Legal Commentary

I think that Democrats have much less to fear this time. Nader's candidacy means something quite different in 2008 than it does in 2000. In 2000, Nader was one of several factors that put George W. Bush in the White House. And in fairness to him, he was only one factor.

My guess is that there is very little chance that Nader will decide the outcome of the 2008 election; he will probably have very small numbers, as he did in 2004. Third parties who do not quickly displace one of the two major parties (as the Republicans displaced the Whigs in the 1850s) tend not to wear well on repeated attempts.

Rather, if Nader has any significance in this election, it will be to push certain issues on the table, and force the candidates to address them. To do that, he would have to be a much more significant presence than he is likely to be. Nader is quite interested in pushing the corruption issue-- and the connections between corporate lobbying and Washington politics-- but public interest in that issue is by now overdetermined.

In the 2000 election, Nader represented the left's displeasure as much with Clintonism as with Republican politics. Nader's assertion that there was no difference between the two candidates in 2000 was premised on the idea that Gore would prove to be as much of an accommodator of conservative Republicans as Clinton had been and that, like Clinton, Gore would accept the framing of political issues and political possibilities in a Republican dominated age. That is, Nader ran against the accomodationist model of Democratic electoral success that Clinton had perfected.

It is worth noting that many Democrats now agree with Nader that this model is outmoded, and their preference for something more has created problems for Hillary Clinton's candidacy.

Bill Clinton's model of Democratic electoral success, whatever its political advantages, had two unfortunate side effects. One was a strongly chastened sense of what politics could do-- at least with respect to the progressive agenda. The second is that with the President and Congress converging on a fair number of issues-- like balanced budgets and welfare reform-- Republicans turned to the politics of scandal as the best technique for undermining the Democratic electoral strategy, and Bill Clinton was only too happy to help them out.

We will never know if Gore would have followed in Clinton's footsteps as a clever accommodator of Reaganism: he was certainly not as agile a politician as Clinton, and Vice-Presidents following successful two term presidents (Van Buren, George H.W. Bush) have not fared well. Perhaps most important, the 9/11 attacks reshaped the focus of American politics to foreign policy.

Gore would probably have had a different presidency than Bush, and many of his policies would have been different. Without a chorus of neoconservatives in the White House, the chances of an Iraq war in response to 9/11 would have been small. However Gore would have faced a very conservative and partisan Republican-controlled Congress following a bitterly contested election, and that Congress would not have been in much of a mood for cooperation. Gore might have served only one term, and the Republicans might have retained control of Congress.

With Bush in the White House instead, the President took the nation into an unnecessary war and a disastrous foreign policy blunder, the Republican coalition underwent enormous strains, and the Democrats retook both houses of Congress.

If Nader is responsible for Bush's Presidency, then, he is responsible not only for the havoc Bush created but also the Democrats' enviable political position today. It is an irony of history, but history is often ironical in precisely this way. Nader in 2008 may now be largely irrelevant, but that is because in 2000 Nader did his small part in in setting in motion the events that led to the political downfall of the Republican Party and the dissolution of the Reagan coalition. And with the end of the Reagan coalition, the reactive Clintonian strategy of triangulation, co-opation of Republican themes and deliberate chastening of progressive aspirations may seem unnecessary; indeed, the end of the Reagan coalition may give way to a new form of politics far more hospitable to liberalism and progressive values. Democrats who blame Nader for putting Bush in the White House will probably give Nader little credit for that, but it probably pleases Nader a great deal.