The crop of books that came out after the 2000 Elections are a collection of snoozers: travelogues of journalists who spent the good part of a year living out of motels to report on lies told by G. W. Bush and Al Gore, a hundred rehashes of the confusion after November 7 as electoral irregularities in Florida led to the supreme court selecting G. W. Bush as president, and collections of dry academic papers looking for social and political trends in the election tea leaves. All of the books ignored the candidacy of Ralph Nader, except for an occasional footnote speculating if he'd cost Gore the election.
Crashing the Party, Ralph Nader's personal account of the campaign, is an exception. In it, Nader talks about the campaign that attracted thousands of activists to the Green Party nationwide -- fueling the growth of a real political alternative that put over 60 Greens into public office in 2001.
Activists made great strides at pressuring the government into protecting workers, consumers and the environment in the 1960's. But big business mounted a counterattack, and by the 1990's, the left found itself locked out of Washington. Although a Republican Congress relentlessly tormented Clinton for his sexual improprieties, Clinton did nothing but further the Reagan agenda: doubling the number of African-Americans in prison, throwing millions of children into the cold with "welfare reform," and letting Detroit flood the nation with SUVs, causing automotive fuel efficiency to decline for the first time since the 1970's. Many progressive groups in Washington, such as NOW and People for the American Way, seemed to become only fundraising arms of the Democratic Party, too busy telling Congressional Republicans to keep out of Clinton's pants to do anything to advance their claimed agendas.
In 2000, the National Democrats lurched further to the right by adding Lieberman to the ticket -- who until then had been a committed opponent of abortion and who voted with Al Gore to appoint Scalia to the Supreme Court. It's little wonder that thousands of activists jumped ship from the Democrats and joined the Green Party to support one of America's leading progressives.
Crashing the Party tells the story you won't read in the New York Times -- from a description of how the power of money built a wall around Washington that kept public interest activists like Nader out to his decision to challenge the system directly by running for office. Although Nader was able to organize "SuperRallies" of 10,000-25,000 people paying $10 or more to hear him in city after city, he was not only excluded from participating in the Presidential Debates but he was threatened with arrest by a police officer when he tried to use a ticket to enter an auditorium to view the debate on television! Nader sued the police officer and the Commission, who have subsequently apoligized, police haven't apologized for acts of violence (such as an attempt to trample sitting protestors with horses) against the 10,000 or so people who showed up at the debates to protest Nader's exclusion.
Although polls showed that many voters felt that Nader was the best candidate, many were frightened at the ballot box into voting for Gore, the lesser of two evils. Many were disappointed that he didn't win 5% of the vote, enough to ensure the Green Party federal matching funds in the next election -- yet, Nader's run got thousands of activists to join the Green Party. Although Greens have yet to win state or national offices, Greens are winning local elections from San Francisco to Massachusetts. In a time when those power seem to have little concern for legitimacy, where elections are wracked with fraud and threat of police violence, it's easy for people to give up.
Indeed, apathy is the worst threat to a healthy political system. Crashing the Party proves that we haven't all given up.
Title: Crashing the Party: How to tell the truth and still run for president
Authors: Ralph Nader
Publisher: Thomas Dunn Books
ISBN: 0-312-28433-0
Year: 2002
Pages: 383
Libraries: Alternative
