues: "About a half-dozen articles might seriously be said to have looked at Nader as a candidate--and most of those were published around the time of the Green Party's nominating convention." Of course, what it means to "look at Nader as a candidate"—not to mention what it means to seriously be said to do that—is, generally, to speculate on Nader's chances of winning (nil), or to repeat the same tired lines about his dull suits, dull diet, retro persona, etc. etc. I remember the Post's Green Party convention coverage quite well, thank you—most of it was trite and most of that came straight off the wire services, not the Post's own news desks. Why would Gore or Bush take seriously the exhortation to address Nader's platform when outfits like the Washington Post mostly poked fun at it?

Ah, but this is only a kind of throw-away, warm-up hypocrisy compared to what comes next. Notice the language: "In the past two months, both Nader and Buchanan have received more ink but nothing like that given to the major party candidates. '[Y]ou have a responsibility to report fairly on presidential candidates that may gain potential public support,' said a Nader enthusiast. A Buchanan follower said, 'The media [have] the power to allow a campaign to bring its message to the public to win or lose in the arena of ideas, or to kill a campaign by suffocation.'" "Enthusiast"? "Follower"? When was the last time you heard anyone described as a "Gore enthusiast" or a "Bush follower"? The Post's ombudsman cannot avoid a gratuitous display of contempt here, using language more typically associated with model airplane collections and weird religious cults than the less biased "supporter" or even "partisan." Nothing that is quoted in these letters, of course, shows conclusively that the writers are, actually, supporters or partisans of Nader or Buchanan. It doesn't appear to have occurred to the Post that even dyed-in-the-wool Democrats and Republicans might object to tendentious and belittling newspaper coverage of third-party political candidates.

So how does the ombudsman respond to the charge of unfair coverage? "Jackson Diehl, the assistant managing editor for national news, responds this way: 'We're not a public utility. We're a newspaper, and we cover things based on what is newsworthy. People who have half a percent or less following among the public are much less newsworthy than people with 40 and 50 percent.'" So it's official: newspapers have no public purpose. They are simply there to report the "news," which can be defined as what is consistent with what the majority or at least very large numbers of the public already know about. In other words, what is "newsworthy" is what isn't news to most of us. Go figure.

It gets better: "In the best of all possible worlds--or, perhaps, on the Internet--all candidates may be equal. But in the world of newspapers, resources are initially allocated on the basis of which candidates seem to have the strongest chances. Minor party candidates warrant coverage, Diehl said, 'when we see them having a significant impact on the presidential race, either by their becoming serious contenders in their own right or [because] they seem in other ways to have an influence on the race by shifting the balance in some states.' Like Nader in the West."

A rhetorical strategy as old as Voltaire: when in doubt, throw up some dust with the Panglossian innuendo of "the best of all possible worlds, " as if even a half-assed and highly improbable world couldn't result in journalism that occasionally breaks with the herd and provides us with information just because we need to have it. Then go on to define newsgathering as an odd form of triage, as if, in a country as rich in media sources as our own, there simply weren't enough reporters to cover four candidates, or enough space in the paper to skip a few inane pieces about Gore's new clothes or Bush's joshing around with the campaign reporters in order to print a few complete sentences of Nader's. Pretend that someone can become a "serious contender" without newspaper and television coverage, as if there were any other way an under-funded campaign could reach America's millions. Why not go on to make the final cynical point, that anyone who can't afford to buy commercials isn't worth notice?

The crescendo of disgusting hypocrisy comes in the final paragraph: "In the pages of The Post, the main story will remain Bush and Gore in Campaign 2000. But The Post--and other news media--should take to heart that July editorial admonishing the major candidates to allow the minor ones into the forthcoming debates. 'Rather than branding Messrs Buchanan and Nader as spoilers,' the editorial said, 'the mainstream candidates need to address their issues.' So do the media. Early and very, very often."

Gentle readers, take it from Nader Watch: it's as shameless and cynical as it sounds. –Doris 9/10

From "A Citizen in Full"

by Lewis Lapham
Harper's Magazine September 2000

Ralph Nader declared himself a candidate for president of February 21 in a Washington hotel, and for the next two months the national news media were careful to ignore the proposition. Although well-known as a zealous consumer advocate, forever finding something wrong with the country's pickup trucks or water supply, Nader didn't enjoy much standing as a politician. He had made a cameo appearance as the presidential candidate for the Green Party in 1996, but he didn't deliver any speeches, didn't travel out of the District of Columbia, didn't raise any money. Four years later, who knew whether he wasn't staging another futile gesture.

