Countdown

Home > Interviews > Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader, a lawyer, consumer advocate, and author, is a three-time presidential candidate. In 1996, he ran as an independent in some states and as the Green Party nominee in others, receiving 685,128 votes nationwide. In 2000, as the Green Party nominee, he received 2,882,955 votes — more than the margin between Republican nominee George W. Bush and Democratic nominee Al Gore. Denied the Green Party nomination in 2004, Nader received a total of 465,650 votes. Nader has founded numerous organizations, including the Center for Study of Responsive Law, the Public Interest Research Group, and Public Citizen.

Jules Witcover interviewed Nader on April 12, 2007

First, why don’t you tell me what you think about the campaign finance subsidy program, whether you think that can survive or whether it’s a loss or not? And what you see in a prospect for anybody who doesn’t have millions and millions of dollars to compete in the presidential process?

Well, it obviously has fewer takers. And the fewer takers it has from the major candidates, the less its rationale is being utilized. But there is a way out of that. [Barack] Obama and [John] McCain came to some sort of agreement if any of them were [to be] the nominee in the fall.

Another way [would be] to increase the amount of the subsidy, but a better way would be to try to convert as much as is constitutionally possible over to public financing by a well-promoted voluntary checkoff that goes, say, as high as $300 a person.

But that really hasn’t worked very well.

It’s not promoted well. And it’s not enough. So if it goes up to $300, and it’s well promoted, and it’s connected with a certain amount of free time on radio and TV for ballot-qualified candidates, I think it would be a more attractive package.

Of course, how do you get that free time? That’s a rub there.

Yeah. That’s got to be congressional, or FCC [Federal Communications Commission], or both, as a condition of the license. I mean it’s the public airways, after all.

Has anybody in Congress seriously talked about that?

They have piecemeal. Like I think originally McCain-Feingold, they had some provision there, if I am not mistaken — or at least it was talked about, the free time. But I don’t think anybody is courageous [enough] to take on the television and radio media.

Well sure, it’s a gold mine for those people.

Huge. And more than ever now.

It used to be like an aside, and now it’s the main event for a few weeks. But it also punctuates a principle that is abhorrent to the television and radio industry, which is [that] the public owns the airwaves and therefore the public can condition the license in a variety of ways, through their representatives in the Congress and the FCC. Up to now, most people don’t know or don’t think about the fact that they own the airwaves. They don’t think about conditioning licenses one way or the other. This would open that public awareness up extraordinarily. And that’s the last thing they want.
For example, we got Congressman Ed Markey in 1992, I think, to have a hearing in his subcommittee [the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance, now called Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet], on a proposal we made called Audience Network, which would have involved a reversion of an hour or so time a day to a nonprofit entity called the Audience Network. And people who joined it through a well-thought-out process would program that hour, or two hours, whenever. And it would be funded not just by the membership dues, but by the rent charged the stations for their license. It was a remarkable hearing.

It’s published, of course, because Ed Markey, who is a pretty progressive guy, kept delaying this hearing until I wouldn’t allow him to delay it any more, because I am an old friend of his from way back. And when he finally did it, he divided the table up with the broadcast witnesses and the supporters of this idea at the same time, and he’d go from one to another. The broadcasters lost their moorings because they were always ready to charge censorship, charge government nanny for any kind of reform of the broadcast system. But this was neither. This was Give us back an hour of our property, and they didn’t quite know how to handle that. I had to keep reminding them — I said, “This is not censorship.” They finally said, “Oh, you just want your own station?” I said, “It has nothing to do with me.” I mean they were so frustrated that they had to ad-hominem. And that’s an example of why the members [of Congress] know this is a real Maginot Line.

Have you thought about mounting that kind of campaign this time around?

Yeah. Well, I talk about it all of the time in the campaign and off the campaign. I even got on NBC once discussing it on the morning show; I don’t know how that got through. But it’s all part of the overall commonwealth. We, as people, own the public lands. We own the public airways. We own all of the government research and development like at NIH [National Institutes of Health] and et cetera. And it’s being given away, control is being given away. And the benefits are accruing to the corporations, whether it’s the oil and gas [industry], timber industry, or the broadcast industry, or the drug industry.

