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Why they call him Darth Nader
Posted at: Wednesday, February 25, 2004, 02:35 PM
Does anybody remember Silas Swallow, John Hospers, or William Wirt?
They are all losers, forgotten third-party candidates for president, or “spoilers” as political pundits call them, because they siphoned off vital votes from the nominees of the Republican and Democratic parties.
Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate, got the “spoiler” tag in the 2000 presidential election. Now, having announced last weekend — against the pleadings of Democratic leaders — that he’s running again, another nickname for him, “Darth Nader,” figures to get a lot of play.
Democrats say the 97,488 votes Nader got in Florida in 2000 — where the election was decided — swung the outcome because Gore only lost by 543 votes to Bush. Surely, they argue, at least 544 of those 97,488 Nader votes would have gone to Gore.
Nader defenders counter that if just 1 percent of Democrats had stuck with their party’s nominee, Gore would have won Florida handily.
They also argue that only half of registered Democrats in Florida voted in the election, and, besides, maybe it was the other loser parties that stole Gore’s Democratic votes.
The Natural Law, Reform, Libertarian, Workers World, Constitution, Socialist and Socialist Workers parties each polled more than 543 votes. Only write-ins, who tallied 40, did not get enough votes to make the difference.
Even Nader concedes his chances of winning this year are extraordinarily slim. Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press” he said making all 50 states’ ballots by election day will be “like climbing a cliff with a slippery rope.”
Still, Nader is continuing a rich tradition of third-party presidential candidates who run despite having a snowball’s chance in Palm Beach County of winning.
No less than 71 men have run for president as third-party candidates in the history of this country, beginning with Wirt in 1832, when he ran on the Anti-Masonic ticket. Swallow ran in 1904 on the Prohibition ticket. Hospers ran as a Libertarian in 1972. And not a one of them won.
Two ex-presidents have run as third-party candidates, but both had been in office before, and both lost when they ran outside the Democrat and Republican machines.
Martin Van Buren ran as the Free-Soil Party candidate in 1848. He lost to Zachary Taylor. Theodore Roosevelt ran on the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party ticket in 1912, losing to Woodrow Wilson.
Roosevelt’s loss in 1912 cemented the idea of third-party candidate as spoiler. He ran as a Bull Moose after being rejected at the Republican Convention, which re-nominated President Howard Taft. In the general election, Roosevelt beat Taft in the popular and the electoral vote, dividing the Republican party and giving the election to Wilson.
Wilson took the White House with just 41.9 percent of the vote, the smallest percentage since Abe Lincoln won, as a Republican, with 39.9 percent of the vote in 1860, defeating John C. Breckinridge, John Bell and Stephen Douglas.
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Voices from small towns: Placerville, CA
Posted at: Tuesday, February 24, 2004, 12:49 AM
Bob Billingsley, 64, is the Back Fence columnist for the Mountain Democrat in Placerville, Calif. (pop. 9,610), a town about 130 miles northeast of San Francisco in the foothills (elevation: 1,866) of the Sierra Mountains.
The demographic make-up of Placerville is 83.1 percent white, 12.6 percent Hispanic, 5.8 percent other, 3.1 percent two or more races, and 2.6 percent American Indian. The median household income is $36,454.
A retired federal probation officer, Billingsley has lived in Placerville 34 years and been a columnist for the Democrat since 1998:
“Placerville is basically a retirement town, though some people who live here commute to Sacramento; they’re the ones who live in the $370,000 houses. We don’t have any problem with drugs or gangs. We’re quiet and semi-rural.”
Billingsley is a registered Democrat whose middle name, Delano, is the same as Franklin Roosevelt’s. Billingsley is outnumbered two-to-one in Placerville by registered Republicans.
The morning I called Billingsley he went to the Donut Factory and talked to people about the campaign:
“The concerns of the blue collar people are about immigration in general, and in particular the people coming from Mexico are taking jobs from Americans. There’s also a concern about jobs being shipped out of the country, and the unemployment rate. The one they really got on was Bush spending money on Mars and the moon when we got problems here. That really gets them. Why are we spending all of those billions of dollars in space when people don’t have jobs here and poor people don’t have health insurance?”
People in Placerville are tired of hearing about the weapons of mass destruction and whether the U.S. attack on Iraq was based on bad information:
“They think George [Bush] has done a good job with the war and this false intelligence stuff is a bunch of BS, and they don’t care about that. But they do worry that George is like his dad, good with war, but bad with local. His dad’s ratings were high but the economy got him. They worry the same thing will happen to George.”
Bush will win unless the economy gets worse:
“The Republicans don’t think Kerry can beat Bush unless the economy continues to go sour. If they are in great shape with their jobs and their stocks, they’ll vote their pocketbook.”
— Jeffry Scott, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Voices from small towns: Arabi, Ga.
Posted at: Monday, February 23, 2004, 12:27 PM
Al Douglas, 62, is the mayor of Arabi, Ga. (pop. 688), a town about 10 miles south of Cordele (“Watermelon Capital of The World”) in the south central part of the state. (Georgia is one of 10 states holding primaries March 2.)
The demographic make-up of Arabi is 74.8 percent white, 24.3 percent black, and 0.9 percent Asian Indian. Median household income is $24,327.
A retired IBM systems engineer, Douglas grew up in Vermont and moved to Arabi a few years ago and loves South Georgia and the weather.
“We’ve got four seasons — almost summer, summer, still summer, and Christmas.”
He won the mayorship last fall unopposed. He works 13 hours a week as mayor and doesn’t get paid. In his spare time he repairs antiques and breeds miniature dachsunds (they yapped as we talked on the telephone). He wishes Bill Clinton were still president:
“I like the way he got things done. Bush has gotten us back up to our ears in debt again. I’m more of a liberal than a conservative. So the fact that Bill Clinton had a biological problem is none of my business. This country wasted millions of dollars chasing his personal business. Washington, D.C., is a crime as far as I am concerned. They think they are above the law and better than God.”
He doesn’t trust the primary system:
“It’s a funny system, I can’t believe how it works, it’s almost like a disease. It floods one way or the other. It’s all how the candidate is marketed, not what the candidate stands for.”
— Jeffry Scott, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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