ABSTRACT

But starting in the 1980s, Nader began to see that the efforts of the public interest community he had helped spawn were regularly being blocked and trumped by an equally well-organized and much better funded mobilization of big business. It's getting harder and harder to get anything done, he would tell audiences. Congress was in thrall to big money; the media were doing fewer investigative reports, those that they did do weren't reverberating into legislative action the way they used to; and the White House was a "corporate prison," subservient to powerful special interests no matter who was president. Some of Nader's friends and associates tried to get him to enter electoral politics himself, in the hopes of transforming his high public standing-Life magazine called him one of the hundred most influential people of the twentieth century-into millions of votes. In 1992, he resisted an organized "Draft Nader for President" push led by several close allies in the public interest community, but traveled up to New Hampshire and asked voters to write in his name as a stand-in for "none of the above" and to demand a new set of enhanced citizen powers, which he called a "democracy tool kit." Two percent of the voters in each major party primary, Democrats and Republicans alike, wrote in Nader's name. It was a disappointing showing to his supporters, but Nader saw a silver lining in how some of the other candidates, particularly Democrat Jerry Brown, adopted whole chunks of his reform platform.