Do you think there is any way at all to reverse this trend of more and more campaign raising and spending?

Well, there is one way is to blow it apart. When abuse keeps swelling and swelling, it’s like a balloon. And it gets to a point where there is such scandal, or it doesn’t pass the stench test, the smell test, and then, as you know from your own writings, that’s when reform sometimes occurs.

And this could happen if billionaires move into the system and turn it into three- and four- and five-sided races. Like [H. Ross] Perot turned it into a three-way race.

But there are so many billionaires now. And for them, they could mount a $400 million campaign and it would hardly make a dent. I mean, [Michael] Bloomberg could mount a half-a-billion-dollar campaign, which would blanket the country and get him on every ballot. And that would be less than 10 percent of his fortune, not counting what he’s earning during the year.

But do you think that voters really care about how much money is in a campaign and how much money an individual gives? There seems to be an attitude among a lot of people, reflected in some polls. They say: “Well, it’s their money. Maybe they will be more honest. We can trust them more because they are spending their own money.”

There is that. There is that for the billionaire candidates. But not for the others, which are the predominant type of candidates.

I think part of it is what you say, but I think the bigger part is, people know the system stinks, that it’s for sale, that it’s corrupt. But they also know that it’s so powerful that they shouldn’t waste their time trying to do something about it, because nothing will happen. So when you have an overwhelming power arrayed against non-organized people, they tend to withdraw into apathy. But that doesn’t mean they don’t know what the score is.

And the second [part] is that they know they are confronted with only two choices. And if they want to be with the winner, they will not vote for a non-major-party candidate. So there is a kind of resignation and fatalism that is built right into the voter’s mind, which accounts, in a way, for their “least worst” voting. Even though they vote for one or the other, it’s a “least worst” voting mentality. But they want to be with a winner. And they know that the system is a two-party duopoly and that only one of the two is going to win.

But I think that the first credible campaign reform movement that translates money and politics into an explanation as to why people are denied health care, why they are denied a living wage, why they are denied a clean environment, why they are denied an equitable tax system, why they are denied a voice, why they are denied choices, politically, will generate a lot of moment. I think the worst problem that the campaign finance reform movement has is its name; it’s too vague, it’s too general, it’s too bureaucratic. It’s got to be translated into the denial of the necessities of large numbers of people. This is why your drug prices are so high. This is why your oil prices are so high, in part. This is why you don’t get public transit. This is why your libraries, clinics, and schools are crumbling. Because the people who pay the piper make the piper adopt the priorities of the oligarchy.

This is a message that you have been conveying for a long time.

But it doesn’t get over the mass media.

Why? Why, if it’s such a strong message and such a good message? Is it the problem of the message? Do you need some kind of Messianic figure to be . . . ?

You need somebody who has a chance to win the presidential election. Then the press says: “This person has got a great program. This person is raising a lot of money. This person is rising in the polls. Therefore, we are going to cover them.” And money, now, is the ticket to media coverage. In the early stages of the presidential campaign, if you don’t raise a lot of money, you are not credible — and you are not covered.

We are seeing that just this last reporting period, of how [Mitt] Romney suddenly becomes somebody out of nobody.

That’s right. It’s like the corporate quarterly return. They are waiting for the corporate quarterly returns of the candidate. It keeps getting worse.

Do you ever hear the phrase “wake us up when it’s over?”

Do you see anybody at all in the picture, in either a candidate who has declared or somebody out there who should be a candidate, who could convey that kind of message?

Yeah. I think [Dennis] Kucinich conveys that message. But his delivery is not what is expected in a modern media. And he’s not raising a lot of money. I mean, even though he’ll raise $10 million, that’s nothing. He will raise $10 million.

He claims he’ll raise $50 [million].

Well, yeah, [but] I don’t know if that’s enough, I mean if it’s spread through the whole year.

