Ralph Nader Wrong About Democrats & Republicans?

Ralph Nader likes to say that there is no real difference between the Republican and Democratic parties - that they are both the "Business Party," Tweedledum and Tweedledee. It's an accusation repeated by many who tend to support third parties. But is it true? A study done by a group founded by Nader shows it's not.

Paul T. von Hippel explains at The Gadflyer:

Government touches many issues, and though it's possible to find areas where the parties converge, it's also possible to find big issues on which the parties differ. Would any Republican have proposed the Clinton health plan? Would Al Gore have responded to 9/11 by invading Iraq and encouraging consumers to buy SUVs? Has either Bush ever uttered the words "carbon tax"?

Instead of cherry-picked examples, what we need is a systematic way to score politicians on a variety of public issues—especially the issues that matter to Nader and Nader voters. Fortunately, such a scoring system exists, and Ralph Nader helped to set it up. In 1975-76, Congress Watch began scoring U.S. Senators and Representatives on selected roll-call votes. Congress Watch is a branch of Public Citizen, which Ralph Nader founded in 1971 and directed until 1980.

Congress Watch scores typically show a large gap between Democrats and Republicans. In the 106th Congress—the last Congress before the 2000 election—the average Democratic Senator voted the Congress Watch position 77% of the time; the average Republican Senator sided with Congress Watch on only 13% of key votes. The spread in the House was similar, with Democrats scoring 77% and Republicans scoring 15%. If we assume that Ralph Nader himself would vote "for consumers" 100% of the time, it seems that the gap between Democrats and Republicans in Congress is almost three times larger than the gap between Democrats and Nader.

The difference is even larger for presidential candidates:

There is a large and consistent gap between the Democrats (Gore, Lieberman, Kerry, and Edwards) and the Republicans (Dole, Kemp, Cheney, and Quayle). Cheney, Dole, and Kemp have scored as low as 0%, whereas Kerry, in 1990, scored a perfect 100%.

As is noted above, it's easy to find areas where the two parties agree — but the same would be true of any two parties, no matter how far apart their political ideologies are. All that is required is a large enough database to cherry-pick from and a sufficiently high level of mendacity that allows one to operate that way. It may be true that the two major parties are too similar on particularly important issues and that would be a fair criticism to make — but it doesn't justify saying that there is no substantive difference.

One can certainly expect that he knows about the existence of genuine and substantive differences, even if there are similarities that he considers important. Thus, one might reasonably conclude that while he knows it would be fair to accuse them of being too similar on some things, it isn't fair or accurate to accuse them of not really having significant differences at all. This would make Ralph Nader just like the politicians he complains so often about: someone who distorts the records of others in order to make himself look better.

Ironic, isn't it?

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