Deja vu

I want to share a story. A story that I rarely get into because my involvement in this particular moment in history has gotten some snide comments from my peers over the years.

The year was 2000. There was an election. On the left, you had Al Gore, a stuffed shirt that was very smart but had a tendency to sound like an angry robot with no sense of humor. On the right, George Bush, a fun loving guy you could get a beer with, but wasn’t too great with policy. Both sides hated the other and said the other guy would ruin the country.

I didn’t want to vote for either of them.

I was on staff for the Green Party candidate. You might know him – an older gentleman who used to talk about consumer safety on Sesame Street. Ralph Nader was the only one in the race talking about what I wanted to talk about: corporations and their stranglehold on the American democracy, the importance of labor unions, the dire state of the minimum wage, healthcare, and the crookedness of career politicians. I ate his speeches with my overworked fingers and ordered dessert. I moved from NYC to DC when I was offered a job with his campaign. Idealistic. Full of fire and will and heart.

I believed at the time that it didn’t matter who was elected because they were both bad choices, and they were.

Nader2000 tried to get 5% of the vote, which would bring federal matching funds to the Green Party in future elections.

We called Bush and Gore Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dumber. We called Gore the GoreBot 2000. In many ways, we were hardest on Gore. We split the left. Splintered it.

I wanted my issues in the debate. I wanted the truth spoken. That’s why I was there. It felt like I was doing something important. Changing the locked two party system. Maybe changing the world. I was 27. I’d go for drinks with my colleagues and we would discuss the merits of proportional representation, abolishment of the electoral college, and campaign finance reform over pitchers of blessedly cheap beer. We worked late into the night. It felt like we were on the precipice of something bigger than us.

My job was to help create and then drum up press for political “theatre events” that would be performed near DNC and RNC events, and in the headquarters of various candidates on both sides.

The events we crafted included Bush and Gore puppets, both manipulated by the same puppeteer (see what we did there?), and dealt with all of the issues I mention above. The performers dressed as janitors and went into the campaign offices of both parties with the stats on who had donated to that candidate and announced they were there to clean up the corporate influence. They carried mops and “Caution – Slippery” signs. We called them the Corporate Influence Clean-Up Crew. We made buttons. And little bars of soap. It was clever. It was fun.

The media was largely uninterested at first, only covering our events in small towns in Georgia, Iowa and…. Florida.

As the campaign progressed, Ralph was dubbed a “spoiler.” This only made him more popular. Now we had lots of press, but mostly negative and from the left. Ralph was barred from the debates.

But he was on David Letterman. He sold out Madison Square Garden, the MCI Center. Eddie Vedder played, so did Ani DiFranco and Ben Harper and speakers included Billy Murray, Danny Glover and one of the Beastie Boys.

Democratic leaders started saying Nader should drop out or we would elect Bush. Ani DiFranco even wrote an impassioned letter saying she was switching teams that actually hurt my feelings though I had never met her. She had always been my favorite songwriter and was very influential in my life. Years later, a line in one of her songs made me wonder if she regretted this. But I still believed we were right. In fact, I still do.

Ralph was speaking truth. The system IS rigged. Corporations have too much power. No matter if you wear red or blue, this ain’t democracy.

But…

As the election neared, Pat Buchanan was also gaining traction on the right but not as much as Ralph on the left. I was on the phone with people all day who had been urged by email campaigns to flood us with calls, faxes and emails to disable us, telling us to drop out.

The team on the third floor made a wheel out of a broken CD with call categories written in black marker and would spin it when the phone rang. Some of the categories were “aliens are communicating with me” and “Can I meet Ralph?” The largest block on the spinner was labeled simply “spoiler.”

One woman asked me “what am I going to tell my children if Bush gets elected? What am I gonna say when they ask how we let that happen?” I responded, “How about you look them straight in the eye and tell them you never voted for evil just because it was lesser.” I told her to consider the precedent. Vote for Gore now because he isn’t Bush. Next time, vote for Bush because he isn’t Buchanan. The time after that, vote for Buchanan because he isn’t Satan.

I meant it. I still do.

But…

Election night. We sat on CSPAN live feed at our returns party at some hotel I forget now, watching the votes come in. I gave a quote to the Times. Our stomachs sank as we watched the states flip blue then red then blue then red again. Back and forth. The news anchors apologized for calling states too early. It came down to a few hundred votes in many places. And there we were, a campaign with enough votes to swing the election. But not 5%.

It was a long, dark night of the soul.

Turns out, we really DID want Gore more than Bush.

They really weren’t the same.

But we had voted for Nader. For the 5%. As a protest.

Right?

Both things were true. And in that simple contradiction lies the problem with it all. The sticky place that makes this election feel really familiar to me.

We left the returns party that night with no winner. “Too close to call.” In the morning, no one was president but it felt like only a momentary reprieve. The Times used my quote which was something like: “The sad thing is that we are going to wake up tomorrow morning and one of these men will be President.” They misspelled my name. They also got my title wrong. Many times in the years following I was glad of this because it doesn’t come up in a Google search of my name. We were largely vilified by the left for years for what we had done.

Bush was president. The towers fell, and under his administration, we got the Patriot Act, the largest end run around civil liberty that we have seen in my lifetime.

For many, Bush was a great president, and I’m not throwing shade on that opinion. I’d happily debate it, because healthy debate on dissenting opinions brought this country into being, but that’s not my point. For me, Bush was ideologically opposite and I didn’t take my opportunity to vote against him because of the imperfectness of his opponent. I just didn’t LIKE Gore. I wanted a candidate to vote FOR, not one to vote against so I chose in essence not to vote.

We should have a candidate that we can truly believe in with a sainted record and no flaws. But we don’t. On either side. Not then, not now. Not really. We do however have two very different candidates with very different agendas and it DOES matter which one gets elected. They will pursue very different agendas.

I still have my Nader shirt that reads, “Vote your conscience, not your fear.” I still hold this sentiment. Sometimes, I still wear the shirt. But If I could take it back, I would vote for Gore in 2000 and urge others in the eleventh hour to do the same. Not because I believed in him specifically. Because he was a better match for my ideals than Bush. I threw my vote away on principle. I still have my principles but life as a good citizen is more complicated than that.

I’m not going to tell you who to vote for, but do your homework. The hard kind. The kind you don’t find on Facebook or Fox News or CNN.

Beware the clean narrative.

Truth is always more complicated than a Tweet or a sound byte and it doesn’t matter if you “like” the candidate. It matters the policy they will enact. Get beyond your “gut” and really think through the policies each of them proposes and weigh the likelihood of those policies being real plans versus propaganda to sell on the nightly news. Think about the people who you love that might be positively or negatively affected by these policies. Think about the people you don’t know who might be affected. And then…

Vote pragmatically.

Because you will have to live with what you do with your right to vote.