But what’s the difference between Kucinich and you? I think you are a more credible person than he is, and maybe not deservedly so.

Yeah.

But he’s constantly dismissed by everybody because of his appearance, and his manner, and so on.

Well, I am outside the two-party system, and so I bear the burden of the institutionalized political bigotry against third-party candidates, and ballot access, and harassment, and obstacles, like no other Western democracy obstructs minor-party candidates and voters. There is no other Western democracy that has so many obstructions of people voting, people having their votes counted, and more candidates on the ballot. I mean it’s just not even close with Western Europe or Canada.

So if it’s that difficult to break through, why do you keep doing it? Why don’t you run for the Democratic nomination?

Well, I believe in the efficacy of jackhammers. [With the] Democratic nomination, I could be stripped of any right to appear on the ballot. And because the Democratic Party is a private corporation, I could be deregistered. That’s an extreme move, but they could do it. But they definitely could keep me off the debates. And if you are not on the debates, you can’t reach people. In 2000, I campaigned in every state before huge audiences, all of the arenas basically — Target Center [in Minneapolis], Boston Garden, New York Madison Square Garden. 

[In] one of the speeches you made up in New Hampshire, you had [everyone’s attention] going on for two and a half hours. You had people outside listening.

Yeah. And total up all of those people, and everyone that I campaigned in front of, and it would be 2 percent of the amount of the number of people I could reach on one presidential debate. But, as you know, the two parties created the debate commission. It’s a private company. And they have set the rules. So if they shut you out of the national presidential debates, there is no way, short of being a [Ross] Perot, of reaching people — just no way. So it’s a two-party elected dictatorship.

Let’s face it. They have got all kinds of state ballot-access obstructions. My campaign manager is writing a book on ballot-access obstacles. And no one — even with your experience, Jules — could ever believe it’s as bad as it is in one state after another. The thousands of ways they can trip you up, and dismiss thousands of your signatures, and dismiss your petitioners. For example, in Arizona, the only people who can petition to get you on the presidential ballot are residents of Arizona. If you ask for friends from Texas or New Mexico, the petitions they fill are invalidated. In Texas, if you vote in the primary, you cannot sign a petition for a candidate to get on the ballot. Multiply that a thousandfold, each state different. You get the idea.

How many states were you on the ballot last time you were in?

Last time I ran, about 38, 39. And they knocked us off the ballot in the last few weeks Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oregon, Illinois, and on and on. Maybe it was 37, 38, whatever. But we are talking about states with big populations here.

Right. But my recollection is that George Wallace did get on the ballot in all of the states when he ran [in 1968].

He did. They keep getting worse. The ballot-access laws get worse. Second, he had an ideological constituency. And third, there are third-party candidates who can get on the ballot, but only if they are not challenged. And so the Libertarian Party is not challenged because it’s not a factor. And the Green Party in 2004 wasn’t challenged, and it got on in Pennsylvania. But we had far more signatures. But if one of the parties wants to take you out and get you off the ballot, and file the lawsuits — we had 21 lawsuits filed against us. [It’s a] war of attrition. They had Republican corporate law firms retained to — it’s both interesting. The DNC [Democratic National Committee] had a Republican corporate law firm, including Ken Starr’s law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, in Ohio, [and] Reed Smith, in Pennsylvania. It’s almost impossible, in a number of key states, to get on the ballot. We qualified in Oregon by all of the rules. The elected Democratic secretary of state changed the rules after we qualified. And the Oregon Supreme Court upheld him and said he can change the rules anytime he wants, ex post facto.

Are you going to run again this time?

It’s too early to say. That’s one of the key problems. I have got to get thousands of volunteers to mount the ballot-access mountains.

Let’s talk a little bit about the debates. Do you think people care about the sponsorship of the debates? And what’s your concern about the sponsorship of the debates?

Well, first of all, they are corporate sponsorship, overwhelmingly. And it’s unseemly and unsavory to have AT&T, Ford Motor Company, Anheuser-Busch, [and] tobacco companies over the years paying for these hospitality suites in these arenas, which you have seen. At the same time that the Republican and Democratic conventions are getting millions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies to run their conventions on the grounds that it’s an educational event for the public. That’s how they justify it to taxpayers, when most of the money is contributed by corporations.

