Ladies and Gentlemen: President Ralph Nader

I was glad to see Ralph Nader in his appearance at the National Press Club talking about Professor Galbraith of the University of Texas as a possible replacement for Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan when he, Nader, moves into the Oval Office next January. The more Nader is seen by people as someone who is eager to be president, could run the country decisively, the more they'll feel it worth voting for him as a protest against the two main choices. People don't like to throw away a vote on someone who has no credibility at all.

There's been some talk in the Nader camp of him going to Los Angeles to attend the "shadow convention" being organized by Arianna Huffington. I hope he doesn't. It would put him in the role of pipsqueak would-be show-stealer, which is a profile he doesn't need. He should be presidential, somewhere else.

Nader is pretty ebullient these days. I chatted with him on the phone just after he'd got back from Columbus, Ohio, where he'd had a crowd of over a thousand. A bunch of steel workers had come to cheer him on, and he reckons that if it was up to union locals to do endorsements he'd make a very good showing among organized labor in places like Michigan, where he's already showing well. He reckons that when Pat Buchanan comes out of the Reform Party convention next month, with over $10 million under his belt and a lot of organizing, the whole dynamics of the campaign will change and the impact of his and Buchanan's drives could be major.

It's only July, and Nader is terrifying the Gore crowd. Omens of their disquiet have come in the form of attacks on Nader by Anthony Lewis in the New York Times and Katha Pollitt in the The Nation. Pollitt came right out and said it: if Nader draws support from Gore and Bush wins, then he'll load up the U.S. Supreme Court with clones of Antonin Scalia, and it will be bye-bye Roe v. Wade.

The arguments about Gore, Bush, and who they will put on the court are intense but in the end an empty exercise in hypotheticals. The two most progressive people on the present court, Stevens and Souter, were both put there by Republican presidents. The man who wrote the Roe v. Wade decision was Blackmun, put in by Nixon, and the man who most bitterly dissented from it was Whizzer White, put in by Kennedy. If Gore got into the White House and the Senate was held by Republicans, he'd have to get his nominees past Orrin Hatch. On the political plane, will the Republican Party ever end abortion for middle-class women? Of course not.

At the Los Angeles convention, Democrats will tell Americans they've never had it better. But who exactly has had it better in America over the past eight years? The crowd cheering Bush and Cheney in Philadelphia was mostly feeling flush. And the big contributors to the Democratic National Committee, feted in LA, will be feeling flush, too. Through eight years Clinton-Gore never let them down. But Gore still needs the votes of people who aren't feeling flush, who won't be renting sky suites in the Staples Center in LA. How have these people been doing these last eight years?

Robert Pollin, a good economist at the University of Massachusetts, has an "Anatomy of Clintonomics" in the bimonthly periodical New Left Review for May/June of this year. It doesn't offer much comfort to those trying to run the "Gore is the friend of the working people" flag up the pole.

The record: "Clinton had done virtually nothing to advance the interests of working people or organized labor." What about the two-step rise in the minimum wage? Answer: the overall rise from $4.25 to the current $5.15 has done little to offset the plunge in the real value of the minimum wage. Even the rate of $5.15 set in September 1997 is 30% below its real value in 1968, even though the economy has become 50% more productive across that 30 years.

Nor can it be said that under Clinton-Gore organized labor enjoyed much of a renaissance, starting with the kick in the face from Clinton-Gore over NAFTA. Remember that back in 1992 some optimistic people were even talking about reform of the Taft-Hartley anti-labor law. In 1988, Reagan's last year, the percentage of the total work force in unions stood at 16.8. In 1998 it had fallen to 13.9.

How about anti-poverty programs? Pollin looks at all the claims made by the administration for the glories of the earned income tax credit, offsets these against the destruction of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), and factors in the decline in the number of people getting food stamps (five times greater than the decline in the number of people in poverty). Then he spells out the conclusion that the combination of a low minimum wage and a widening of the earned income tax credit "have allowed business to offer rock-bottom wages, while shifting onto taxpayers the cost of alleviating the poverty of even those holding full-time jobs." In sum, the overall conditions of life for America's poorest households may have worsened during the Clinton administration.

So much for the destitute. What of working people and the poor? Both the average wages of non-supervisory workers and the earnings of those in the lowest tenth percentile of wage distribution remain not only well below those of the Nixon-Ford and Carter administrations, but are actually lower than those of the Reagan-Bush years. Wage inequalities have also shot up. "If low rates of unemployment have been a positive feature of the 1990s," Pollin writes, "it is still quite possible that the overall condition of the poor will prove to have worsened in Clinton's final years of office."

Pollin concludes that the core of Clinton's economic program has been global economic integration, with minimum interventions to promote equity in labor markets or stability in financial markets. Gestures to the least well-off have been slight and back-handed, while wages for the majority have either stagnated or declined. Wealth at the top, meanwhile, has exploded.

In eight years working people got virtually nothing out of the Clinton-Gore administration except what fed chairman Alan Greenspan termed exultantly in 1997, "subdued wages" and heightened job insecurity. There are now 45 million instead of 35 million people without health insurance. Many of them are ready to rebel. Green Party candidate Ralph Nader is doing well not only up and down the West Coast, but in the rust belt states. In Connecticut Nader's now polling 11%.

If Nader starts edging up towards 15% he'll be able to make a strong case for getting into the debates. Once there he'll be able to tell voters facts they won't ever hear at either convention or from the mouths of either George W. Bush or Al Gore.