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TIMES ON THE TRAIL
A continuously updated report from the campaign trail reported and edited by the Washington bureau of The Times and produced by NYTimes.com
POLITICAL POINTS | 2.14
Nader Searches for His Roots
By JOHN TIERNEY
WHILE Ralph Nader says that he will decide within the next week or two whether there is enough grass-roots support for him to run for president, so far it is not easy to discern a groundswell.
Mr. Nader tried asking visitors to his Web site, naderexplore04.com, whether he should run, but the poll was halted after a flood of negative votes orchestrated by another Web site, RalphDontRun.net, created by John Pearce, a California Democrat and former Internet executive.
"There's been a grass-roots response from people who respect Ralph Nader but don't want him to tip the balance to George Bush," Mr. Pearce said. "In just two weeks, the traffic on our Web site has grown from 100 visitors a day to nearly 9,000."
Another measure of grass-roots support, or lack thereof, can be found at meetup.com, where candidates' supporters register to arrange meetings in their communities. As of Saturday, there were more than 188,000 registered supporters for Howard Dean, 45,000 for John Kerry, 23,000 for Dennis J. Kucinich, 9,000 for John Edwards and a grand total of 375 for Mr. Nader. He did however come out ahead of the Rev. Al Sharpton, who had 233.
Mr. Nader said his decision would depend mainly on the returns from a fund-raising appeal he recently mailed, and to a lesser extent on whether Dr. Dean remains in the race. Mr. Nader said he was not dissuaded by his standing on meetup.com.
"A third party can push the agenda and increase voting turnout," said Mr. Nader, who did not sound discouraged by his low numbers on meetup.com. "I really don't deal with the Web. There isn't enough time in the day to go into virtual reality."
Welfare Queen, Meet Coatless Girl
RONALD REAGAN used to talk about a "welfare queen" in Chicago with a mink coat and a Cadillac, but he got in trouble when no one was able to locate her. Mr. Edwards is on safer rhetorical ground. He does not claim to know where the poor people in his speeches live.
In his stump speech about the "two Americas," he has repeatedly deplored the plight of the 35 million Americans below the poverty line by imagining a 10-year-old girl "somewhere in America" who goes to bed "praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today, because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm."
Last week, after Mr. Edwards introduced an imagined scenario of a worker whose factory was shutting down the very night of the speech, reporters on his plane jokingly asked if this new character was the father of the girl. Mr. Edwards laughed and replied, "You guys are bad."
To some critics of Mr. Edwards, a more serious question is whether the coatless girl is any more representative of America's poor than Mr. Reagan's Cadillac-driving welfare recipient. After all, clothing has become so cheap and plentiful (partly because of textile imports, which Mr. Edwards has proposed to limit) that there is a glut of second-hand clothing, and consequently most clothing donated to charity is shipped abroad. The second-hand children's coats that remain in America typically sell for about $5 in thrift shops.
"Edwards would do better to say there's a girl somewhere in America who's cold because her family can't afford to fix the furnace," said Robert E. Rector of the Heritage Foundation the Census Bureau and other agencies on the living standards of the poor. Since the typical American family below the poverty line has a car, air-conditioning, a microwave oven, a stereo and two color televisions with cable or satellite service, Mr. Rector said, it was implausible to assume the family could not afford coats.
Mr. Edwards's spokeswoman, Jennifer Palmieri, said that the critics were missing the point and that the coat story was a metaphor for the plight of impoverished children. "Many children are lacking more than just coats," Ms. Palmieri said. "Cheap second-hand coats from other countries aren't going to solve their problems."
The Revenge of the Trolls
SOME professionals might have been offended to hear their work dismissed as "trolling for trash," a phrase that White House spokesmen used over and over last week to describe the questions raised by Democratic officials and reporters about President Bush's National Guard service.
But this was an insult some of the trollers could enjoy, because it meant the White House cared enough to get mad.
For the past year, as Democrats have been lambasting President Bush, the White House's official stance has been to ignore Democrats' insults and reporters' questions. Journalists complained that the White House was singularly uncommunicative and disdainful, and their resentment intensified last month after a New Yorker article quoted White House officials belittling the press corps' importance in the age of cable television and the Internet.
But as Dr. Dean learned, the Internet has its limits. Last year he seemed to be the Teflon candidate, immune to attacks by the traditional press and its coverage of his supposed gaffes because he could reach his supporters directly through the Internet.
When the campaign began in earnest last month, suddenly Dr. Dean's gaffes on network television started to matter, and the mounting criticism of Mr. Bush seemed to take its toll, too. As some polls showed Mr. Bush falling behind Mr. Kerry, the president submitted to the ultimate Washington ritual of atonement, an hour of questioning on "Meet the Press," and the White House press office fought back by denouncing critics and showering reporters with Mr. Bush's records.
"A month ago I don't think the White House would have felt compelled to release all these records," said Bennett Roth, the White House correspondent for The Houston Chronicle, after the White House suddenly released hundreds of pages of National Guard records Friday evening. "They thought they could float above the criticism. Now they apparently feel they can't afford to ignore it." |
