Driven to distract (continued)

Q: So if someone like Richard Egan, Bush's lead fundraiser here, donates thousands of dollars to your campaign, doesn't that at least provide fodder for the people who don't want you to run? Can you see why that would make them think the Republicans view Ralph Nader as a pawn?

A: Except that the Democrats raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Republican fat cats, and the Republicans raised hundreds of millions from Democratic fat cats over a decade, because they both play both sides of the aisle. They're hedging their bets, you see? Twenty-five percent of our vote last time would've voted for Bush, according to the exit polls. Ten percent or less of our big donors are coming from the Republicans. I don't even know who Egan is. I'm going to give him a call. He might be someone who just believes in civil liberties.

Q: I think he's a big Bush guy, so --

A: No, he is. But you know Jeno Paulucci [a Minnesota packaged-foods magnate]? We worked with him years ago on the Mesabi Iron Range disaster [in which iron ore mines were shut down for having polluted the area and thousands of workers lost their jobs]. He's given money to Bush. But he wants more voices and choices.

Q: You've accused the Democratic Party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, of sanctioning dirty tricks aimed at keeping you off the ballot in key battleground states.

A: Right.

Q: And you've warned John Kerry that he risks, as you put it, a "mini-Watergate" if these efforts continue. Are you considering legal action against the Democratic Party or the Kerry campaign?

A: If it continues, and they cross the legal line, and we're seeing just the tip of the iceberg—because my experience is, when you see what we already see, it's a lot of meetings, strategies, this, that, they're harassing our signature gatherers in a coordinated way in West Virginia—we will preserve our legal remedies.

Q: Some prominent individuals who supported you in 2000 -- Michael Moore, Granny D, Jim Hightower -- urged you before you declared not to run and then, once you got in the race, have bemoaned your candidacy. Did any of them offer arguments that gave you pause before you decided to run?

A: Just the reverse. I've read Michael Moore's book and it's one of the best condemnations of the Democratic Party in its cowardly stature.

Q: Which book? Stupid White Men?

A: Yes, and the one before [Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American]. And I've read, in manuscript, [Jim] Hightower's book [If The Gods Had Meant Us To Vote, They'd Have Given Us Candidates]. When I was reading it before I decided to run, I said, This could be the manual for running! And suddenly I hear Hightower say he'd vote for a bag of cement if that was all that was standing against George W. Bush. But you know what that means? That means that you're not asking Kerry for anything in return. Here's the problem I put before Kerry. You got all the groups that support you by not making any demands on you because they're so freaked out by Bush. That means, if you get elected, you have no mandate. And all these -- Sierra Club, civil liberties, African-American groups, labor groups -- ask yourself: Have they made any demands on John Kerry, on living wage and so forth? That is a prescription for the following -- allowing the Kerry-Edwards ticket to be pulled only in one direction, by the corporations, because you, the supporting Democrats, are not demanding anything in return to pull in the other direction. So they're selling out their vote very cheaply.

Q: Would you have run if Dean were the nominee?

A: Yes, because I know Dean as a governor, and I measure a politician by his record, not his rhetoric. And given what he's just done -- completely forgotten all of his devastating critiques of John Kerry, when he called him the lesser of two evils, just like George W. Bush, another special-interest clone in Washington -- and now he's praising him to the skies.

Q: Don't you have to do that, though, if you're running in a contested primary? Don't you go for the nomination as aggressively as you can and then help out whoever wins once they win?

A: And that's the way you lose your credibility. That's the way you feed public cynicism. That's the way you make people not want to have anything to do with politics.

Q: For many people who worry that your candidacy might help bring about a Republican victory, your determination to press on suggests an intransigence and an inability to critically assess the impact of your own actions. Is that an unfair characterization?

