Kerry or Nader: Does It Make Any Difference?

Or, It’s the Social Movements, Stupid.

by Michael Hirsch

printed in the Spring 2004 Democratic Left

Voting is a bitch. John Kerry will get my vote in the
November elections, and I’ll give it with the same
grudging, wintry discontent that I did in the last two
presidential elections, when I backed Ralph Nader. In
those races, I made statements. Now I want to beat
Bush.

But that’s not what this piece is about. It’s not why a
vote for Kerry is inevitable in a year when Bush is
vulnerable. It’s about how liberals and leftists on
both sides of the Kerry-Nader divide get rabidly
exercised about other people’s campaign choices, when
they both know that power does not come out of an
election booth. It comes out of the economic and social
movements poised to hold officeholders accountable.
It’s about never forgetting that the left-the only
hope for humanity (and do I exaggerate?)—isn’t built
by electoral struggle but by building the social
movements, before, during and after elections. It is
the weakness of the social movements that forces poor
choices on us.

Beyond the facility of corporate Democrats to co-opt
movement leaders into precinct captains or the
fecklessness of radicals to form lasting electoral
alternatives, a centrist Democrat is sadly our last
best shot for ending the White House occupation because
no social movements are strong enough to move the
country left.

That hasn’t stopped sides from forming up for color
war, with the loudest drumming from the punditry. When
Nader announced his third run, the usually measured
Michael Tomasky, for one, counseled Democrat
candidates, to a man, to "attack Nader right now, and
with Lupine ferocity." He told The American Prospect
readers how Nader was "a megalomaniac whose tenuous
purchase on present-day reality threatens to cancel out
every good thing he’s done in his life," which, if
true, would be a cancellation on the order of the
original Star Trek.

There was more passion on view in Tomasky’s tough love
for Nader than in his eight years of covering Giuliani,
the race-baiting, city-service privatizing, real-estate
creature and poster boy for megalomania whom he
characterized in New York magazine as someone who ran
for office "to the right of how he ruled."

Making the case for Kerry is no slam-dunk.

Problems with the Washington fixture are palpable; they
can be lined up and bowled over like candlepins. But
even if Kerry were the political bastard his left
detractors say he is, he is—as FDR said of the senior
Somoza—our bastard, at least until Nov. 3. Until then,
the anti-Bush effort is well-worth building in its own
right, if only as realpolitik. It needn’t be dressed up
by pounding the iron necessity of beating Bush into a
tin-plated virtue. We don’t have to say the ridiculous
or the indefensible on his behalf.

Of course, some critics of the Democratic candidate do
offer a real-world model for Tomasky’s ravening beasts.
John Pilger’s New Statesman screed (March 4) widely
clipped and distributed over the Internet and on Web
sites including ZNet, came illustrated in the original
London version with a split screen of Bush and Kerry
melded into one face, sharing a lipless sneer. Same man
and same agenda.

Pilger says pointing to differences between Bush and
Kerry is "a big lie," that distinctions between the
two do not "go beyond the use of euphemisms," and
that the real objection to Bush by Democrats is to his
outspokenness, to his administration’s "crude honesty,"
and not to any policy differences.

"The Democratic Party has left a longer trail of blood,
theft and subjugation than the Republicans [which] is
heresy to the liberal crusaders, whose murderous
history always requires, it seems, a noble mantle,"
Pilger writes. But what reader of Democratic Left
doubts that the trail was blazed in a fit of
bipartisanship, along with opposition throughout ever
sector of society, including the two parties.

What does any of Pilger’s biliousness tell us about
politics and political choices? Nothing. It’s
catharsis. Much of the same runs in Counterpunch, where
Alex Cockburn and friends equate Kerry bashing with
political comment, or in one small left-wing paper that
urges readers to "get off the Democratic Party train
now," in order to "fight for a new political party,"
presumably one devoid of those pesky misleaders who
seem to muck things up. This without explaining how a
second Bush administration could possibly bring that
goal of better trains and better leaders nearer.

At least the Greens bring some humor to the table, as
when St. Louis Green Party organizer Don Fitz turns the
question around, asking "Should the Democrats Run a
Candidate for President in 2004?" and says, with some
justification, "If the Democrats were against the Bush
program, why would they wait for the election to fight
it?"

Let’s shovel away the accumulated sludge. Nader’s take
on corporate power is terrific, as far at it goes.
"Crashing the Party," his account of the 2000 race, is
a good statement of first principles as well as a fair
treatment of how hard it is to raise political issues
in a national campaign, especially absent a social
movement running interference for you.

Nader also has every right to run for president, and
leftists who know that defeating Bush is all- important
have every right to say "Ralph. Don’t Run." But we have
no right to chant, "unclean; unclean" or vilify his
supporters.

The problem I have with Nader’s run is not bad faith or
a belief in the worse, the better. It’s how his brand
of anti-corporatism won’t mesh with a political
campaign. While he can run a brilliant position-paper
operation that spotlights big business domination of
political and economic life, don’t expect him to target
the real dissatisfaction voters have with the Iraq
occupation, even its corporate analog, or offer voters
an alternative.

Everything Nader says will resonate as a critique of a
bought and paid-for two party system, not a bash at
Bush or even a synthetic look at what got bought. If he
were instead to frame Bush as an acknowledged corporate
tool, he’d play a hero’s role in bringing Bush down.
But that would detract from building a 3rd party, his
acknowledged goal.

Now I want a left-of-center political party, too, one
that can harness and represent working class politics
in a way the Democratic Party in its big tent,
corporate-dominated incarnation cannot. But the time
and place to build that isn’t eight months from
November and on the national level, especially when you
don’t have 50-state ballot access or even a Green Party
skeletal apparatus to run with.

If the pro-Kerry folk tend to be unreflective or even
somnolent about how bad the situation is: that in 2004,
amidst war, joblessness and poverty, we soldier on and
hopefully elect another centrist Democrat, then the
self-styled revolutionary Left’s sin is to act like
lemmings, as though the sea were not instant death and
Bush or Kerry do not matter. The candidate of one
socialist groupuscule says he is running as "a voice
for the international working class in the 2004 US
elections." Even bullfrogs don’t puff themselves up
that much.

Differences like these won’t get resolved by talking or
fighting from now until November. Instead of an arctic
night of long knives, I’d rather DSA activists work our
own sides of the street. That could mean stumping for
Kerry, or insisting—as DSA does—that the social
movements have a voice and face in the campaign and
room to grow. It could mean running the ground war in
media markets where the emphasis by the party pros will
be on television saturation in the 17 battleground
states. It could mean focusing on local races, where a
few dedicated campaigners can make a difference in
swinging control of state houses or Congress.

In New York City, for example, that means working in
the long-shot Frank Barbaro campaign in Brooklyn-
Staten Island against a hard-core right winger who
holds office in a district that boasts the highest
union-household density in the nation.

Or it could mean backing independent candidates with a
chance of winning and who deserve to win, like Matt
Gonzalez in San Francisco last year

After November, the left is going to need each other,
unmaimed. If nothing else, we can at least dial it down
and get to work.

[Michael Hirsch is a member of the DSA National
Political Committee and an editor of New Politics and
Democratic Left. He ran as a Dennis Kucinich delegate
in the March primary, outpolling the Ohio congressman
in New York’s 14th C.D. by some 200 votes. "Dennis ran
on my coattails," Hirsch says.]