So little was said about Nader's presidential campaign in February and March that as late as April 10 it wasn't hard to find New York sources supposedly well-informed (editors at Doubleday, columnists for Vogue) who hadn't been told. They had heard that somewhere west of the Pecos River Pat Buchanan was on the hustings for Ross Perot's troubled Reform Party, probably with a gun and an American flag, but if in answer to a question about the November election I said that I intended to vote for Ralph Nader, I could count on expressions of genuine surprise. "You don't say." "Fancy that." "How very retro." Among respondents who thought the item "interesting . . . no, I mean it, really interesting, almost sweet," the clear majority regarded Nader as a romantic figure somehow reminiscent of Thelonious Monk or the Man of La Mancha. An idealist and an espouser of noble causes, but not a power guy, not an orator from whom they expected to be hearing an inaugural address.

Most of the upscale media adopted a similarly complacent tone when they were obliged to take notice of Nader's campaign in early May. The candidate by then had placed his name on the ballot in fifteen states; actively in search of votes, he was making stump speeches in Kentucky and South Carolina, attracting endorsements from prominent celebrities (among them Willie Nelson, Susan Sarandon, Pearl Jam, and Paul Newman), apparently being taken seriously by the United Auto Workers union. Still not enough of a campaign to warrant mention on the political web sites maintained by ABC, CBS, and CNN, but certainly a curiosity deserving of the same attention paid to spotted owls and giant pandas. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The Nation sent scouts to observe the candidate in Hawaii, California, and New England, and their sightings confirmed the opinions in force at the nation's better news desks. Nader was the same old dreaming ideologue, gaunt and painfully earnest; an austere figure in a dark but rumpled suit complaining about the all but infinite number of ways in which the de jure American democracy was being suffocated (also gulled, looted, and contemptuously mocked) by the de facto oligarchy. In brief and in sum, a preacher of discredited 1960s leftist doctrine, but because he hadn't learned the new and sprightly idiom made for television (the sound bite and the catch phrase in place of the long paragraph and the complete sentence), his audiences were reassuringly marginal and small--a few hundred student "goofballs" in Wisconsin, in California a thin haze of "patchouli and tie-dye, sarongs and navel rings," a scattering of bearded men in New Hampshire clutching kayak paddles.

Nader's candidacy continued to gain currency during the spring and early summer (his acceptance in Denver of the Green Party's presidential nomination, nearly $1 million raised in campaign contributions, his name on the ballot in another ten states), but the official portrait in the media (that of the harmless reformer, high-minded but faintly ridiculous) wasn't retouched until June 30, when the New York Times promoted him to the rank of public menace. The upgrade took the form of an impatient editorial, royalist in sentiment and pompous in tone, reprimanding Nader for his meddling in an election that was beyond his sphere of competence and none of his concern.

"He is engaging in a self-indulgent exercise that will distract voters from the clear-cut choice represented by the major-party candidates, Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George Bush.

"It is especially distressing to see Mr. Nader flirt with the spoiler role.

"Of course, both Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Nader have the right to run. But given the major differences between the prospective Democratic and Republican nominees, there is no driving logic for third-party candidacy this year, and the public deserves to see the major-party candidates compete on an uncluttered playing field."

Disappointed as well as piqued, the editorialist acknowledged Nader's "legacy as a conscience-driven crusader" and took the trouble to commend him for championing the cause of automobile safety and having "sharpened Americans' awareness of the flaws in their political system." Which was why it was distressing to see a man once principled destroy his reputation with conduct unbecoming a moralist. His irresponsible behavior threatened Al Gore's chances in "swing states like California," and if he were a true gentleman and a real liberal he would stay with the seat belts and leave the politics to the professionals.

. . . . .

I found Nader in the front room [of his campaign headquarters] on the third floor, seated behind a small and cheaply rented folding table burdened with sheaves of paper. He was wearing his customary rumpled suit and dreary tie, and the mournful expression on his long face was as I'd remembered seeing it when I'd seen him earlier in the spring in New York, once when we'd spoken to the same audience at NYU, again at a fund-raising lunch that had failed to raise any funds. The standard press description gets it right about Nader's frugal habits and bookish manner--sixty-six years old and never married, he doesn't own a car, a cell phone, or a credit card--but it misses his candor, his modesty, and his wit. More amused than offended by the Times editorial, he aksed me if I knew who might have written it, which one of the philosophers resident on West Forty-third Street.

"You've got to love these people," Nader said. "They think the American electoral process is a gated community."

Never in recent memory, he said, have the Democratic and Republican parties so closely resembled each other, and if the absence of 100 million citizens from the polls in the 1996 presidential election didn't indicate, or at least strongly hint at, an impressive lack of respect for the threadbare wisdoms in office (and thus "a driving logic" for a third party, or any party at all that could reinvigorate the country's moribund political debate), then what would it take to prompt the editors at the Times to smuggle their heads out of the sand? For ten years the American electorate has been voicing its objection to "a government of the Exxons, by the General Motors, and for the Du Ponts." The party of discontent voted for Ross Perot, elected Jesse Ventura governor of Minnesota, made credible the candidacy of John McCain, paraded in animal costume through the streets of Seattle.

