In the Bunker

Ralph Nader goes from righteous to self-righteous.

by Sam Adams

RALPH MAKES ME WANT TO...: Nader shares the love. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

From seat belts to train wrecks, Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan's documentary An Unreasonable Man traces Ralph Nader's evolution from consumer advocate to electoral scapegoat. Or rather non-evolution, since the movie's thesis is that the same hard-headedness that allowed him to take on the auto industry in the 1960s helped him tune out the pleas of those who begged him to sit out the 2000 and 2004 elections. (Should the latter sound like an exaggeration, the movie includes footage of Michael Moore and Bill Maher dropping to their knees and imploring him not to run in 2004.) In other words, blame him for Bush if you must, but don't forget the good he did beforehand.

The argument isn't convincing even on its face: If, as the filmmakers suggest, Nader deserves credit for the nearly 200,000 lives saved in the last three decades by the seat belts he helped make mandatory, what about the 340,000 lives lost in Iraq since 2003? But there's a more intriguing and more poignant story lurking under the surface, one that comes through even though the movie never quite addresses it. In a sense, Nader's downfall is the inevitable fallout from the clash between the unwavering idealism of the old left and the compromised pragmatism of the Democratic party under and after Bill Clinton.

Nader's absolutism served him well as a citizen crusader, but it ironically turned his greatest victory into the beginning of the end. An Unreasonable Man spends much of its first hour on Nader's victories of the 1960s and '70s — the Clean Air Act, the Freedom of Information Act, the creation of the EPA and OSHA, to name only a few — building up to the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter, at whose side a smiling Nader is seen giving counsel. Nader's longtime ally Joan Claybrook was appointed to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which should have been the ultimate vindication for a man who had spent more than a decade urging the auto industry to make cars safer.

Not surprisingly, however, Claybrook had to play politics, and when she allowed the automobile industry to build a four-year delay into an airbag bill, Nader struck back at his former ally without hesitation, publicly denouncing her at her own press conference. Nearly 30 years later, Claybrook still sounds stung by the confrontation, but Nader doesn't hesitate to defend his actions, dismissing the place of "sentiment" and saying that Claybrook "broke the back" of the automobile safety movement. (Oddly enough, Claybrook has served as president of Nader's Public Citizen since her exit from the Carter administration, which you may chalk up to loyalty or Stockholm Syndrome as you see fit.) There's something chilling and frankly dislikable about the ice-cold assurance with which Nader talks about his decision to stab Claybrook in the back, and something familiar, too — it's the same tone he takes when talking about the 2000 election.

Mantel and Skrovan devote nearly half of their two-hour film to the 2000 campaign and its subsequent fallout. They remind us that the campaign was ugly long before its hideous denouement, and that rather than responding to the obviously potent ideas Nader represented, both sides attempted to shut him out of the debate. Literally: Not only was Nader denied a spot in the presidential debates, but he was barred from the grounds and threatened with arrest for attempting to attend a closed-circuit simulcast. The disgraceful attempt to wish Nader out of existence so that the two well-funded candidates of the major parties could get on with the business of fighting for the center utterly vindicates Nader's contention that the nation's democratic process is held captive to a few powerful interests, and the footage of Nader calmly confronting the unfortunate police officer saddled with the task of turning him away instills a fresh sense of outrage that, for once, is directed at Nader's opponents and not at him.

The trouble is that, however right Nader was about the democratic process, he was dead wrong in his contention that there wasn't "a dime's bit of difference" between Bush and Gore, a line that, as one commentator notes here, will surely end up in the first paragraph of Nader's obituary. Watching Nader positively crowing on the morning after Election Day, 2000, as if proving his point were more important than establishing a legitimate presidency, it's hard not to share the white-hot anger expressed by establishment liberals Eric Alterman and Todd Gitlin, who spare no epithet in assaulting Nader's character, ideology and mental health. As Teresa Amato, Nader's campaign manager, points out, any one of a half-dozen third-party candidates polled more votes in Florida than the 537 votes separating Bush and Gore, which would seem to put a dent in the theory that he was solely responsible for Bush's victory (especially since, and excuse me for saying so, Gore didn't actually lose). But it's the height of disingenuousness to claim that Nader had no influence on the election, or that the principles Nader stands for were better served by his token campaign than they would have been by Bush's defeat.

It's equally dishonest for Alterman and Gitlin to attack Nader with 20-20 hindsight, accusing him of wantonly ushering Bush into office when no one could have imagined the unprecedented debacle that the Florida recount became. But it would help if Nader could simply acknowledge that he might have erred, rather than blaming everyone but himself. It wouldn't change history, but it might well change his legacy, and win back a few of the allies he has roundly alienated. Perhaps the greatest irony of An Unreasonable Man is how closely Nader resembles the man he helped elect.

(sam@citypaper.net)

An Unreasonable Man

Directed by Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan

An IFC release

Opens Friday at Clearview Bala