Do you see the corporations and other contributors getting anything, besides general publicity, for their sponsorship of the debates?

Yeah. They get access. They get schmoozing in the hospitality rooms. They get . . .

You mean access to the candidates?

Yeah. But also a huge number of senators, governors, and representatives are there. And they get to call them by their first name. They get to know them. The other thing is that the polls in 2000 wanted me and [Patrick] Buchanan on the debates. But that didn’t qualify for the criteria of 15 percent in the polls supporting us for president. Which means that a lot more people wanted a diverse debate than would vote for me and Buchanan. But they wanted more activity. They didn’t want to fall asleep.

What’s your feeling about the people, the reporters, who participate in the debates and the objectivity of their performance?

Well, first of all, they are selected by the parties, which compromises them, because the ones that would ask the tougher questions are not going to be selected. So if I was a reporter, I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I wouldn’t have anything to do with two parties, connected with the networks, rigging the debate rules, funded by corporate lobbyists, and excluding all competitors. There is a book out on this, the one and only exposé on the debate commission, by George Farah. I think it’s called No Debate. And it’s a devastating history of the debate commission and how they rigged the rules. I mean, here is a debate commission [that] had a facebook that they gave to the police at Northeastern University in 2000. And the facebook had me, and Buchanan, and other party candidates, and vice president. And it’s like we are a rogues gallery. And they said, “If these guys set foot, not in the auditorium where the debate is, not in the adjunct auditorium to watch it by remote, but to go to Fox studios on invitation, or NBC studios, they were to be arrested.”

Did that happen?

I was almost arrested. I was thrown off twice and escorted by a very distressed Secret Service chief in Boston, who told me on the way back to town in the bus that he thought that the police handled it disgracefully. And this is all on tape; NBC taped it. I’d say, “Your authority is being misused by a private corporation that is excluding me from going to Fox News to give commentary on the debate on the premises of Northeastern University, for political reasons.” I was being excluded for political reasons. You would think the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] would have been upset. But only Al[bert] Hunt had it “the disgrace of the week” on his television program [CNN’s “The Capital Gang”]. I sued them, by the way.

I remember that.

We settled, and for an apology, too.

Well, if you had your druthers, what would a debate look like?

Well, it would not be a parallel press conference, which is what they are, where they would just regurgitate everything they have said in the prior 10 weeks. It would not have predictable questions.

Well, who would be the moderator? If there was a moderator, what would his role be? And who would be the questioners?

Well, first they would question each other.

Question each other.

That’s one. The second is, I would put in the audience civic leaders who span the entire range of potential subject matter. Not an audience that reflects the narrow-gauge headlines and reporting of the campaign. When you throw it open to the public, the public simply asks the questions that the candidates have been talking about, not what they have been ignoring. So there is never a question, for example, in ’04 and ’00, on the military budget. There is never a question on cracking down on corporate crime — law and order for corporate crime. There are tons of major subject areas that are never questioned. So what you want are people who are going to really ask very thoughtful and tough questions.

So how do you identify them? What’s the yardstick for identifying those people? You are talking about people in the press or just anybody?

Well, I would start with a whole spectrum of very strong-willed civic advocates. And I would have a lot of debates. So you can’t say, “Well, you are excluding 100 and you are just letting in 10.” I would have a lot of debates. A lot of debates means you can have a much more thorough process.

Are you talking about the general election now, or all through the process?

Both. Both. And I would not have the debaters select the moderator. I would have some panel select it and make it, some recognized panel of ex-judges, and university presidents, and whatever. The moderator is basically just a neutral.

He would function like a referee in a fight?

Yeah. Then I would have 10- and 12-year-olds ask questions, because they ask the toughest questions. They are uninhibited. They ask the impertinent question. I would have labor people ask questions. I would have church people ask questions. I would really spice it up.