"Maybe they don't read their own paper," Nader said. "Maybe they don't look out the windows."

. . . . .

The judges on the bench of prime-time opinion say that Nader lacks charisma, but the word admits of different interpretations, and if it can be referred to a lively intelligence as well as a bright smile, Nader seems to me a good deal more charismatic than David Letterman or Brad Pitt. I know of few spectacles more entertaining than the play of a mind being put to constructive or imaginative use, and I like to listen to Nader talk. I never fail to learn something new, and in Nader's idealism I find an antidote for the cynicism that constitutes an occupational hazard on the shop floors of the image-making industries in New York.

Accepting the Green Party nomination in Denver on June 27, Nader had presented his campaign as a question--"How badly do we want a just and decent society, a society that raises our expectations of ourselves?"--and in Washington three days later he supplemented it with further commentary and explanation.

"Unlike Gush and Bore," he said, "I don't promote myself as a solution to the nation's problems. The idea is to encourage a lot of other people to use the tools of democratic government to take control of the assets they hold in common--the public lands, the public broadcast frequencies, the public money. Whatever your issue is, whether it's racism, homophobia, taxes, health care, urban decay, you're not going to go anywhere with it unless you focus on the concentration of power. We have an overdeveloped plutocracy and an underdeveloped democracy, too many private interests commandeering the public interest for their own profit. Most Americans don't realize how badly they're being harmed by the unchecked commercialization of what belongs to the commonwealth. If enough people knew what questions to ask, we have both the ways and means to achieve better schools, a healthier environment, a more general distribution of decent health care."

. . . . .

"The oligarchy," he said, "never wants anyone to know what, or how much, ordinary citizens can accomplish if they learn to use the power of their own laws. Apathy is good for business-as-usual; so is cynicism. The lie that all the worthy causes are dead is like the lie that art is dead. Both lies serve the interests of entrenched mediocrity. Convince the kids that all the wars are over, that history is at an end, that nothing important remains to be discovered, done, or said, and maybe they won't ask why a corporate CEO receives a salary four hundred times greater than that of the lowest paid worker in his own company.

"I hear young people saying that they're not turned on to politics, and I tell them that if you do not turn on to politics, politics will turn on you."

. . . . .

[R]eferring to a point that Nader had made to the Denver convention about the American electorate conditioned to think of politics as brand-name product merchandising, I asked him what it was that he expected from people who had trouble following the plot-lines of The Patriot and The Perfect Storm. Who had time to read The Federalist Papers, much less a federal budget report that weighed forty pounds and ran to the length of 40,000 pages?

"One of the ways to define freedom," he said, "is as a taking part, even a very small part, in the dispositions of political power. If every year in this country one million people gave 100 hours of their time to some sort of public purpose, 100 hours and $100, I think we'd be surprised by the number of changes we could make. Obviously I don't have any chance of winning the election, but if in November I can draw 5% of the vote, the Green Party possibly could establish itself as a credible voice capable of asking the right questions."

. . . . .

"Other critics tell me that I ought to work 'within the system,' but people 'within the system' don't welcome new ideas. They like to talk about social change, but when it comes to actually doing something, they remember that social change is outrageous, un-American, and wrong. Look at the history of the country. I don't care whether you're talking about the Revolution of 1776, or abolitionists forcing the issue of slavery in the 1850s, about women's sufferage, the late nineteenth-century populist revolt against the eastern banks and railroads, the trade-union movement, Social Security, meat inspection, civil rights. The change invariably begins with people whom the defenders of the status quo denounce as agitators, communists, hippies, weirdos. And then, ten or twenty years later, after the changes have taken place, the chamber of commerce discovers that everybody's profits have improved. The captains of industry never seem to understand that a free democracy is the precondition for a free market; try to turn the equation the other way around, and you end up with an economy like the one in Indonesia."

. . . . .

The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer alloted Nader ten minutes at the top of the broadcast and didn't bother with the theatrics of false confrontation. Lehrer asked straightforward questions, but they were so tired and perfunctory that it was apparent he didn't understand Nader's critique of the sham democracy. Nor, like Novak and Press, did he seem to know what was meant by the phrase "economic injustice." Where was the problem, and why the complaint? Here we all are in the most prosperous society ever to see the light of heaven, real estate prices going nowhere but up, the ever-expanding middle class floating in suburban swimming pools on the buoyant mattress of the Nasdaq, and why were we talking about poor people?

In the time allowed, the conversation couldn't become anything other than an exchange of platitudes, but it permitted at least one memorable question and answer. Lehrer was asking Nader what he would do in and with the office of the presidency in the unlikely event that he won the election. How could Nader possibly appreciate the complex workings of all those vast and complex government agencies in Washington?

