Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich
Round One - November 1, 2000

It's painful to watch Gore struggle uphill against the silliest Republican candidate in about two decades, and even more painful, in a personal sense, to watch Democratic loyalists blame Nader for their troubles. Nader is currently polling at about 5 percent of the electorate, of which, according to a recent Reuters/MSNBC poll, only 25 percent are Democrats, while a remarkable 20 percent are Republicans. Thus the effect of Nader on Gore will not be much larger than the effect of Buchanan on Bush, and the small parties' net impact will be a wash.

While Democrats seethe about presumed defections to Nader, they are missing the numerically far vaster groups that will, one way or another, decide the election -- the approximately 25 percent of the electorate that remains undecided (this estimate from a Democratic pollster on Crossfire Friday) and the up to 51 percent that won't vote at all. Maybe there's some willful denial going on here. I would argue that the existence of an undecided and disenchanted majority (75 percent of the electorate if there were no overlap between the undecided and the uninvolved) is in no small part the fault of the Democrats themselves.

First, consider the undecideds. Forget independents, who captured a lot of attention in the eighties and early nineties -- this is the year of the undecideds. The standard explanation for their numerical strength is that the candidates seem to be almost equally impaired: one not playing with a full deck and the other not entirely human. On the issues: well, I can distinguish them, despite my Naderism. But it takes a trained eye and some talent for making fine distinctions to see the difference between the two candidates' tax-cut plans, prescription-drugs-for-the-elderly proposals, and education philosophies.

Bush gets some of the credit for blurring the differences of course: he talks about "compassion," muffles the abortion and vouchers issues, and invited all those black gospel singers to the Republican convention. But he wouldn't be able to make the Republicans look like Democrats if the Democrats hadn't already spent much of the past decade trying to make themselves look like Republicans. The resulting areas of non-difference are vast and numbing: trade, capital punishment, crime in general, welfare reform, military policy, the war on drugs, and the need to abolish first the deficit and now the debt. Neither candidate proposes an "activist government" and certainly not one lively enough to provide, say, a universal health-insurance program. Hence the weird prominence of prescription-drugs-for-seniors -- a worthy issue, but in the scheme of things a microscopic one. What will we be discussing in '04 -- what color Bandaids Medicare will cover?

Maybe the Republican disguise worked for the Democrats in '92 (although in that year Perot was draining off Republican votes, and a bare-fanged Christian Right was helping mobilize the Democratic faithful). Either way, the existence of so many undecideds suggests that the price for that particular pact with the devil has finally come due. If you go around long enough in camouflage clothes, you're bound to be mistaken for, well, a bush.

Turning now to the majority of the electorate -- those who in all likelihood won't vote. A tiny but colorful percentage of these are ideologically committed non-voters: Black Bloc members and right-wing survivalists. But what about the others? The most self-serving theory, from the Democratic point of view, is that these people are, as Fallows writes, "satisfied enough with the way things are going" that they don't see the point of voting. We have achieved perfection, in other words, and as a result are fairly stupefied with joy.

The problem with the excess-of-contentment theory is, of course, that it is the least contented who are least likely to vote. The long-term trend, in good economic years and bad, is the skewing of the voting public toward the upper classes -- and no one is arguing that contentment falls off with rising income. It's the disadvantaged who are most disenchanted. If you're struggling to make rent (as even many iconic middle-class "working families" are), if you don't have health insurance and are panicked about a costly illness or car breakdown, neither candidate has anything much to offer you. Even their tax cuts won't get you out of the woods, because so much of what makes your life easier -- like health insurance, public transportation, and reliable childcare -- is beyond the reach of individual families.

So the stakes are diminishing as well as the differences, and the Democrats have no one to blame but themselves.

What do you think? Join the debate in a special conference of Post & Riposte. We'll highlight selected readers' remarks as the Roundtable progresses.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of several books, including Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989) and Nickel and Dimed, which explores low-wage work in America, to be published in the spring. She writes a column for The Progressive and is a contributor to The Nation and many other publications.