Corporate people as well?

Corporate people ask questions.

Well, what would the mechanism for that? Who would make the call on who these people would be?

If you have a lot of debates, you can pretty much cover the waterfront. You can say, “People who have a track record of consumer advocacy, of corporate advocacy, of labor advocacy.” And this would increase the turnout very substantially.

But you always hear so many complaints, certainly among politicians, but also from voters, when in the primary period there are like 10 people [candidates] sitting around a table or on the dais or so on. And that seems to turn people off. So what do you do about that?

Well, it’s just a matter of exciting formats. I mean, you would avoid things like that. You would go for meaningful questions that are rarely asked, so they just can’t push their mental button and say, “I have answered this question 20 times.”

Well, to be sure you got those kinds of questions, wouldn’t you have to at least know what they were?

Here is what you could do. If you have a lot of debates, you could have one audience full of hard-charging consumer types, labor types, taxpayer advocates, environmental types, corporate types, whatever. And then there wouldn’t be, “This constituency didn’t get its answer.” Every major constituency can get there. Ninety percent of the time the presidential candidates spend is raising money. So if you get rid of that burden, and you make it, say, 90 percent of the time you are going to spend engaging people, and engaging in debates, and engaging people in accountability sessions in auditoriums around the country when you sweep through Chicago or Boston or Columbus, Ohio. The balance of campaigning tips to the public, tips into the public arena. It is not orchestrated, choreographed, controlled to the last photo opportunity by the consultants and the advance people of the candidates.

But you hear candidates saying, “Oh, I learn so much by going out among the people.” How often do they ever talk to anybody anymore?

They never talk. When I was campaigning, I campaigned in poor areas. And they never saw a presidential candidate. I campaigned in Anacostia [a historic low-income neighborhood in Washington, D.C.]. I was the first presidential candidate in history to campaign in Anacostia. I campaigned in a very poor, rundown area in Hartford [Connecticut]. The clergymen who were sponsoring it almost fell off their chairs.

So they don’t campaign in poor areas anymore. They used to sometimes in the old days, the trains and all that. The other thing is, they don’t campaign in blue states, or they don’t campaign in red states. Do you know the last presidential candidate, other than me, to campaign in Alaska and Hawaii? Richard Nixon. And that’s one reason why they say he lost Illinois. Because he pledged to campaign in all 50 states, and he hadn’t campaigned in Alaska, and [so at] the last minute he flew to Alaska instead of to Illinois.

And he was a basket case when he came back.

Yeah.

Was that true that nobody has ever been in those two states since then?

No. In a couple of weeks, I am going to send a letter to all of the presidential candidates. I am going to say, “Will you pledge to go to Hawaii and Alaska?” Because they really resent it, people in Hawaii and Alaska really resent it. I was received like with open arms because Alaska is Republican. Hawaii is Democrat. Well, why bother? I think [Dick] Cheney went, for some reason he went to Hawaii in ’04 near the end. But by and large, what Democrats campaign in the Rocky Mountains or in Texas? What Republicans campaign in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York?

Do you think it’s going to be worse, in that regard, with this frontloading of all of these primaries and what amounts to a national primary?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because the minute March [2008] is over, and you know who the candidate is going to be for the Democrats and Republicans, then the talk will be, what are the swing states? Concentrate in the swing states. And there are only about 10 swing states at that stage, maybe 12. And then it begins narrowing. So that means California, Texas, New York off . . . they are not going to see many candidates unless they make California into something because of [Governor Arnold] Schwarzenegger. And I mean this is what has destroyed the Democratic Party in Congress. For what they spend on one New York Senate race, they could have eight credible Senate candidates in the Rocky Mountain states competing for victory. And instead they conceded eight Senate seats, decade after decade, on some stereotype that the Rocky Mountain voters are right-wing, redneck yahoos, and don’t even bother.

Well, aren’t you seeing changes in that, in Colorado, for instance?