Nader paused for a moment, as if he couldn't quite believe what he'd just heard. Then he laughed and said, "Well, I don't know anybody who has sued more of them."

. . . . . .

It was hard to picture him shaking hands with a holiday crowd at Coney Island, or riding a white horse around the ring of a Montana rodeo, but I could imagine him handing out copies of the Constitution to automobile workers in Detroit, and as the plane to New York climbed into a steep turn over the Potomac, the sight of the Lincoln Memorial in the lovely evening light reminded me that a democratic republic knows no higher rank or title than that of citizen. The media prefer celebrities, who come and go like soup cans or summer moths, unthreatening and ephemeral. Cheaply produced and easily replaced, made to the measure of our own everyday weakness, celebrities ask nothing of us except a round of applause. Like President Clinton, they let us off the hook. Nader sets the hook on the sharp points of obligation to a higher regard for our own intelligence and self-worth. Less interested in the counting of votes than in the lesson of freedom, he mounts his campaign on the proposition that the party of things-as-they-are depends for its continued survival on the party of things-as-they-might-become.

Let's Get Our Symbolic Votes Straight

A Jewish friend of mine called the other night—got me out of bed, as a matter of fact. Her question was simple: "Do I need to worry about Lieberman?" Nah, I said, you don't need to worry about Lieberman. My friend, you see, is one of those precious folks who votes her conscience, always. It had been suggested to her that she might want to waste her vote on Gore, as a symbolic gesture of approval for his choice of a Jewish running mate. This troubled her, since she objects to wasted votes and symbolic gestures. But the trouble was only momentary and all is serene now. She'll still be voting Nader come fall.

Of course, anyone who has bothered to read the four mainstream news articles about the Nader campaign might think this odd . There are, by the way, only four articles; do not be fooled by the number of headlines we post here at Nader Watch. These are merely more or less agile versions of the same article: Ralph the Spoiler, What About Abortion/Supreme Court/Environment, and Nader Is A Puritan. (We expect that last one to drop out of the line-up in the euphoria over Lieberman the Orthodox moral scold going after those Hispanics at the Playboy Mansion, but then again we could be wrong. Liberal hypocrisy knows no limits.) The newest entry, the fourth, is Don't Worry, It Will Fade; expect to see a glut of these in the coming weeks. Fortunately, we seem to be beyond the Why Is He Doing This? fad, showing that our friends in the Big Boys press are actually capable of progressing from one form of herd behavior to another.

The assumption that these articles all share—you can't really call it an idea—is that Nader supporters are childlike, fey sorts enamored of tilting at windmills, who require the mature voice of the New York Times, or perhaps an avuncular commentator like Barney Frank or RFK Jr., to remind them sternly but patiently that politics is a game for grown-ups. And, of course, it is. Only a grown-up could look at the ultimate success of a rich, spoiled frat boy who didn't do his homework and explain to the other children, "Well, that's the way it is. You'll understand when you're older."

The problem is that children have always understood, perfectly. No one has to get "older" to understand injustice and hypocrisy; ask any elementary school teacher worth her box of stick-on stars. The difference is that children still think someone ought to do something about it. Those who have "successfully" managed the transition to adulthood realize that no one is about to do any such thing, so we might as well forget about all those fundamental issues and worry about important things, like targeted tax cuts resulting in an annual savings of $125 and whether other people's children are listening to nasty rap CDs. The aging children who refuse to grow up, if that's what it's going to be like, are impervious to lectures from the NYT editorial cartel. From their perspective, it's just the same old baloney they used to hear on the playground from the adults who refused to do anything about the bullies. And it isn't any more impressive now than it was then.

You must admit that there is something surreal about the Gore camp insinuating that conscientious liberals ought to vote Gore because he had the "courage" to pick Lieberman. These are the same folks who tell us, in the next breath, that courage is too much to ask from a Democrat, at least when we're talking about campaign financing, corporate welfare, globalization, and so on. These are also the same folks who keep suggesting that Naderites are simply sentimental, not real-politikal enough to function in the real world. Allah knows you haven't heard the Democrats suggesting that voting for the son of Middle-Eastern immigrants would be a moral victory against the forces of bigotry and viciousness. Of course not. It's still cool to be anti-Arab—those rabid rogue-state Islamic terrorists, doncha know—and besides, Nader and his family are Christian Lebanese who are competely secular in political outlook. That's just too confusing, like having more than two politicians in a debate. Better to keep things real simple and stay mysteriously silent about Nader's ethnicity.

My advice to any Jewish person (or any person of conscience of any ethnic or religious condition) who wishes to vote for Gore in order to "endorse" the idea of a Jewish Vice President is this: you go right ahead, if that's where your conscience takes you. But lay off the Naderites about "symbolic votes," please. Genug iz genug, for Christ's sake.