A: Of course. I'm a fighter for justice. I'm the underdog candidate for the tens of millions of American underdogs who are being pushed around, disrespected, harmed, defrauded, laid off arbitrarily, and otherwise marginalized from the political scene. You see, the same people who would make that comment that you just communicated would be horrified if they heard anybody in the 19th century say that to the women's suffrage party, to the abolition party, to the labor party, to the populist-progressive party. And to show their hypocrisy, let me pose a question in return to the pro-choice constituency in the United States. If both parties were adamantly against choice, how many seconds would it take for the pro-choice people to form a third party? Tick tock, tick tock. And if both parties were adamantly against any kind of gun control, how long would it take for the gun control advocates to try to teach them both a lesson by forming a splinter party? In other words, we have 30 issues like that that are being blocked and opposed by both parties. Life and death issues, global issues, local issues, issues relating to health care and consumer safety and pollution and toxics and globalization and war and peace, et ceter A: This is a very important point. What I'm trying to do is put these viral liberals, as we call them, up against the wall to face themselves. We have 30 issues. All our groups have been shut out, regardless of Democrat or Republican.

Now let me make one other point to you, and it's this. It is amazing that the liberal Democrats who will fight to the end to preserve your right to speak, petition and assemble on Boston Common suddenly say that they oppose your right to speak, petition, assemble if you apply those First Amendment rights inside the electoral arena. And what these liberals are not taking into consideration is, it's not just a two-party duopoly. Those two parties are leaving 95 percent of voters with one party districts. You know how bad it is in the Massachusetts Legislature? Sixty percent of the incumbents have no opponent on the ballot. Now, I want this to sink in. An election implies selection. When there's no selection, there's no election, there's no democracy. There's authoritarianism, you see? And they can't get it through their heads that this is the ultimate destruction of a democracy, short of the hobbled boot smashing down doors at 4 A:m. It's done in a silent way. They've carved up the country, and it's either Republican incumbent and no one else or Democratic incumbent and no one else.

Q: Are you talking about congressional races?

A: And state legislative races. It's increasingly coming at the state level. Now, why did these viral liberals sit around pontificating in their cafes when their party for 25 years was being sucked away from them into the corporate grip? And they have the nerve to lecture us?

Q: I want to make sure I understand the genesis of "viral liberal." "Viral liberal" because…?

A: Viral liberal means that when you are Anybody But Bush, no matter if you're a PhD or a working stiff, the brain closes down. And no other strategies, tactics, no other variables, no other arguments come into play whatsoever. And it also means you make no demands on your least-worst candidate. And it also means when you buy into the least worst, both parties are going to get worse every four years. Why? Because the only pull is the corporate pull in one direction. That's why we call them viral. Because when a virus strains through a lot of people, it has the same effect.

Q: Just to return to that last question: If you had to convince skeptics that you can critically assess what you do, could you cite one major mistake or misstep that you made -- say, in the last decade?

A: Who, me?

Q: Yes.

A: All kinds! I mean, that's why we lose. My biggest error was that I proposed, when the planes were being hijacked to Cuba, the FAA toughen cockpit doors and latches 30-some years ago. The airlines didn't want to spend a few thousand bucks per plane, and the rest is history.

Q: But that's a good idea that you had that other people didn't heed.

A: I'm talking about failures. Mistakes?

Q: Something that you would do differently if you could rewind the clock.

A: Well, I mean, give me the context. What do you want? Politically? Personally?

Q: Let's say politically.

A: Well, yeah! You make hundreds of mistakes in politics. For example, I would have gone more for county-level organization and less giving interviews to cable TV in Washington, because that's the way you develop a core of volunteers who spread the word. Another way: I would have developed a bigger way of raising funds earlier in 2000. We were very late to the Internet.

Q: So are we going to see you at the DNC, or are you keeping your distance?

A: Well, I'm asking Terry McAuliffe to give me a pass. We joked about it a few months ago. I'm not joking now. So we formally asked him today. I don't want to crash the party.

Adam Reilly can be reached at areilly[a]phx.com.