It is now changing. Yeah, now it’s beginning to change. But look, they could have controlled the Senate for years. But when you cede Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, very often Colorado, Arizona, and Montana, except for [Max] Baucus, I mean basically you are ceding eight seats.

Do you remember Gale McGee? I don’t know where he came from, but he went to Wyoming and kind of, on loose change, got himself elected to the Senate.

Yeah. You just need an attractive candidate with a good campaign budget. But they don’t even field them. Remember [Joseph] O’Mahoney, [the] progressive senator? [Frank] Church, Idaho. [Orrin] Hatch did the same thing, by the way. He went from [Pittsburgh] to Utah.

What kind of a job do you think the press does in the presidential campaign, including the debates but also in other ways, about helping to bring the most important issues to the country?

Below pathetic. First of all, it is total horserace tactics before the nominee is chosen. Then, when the nominee is chosen, it is horserace tactics, polls, money, or gaffes. It is so bad, Jules, [that] the challenge in answering your question can be encapsulated in the following phrase: “How do you satire satire?” And they know better. It’s like they are caught up in a vortex of massive conformity.

You are talking about the reporters?

Yeah. Massive conformity and publisher and editor expectations: “Hey, why are you covering it different than The [Washington] Post? Didn’t you see how The [New York] Times covered it? You missed the story.”

Do you remember last time, at the primary debate, Ted Koppel asked Kucinich when he was going to get out of the race and why he was still in the race.

Yeah, yeah, I remember that. Yeah, like: “What are you doing? Shut up and get in line.” Which he did, unfortunately.

It must be awfully frustrating for you to keep hammering away and hammering away and not seeing some of the things that you think are essential not getting better or even getting a lot worse.

Well, let’s put it this way. I don’t want this to be taken egotistically. I want to be taken clinically. If someone like me, with a track record, pursuing major agendas that receive a majoritarian support among the American people, and willing to go out in areas and places that other candidates are not willing to go out, for the major parties, cannot get any attention, then it’s only left for the billionaire mavericks that are going to get the attention.

Why wouldn’t somebody like you start to work with somebody like that? Find somebody like that and take advantage of his money, and perhaps if he’s an attractive person, work through that kind of a person to advance the sorts of things that you have been frustrated about?

Well, I’d like to find someone like that. But…

You don’t see anybody around like that?

No. They are often idiosyncratic, one-issue types. I mean even Perot, [with him it was the] federal deficit. It’s a very important issue. But it was kind of a one-issue [candidacy].
They don’t have much spectrum. They don’t have much continuum, so far. But I fully expect that [Bill] Gates is going to run in eight years.

Really?

I have no inside information. But here is my reasoning: 99 percent recognition. He has met a payroll, [is a] very successful entrepreneur. By then he will have shifted his time — full time, almost — to the [Bill and Melinda Gates] Foundation, become a globally respected figure for putting billions of dollars into health care and other necessities of Third World people, and very little will get done. And he’ll start to say: “This is because governments don’t have their priorities in order. They are full of careerists, cowards, and knaves. And the only way that I can get done what I want to get done with my $60 billion foundation is to run and win the presidency.” And who is going to tell him no? He’ll be about 58 years old. So there will be a lot more like him, I think, who will run for governor, for senator. We are already seeing it: Schwarzenegger, [Michael] Bloomberg. And we’ll see more.

Do you know Gates?

No. I mean, I was a main antagonist of his monopoly. So we fought the monopoly and got to Justice Department.

He is not going to be your horse?

No. But I say good things about what he has done. I mean, he is really hitting stone walls, because he has got all of this money and the delivery system is not there, into the village in Africa. And there is no infrastructure. There are no skilled people in contagious diseases. So it comes back to public policy. He is going to have to come back to public policy. But anyway, that’s a bit of a detour.

Well, that’s interesting. Because when you think about who is out there now, who is pretty much a clean slate to write on, who seems to be saying a lot of the right things about cleaning up the process, getting rid of negative campaigning, and so on, it’s [Barack] is Obama. Do you see him as any kind of a possible vehicle for the sorts of things you are talking about? And if not, why not?

