Transcript: Nader's Concession Speech
Nov. 7, 2000 -- GREEN PARTY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE RALPH NADER: Thank you very much. Thank you very much, all of you. We really did go. Our last campaign appearance was in Portland, Maine, at 1:30 this morning.
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And the place was rocking. They were really moving up there,having gone from New York to Boston to Durham, University of NewHampshire, and Maine.
Well, first let me thank all the people who worked on thiscampaign. I mean, what we know for sure is that we’re coming out ofthis Election Day with the third-largest party in America, replacingthe Reform Party, and going on …
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… and building a long-term, progressive, reform movement.That’s really quite an achievement. It took lots of people all overthe country to do that. It took great staff working day and nighthere in Washington.
And above all, it took a commitment by people to no longer settlefor the least of the worst or the lesser of two evils, where at theend of the day you’re stuck with worse and evil.
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Climbing …
AUDIENCE MEMBER: We love you, Ralph!
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NADER: Trying to challenge the entrenched two-party system, thisis really a lot what the campaign was about.
The two parties rigged the statutory barriers to get onthe ballot for starters. And they command most of the money, byraising corrupt soft money and corporate money and PAC money, all ofwhich we rejected. All of which we rejected because we want to set anexample of what is necessary for real reform of our corrupt campaignfinance system.
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And then, of course — and of course you’re up against — most of the media coverage is on the horse race between the two horses …
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… that are tired and hollow and have forgotten even to eattheir oats in order to reinvigorate themselves.
And then, the two parties control the debate commission, which isreally a private company control. And they exclude third-partycandidates.
So, really, it’s quite an amazing and varied system of riggingthe election for the two major parties against fresh political starts,which is why the two political parties can’t regenerate themselves,because they’re excluding all kinds of competition and insteadimitating themselves — protective imitation.
As the Republican and Democratic parties take more money from thesame sources, they morph into one corporate party with two heads, andpresume that it really matters for the State Department or DefenseDepartment or Treasury Department or Departments of Commerce, Labor,Agriculture or the health and safety regulatory agencies — whether itreally matters whether Gore or Bush are in the White House, becausethey don’t make the decisions. The decisions are made by the peoplewe trip over Washington, D.C., every day: 22,000 corporate lobbyistsand 9,000 political action committees pumping money into bothRepublican and Democratic coffers.
This is what we expected was going to happen, and we tookthem on. And the important thing here is that we have reached a take-off stage in the Green Party and that this is the last time that thetwo parties in a national election will have the monopoly power toexclude significant third party competitors from the debates, becausewe are going to break the monopoly of the debate commission.
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Going around the country, you get the feeling that there aremillions of people who are really ready for a new, progressivepolitical movement. And it takes a lot of work, it takes a lot ofwork to get them together and to believe that they can do it becauseof the dominance of the two party duopoly. But we have now seenenormous talent come out from all over the country, not just as localand state candidates on the Green Party, like Medea Benjamin inCalifornia running for the U.S. Senate.
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But we’ve seen seasoned citizen activists who recognize that thecivil society has been crowded out in Washington increasingly in thelast 20 years by the two corporate parties.
And we have to heed Thomas Jefferson’s wisdom that when ourgovernment is taken away from us, we have to go into the politicalarena and mobilize new political and civic energies throughout theUnited States in order to come back and take our government back fromthe corporate supremacists who think that there’s nothing they can’t control, there’s nothing that they can’t commercialize, there’s nothing that they cannot daunt. And we’re going to prove them wrong in a very decisive manner.
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Now, most members of the press misread the distinctiveness ofthis Green Party mobilization. They think, well, it’s just likeanother Green Party. It makes a valiant effort and the elections overand then it recedes then their leaders go back into their business inTexas or elsewhere.
This is not …
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This is not that type of Green Party.
Right after the election, the Green Party moves and locks armswith all those citizen and neighborhood groups all over the UnitedStates who are fighting for a more just America, who are fighting forenvironment, fighting to establish missions against policy andenforcing the civil rights laws and the civil liberties laws; missionsto say to the American people that the choice is the sovereignty ofthe people or the sovereignty of global corporations over the UnitedStates of America.
And that’s an easy choice to decide on whose side we’re going tobe. We’re going to be on the side of the sovereignty of the people.
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Also it’s important to note that in our country you cannot fire acitizen. Understand?
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And the coordination and the side-by-side forward movement of thecivic groups in our country and their political ally in the GreenParty is going to give an authenticity. It’s going to ground themovement. It’s going to get much more seasoned talent into thepolitical party than other political parties are capable for.
The Connecticut Green Party, for example, in the last four yearshas led on challenging the nuclear power plants that are in thatstate. And it mobilized the whole state, against the odds, to throwthe NFL Patriots football team back to Boston and get out of a half abillion dollar stadium boondoggle.