Before I get to that, I didn’t answer one of your questions fully. My candidate for the Democratic nomination is from your profession. But he won’t do it. Bill Moyers [went] from Lyndon Johnson’s White House, to a very, very perceptive knowledge of the South and the religious movements, to a distinguished career in the media, to a person who is steeped in progressive values. But look, I . . .

Have you talked to him about it?

No. I have communicated with him about it. And I’ve written a column, along with Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower, to which there were huge responses. But he wrote me a letter saying: “Thank you, but I wouldn’t know where to begin. I have more energy than the young people who are working with me, but not enough energy to run for president.”

And well that’s the point, isn’t it? That a lot of these real, progressive, legitimate complainers of electoral politics are not willing to get into the down and dirty and try to clean up what has now become a dirty word: politics. That’s one of the problems. You have Gresham’s Law operating the electoral arena. Bad candidates, bad political practices, dirty money drive out good candidates, good political practices, and clean ones.

And, oh, in answer to your [other question]. Obama has more capacity than any of the other presidential candidates. By that I mean he has the broadest potential spectrum. And his work in neighborhood organizing in Illinois and New York had a deep impact on him. But he hasn’t filled in the blanks. And he is overdue. It’s hard to read a book called The Audacity of Hope and go through 300 pages or more [when] he doesn’t have many specifics. So now it’s time for him to write the final chapter of that book, when he comes out with a new edition. And it should be called The Audacity of Truth, because he hasn’t filled the blanks. And the question is, and he’s thought about this, [whether] he can go through a year raising, with his hand out, $150 million, a lot from commercial interests, and emerge the same person? And he questions that himself.

Have you talked to him about this?

No. I am going to try and to go down to see him.

I am just reading [his] book now. The one thing that does seem to come through is the question about running a positive campaign and what that can do in terms of revitalizing the whole idea about what politics should be in this country.

But it does come down to, how courageous are you going to be on the Middle East? How courageous are you going to be on energy? Not one of the major candidates is for single-payer [health care]. They talk about universal health care, which will be blown sky-high with the corrupt, redundant, wasteful health-care system we have.

They just don’t talk about full Medicare for everybody. Government pays the bill with quality and cost controls. And the private economy delivers the services. And you have your free choice of doctor and hospital, which you don’t have under HMO regimes. And he [Obama] has got to come out. He doesn’t want to come out against nuclear power, even though people who know him say he is against nuclear power. He won’t make an issue of the corporate criminality that’s eating at the entrails of our society and has drained or diluted trillions of dollars in pensions, and investors, and workers. I mean, if you can’t take stands like this when the business media is reporting all of this stuff every day — and people like [Elliot] Spitzer [of New York] give you political cover, as he swept into the governor’s office on that issue alone — there is something holding him back.

And what do you think that is?

It’s called the lowest-common-denominator politics and protective imitation. You just do what the other major candidates do, [but] better. You do it with refreshed language. You do it with more authentic disposition. And you do it with a little curlicue that’s different. But you don’t really break out into arenas that reflect the hopes, necessities, and justice of the public or the people.

But if elections do turn out to be the lesser of two evils, isn’t that a safe and possibly winning strategy?

Yeah. Yeah, it is. But it’s a winning strategy. A civil-rights leader introduced me in Flint [Michigan] in front of a large audience, in 2000, and he said, about the two parties — and I was running on the Green Party — he said, “They keep telling us to vote for the winners, and we keep losing.” So, what is winning? What does a candidate win when he doesn’t win with a mandate? I mean, if you run on a corporate crime, law-and-order platform and you win, you have got a mandate. But if you ignore so many areas, like full Medicare for everyone, even though you believe it . . . Listen, Hillary [Clinton] believes in single-payer, Obama believes in single-payer, [John] Edwards believes in single-payer. Anybody with a head on their shoulder believes it. But they won’t say it. So let’s say they win. And what’s their mandate?

Do you think Paul Wellstone would have been the kind of candidate you are talking about?