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And standing with labor on living wage issues. You know, there’sno Republican Party, no Democratic Party in those struggles. The twoparties — the two major parties, after election they take a few daysoff, they relax, and then they turn themselves into money raisingmachines for the duration.
Well, the Green Party turns itself into a civic force, tobuild both the critical civil society and the political institutionsthat will represent that civil society.
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We had some funny moments, and I don’t mean going on SaturdayNight Live or Dave Letterman. We had some funny moments in thatMasterCard parody. And MasterCard was foolish enough to sue us …
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… saying that we violated their trademark registration in theword “priceless.” Can you imagine? They put a price on priceless.
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Well, all of these moments will be recalled with pleasure becausewe really performed I think all of us in a very exemplary manner.There is a lot of content behind David Broder, the Washington Postpolitical editor, who this Sunday wrote a column and said: Who ranthe best campaign in the presidential campaign year? And he said,hands down, it was the Green Party, and the Nader-LaDuke candidacy.
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Thank you.
And he thought Bush second, and Gore third. And let me tell you,everybody who knows Dave Broder knows that he does not deal out praisevery liberally. So we really have to work hard to earn thatcommendation by him.
But I think it reflects that we really practiced what we preachedin order to preach what we practice, not just in the way we raised ourfunds, but the way we comported ourselves, focusing on one importantissue after another, which the media systemically ignored, as theycontinued to pepper us with the horse race questions.
Those of you that are interested in the full agenda,which will be pushed further in coming months, the Web site isvotenader.com or votenader.org.
It really is quite unique, in the sense that having received 1percent of the national media coverage and having raised less than 1percent of the money, and having been excluding from the debates thatthe majority of the coverage was on the horse race. “Oh, are yougoing to be a spoiler?” And I would say, “Well, you can’t spoil a system spoiled to the core.”
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And it became so predictable that the reporters would say, “Iknow you’ve been asked about this 1,000 times,” and I felt like having a recorded announcement, you know, boom. But then that would’ve been too much like the corporations who tell you to call 1-800 and say press one, press two, so I didn’t want to do that.
It really didn’t give us a chance to raise the subject matterthat the press over the years has been reporting on: corporate crime,corporate welfare, the whole problem of labor and the living wage,WTO, NAFTA. All these things are reported on the major press; theGore and Bush campaigns ignored all these issues uniformly in theirlook-alike status. And, still, the press was obsessed with the horserace questions.
So one of the goals after the election is to, in a very kindlyway, give some of the media an invitation to learn about what thecriteria are for newsworthiness, in order to cover in the futurethird-party candidates.
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Because we attracted the largest, mass-paid political rallies byfar of any presidential candidate. Madison Square Garden, the BostonGarden, the Target Center, all the huge arenas we filled with GreenParty enthusiasts. That’s one criteria.
Another is our 37-year record on weekends and during weekdays offighting for the American people, for safer cars and food and air andwater, and trying to make the government more accountable and thecorporations more responsive.
And the third criteria is that we have all kinds of peopleorganized all over the country, working their hearts out and theirminds out for our effort.
And the fourth criteria is that we were above the screenin the polls, if they thought that was an important criteria.
So we had the agenda, we had the rallies, we had the record, wehad the polls rising, and still it wasn’t newsworthy. So you see, alot of these journalists are caught in a trap, kind of a time warp,and we’ve got to liberate them as well.
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Now, I want to thank people for voting for us. The people whohave yet to vote out in the West Coast and Alaska and Hawaii, they cancertainly build our reservoir of voters so we can go forward afterthis Election Day with a great second leap forward in 2002, with allkinds of good people running for local, state and federal office,building not just an exemplary election record, not just building aunifying force with a civil society, but above all building a deepdemocracy. That’s what it’s really all about, building a deepdemocracy so we can really put some reality into this hallowed phrase,“A government of, by and for the people.”
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And I just want to — I want to introduce our campaign managerand as a representative of so many hard-working people of ourheadquarter staff, Theresa Amato.
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And I want to introduce that the person who really was the causefor this entire movement and this entire mobilization, and she starteda long time ago, my mother, Rose Nader.
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When I was a school boy, once, I came home, and we were havingdinner table conversation about all the things that go on in theworld.
And she looked at me and she said, “Ralph, do you reallylove your country?” And I said, “Why, of course, mother,” wondering what was going to come next.
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And she said, “Well, I do hope you will grow up and work hard tomake your country more lovable.”
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I never forgot that.
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Just very briefly, I want to introduce my sister, ProfessorLauren Nader, at University of California Berkeley, my niece, RhaniaMilleron (ph), about to be a Ph.D. in infectious diseases.
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My sister, Claire, who is the chair of the Council forResponsible Genetics, among many other activities in Cambridge,Massachusetts.
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We’ll be back, as our great supporter Phil Donahue said on 6,000television shows. We’ll be back in a few moments. Thank you.