Yeah. He would have been a great candidate. He wasn’t totally courageous, but he was more courageous than any other senator, more courageous than [Russ] Feingold. Feingold voted against a fuel-efficiency bill that [John] Kerry and [John] McCain put forward a few years ago, because of the UAW [United Auto Workers], which is shooting itself in the foot in one of the most suicidal positions I have ever seen [from] a union. They keep losing workers, in part, due to [the] superior fuel efficiency of the Japanese, especially around 1979-80. And they just line up with the auto companies, because the auto companies traded off for them in terms of job security. So they are presiding over a shrinking union with job security, instead of forcing the technological breakthroughs or applications that would have carved out a bigger market share for GM [General Motors], Ford, and Chrysler.

Well, just to sum up and get back to the question about the buying of the president. Do you think that the lid is going to be completely off this time? And that from now on it will just go up higher and higher and higher in terms of total expenditures for candidates?

Yeah. We are dealing with geometric four-year increases. We are not dealing with arithmetic. It’s now geometric. I mean we are almost to a point where we are doubling every four years.

And what does that means in terms of the candidates and the quality of a prospective president?

It drains their time. It drains their better natures as to what they would prefer to talk about and advocate. And it indentures them to unspoken or spoken quid pro quos with the commercial interests, all of which turn our government ever more into a corporate government, dominated on the inside and outside by corporate power. And you can just see it getting worse every year. And the regulatory agencies . . . The Democrats, once in a while, would challenge the defense budget. You remember? That’s taboo now. [Al] Gore didn’t do it. Kerry didn’t do it. They tried to out-Republican the Republicans. [They say:] “I’d increase the military. I would increase.” They are in a race to devour the federal budget. It’s already 50 percent of the federal operating budget. We would have no more major enemies, [including the] Soviet Union.

Do you see, in kind of a perverse way, that this growing explosion and campaign spending could persuade somebody like Bill Gates to get into it?

Yeah.

Simply because there is so much money in the system, and that he would be the one guy — in his own mind, anyway, and maybe yours — who would be willing to use all of those millions of dollars for the things that need to be done.

That’s what’s coming on the horizon. That’s what I see as the perturbation that explodes the system. Because what all of this is doing, in a sum, is it’s destroying an already weak democracy, on an accelerated installment plan. And so I can see these billionaires saying: “They want to play the money game? I’ll show them the money game.” They just blast form. But it doesn’t mean anything unless they have a reform agenda that they can blast form with. What’s interesting is [that] it’s more likely for a liberal billionaire to throw his hat in the ring, or her hat in the ring, than a right-wing billionaire. Because the right-wing billionaire is pretty satisfied now with the way things are going for big business, unless he happens to be an evangelical one-issue person. But you see, even someone like Bill Moyers, I think, could raise $50 million easily, I think, both through the Internet and there are a lot of progressive, rich people who love him, who have got a lot of money. And they have got a network. But again, it’s Gresham’s Law.

How much would that [$50 million] be in a race [like the one] that’s coming up now?

Well, with someone who is fairly well-known . . .

That would be enough?

Oh, yeah. In the primary period, yeah, [with] someone who is fairly well-known, who is going to get media because of who he is.

Do you think the development of the Internet — not only as a fundraising vehicle, but as a vehicle for engaging more voices, putting more messages out there — could be a factor that would limit the need for money?

Not if it’s moving into the mega-cacophony stage. You can’t hear it. It’s too much. It’s like a paramecium being suffocated by its own exudations. Too many websites, too many blogs, too many voices, too fractured audiences. I mean, I am not saying that’s bad; I am saying that the Internet is great to alert people to information, to alert them to meetings. But it hasn’t proved itself to increase the turnout on the vote very much.

And it’s also great to raise money inexpensively. But I don’t see it as a really dynamic factor yet, other than raising money in small amounts. It may well be someday. But let’s put it this way: The peak use is MoveOn. And MoveOn has got three million [members]. And there is no second MoveOn and third MoveOn, which is a mystery to me. It’s like there is a Hertz, but no Avis. I don’t quite know why.