A little green: shaky start for the Nader campaign.

• Author: Armoudian, Maria
• Position: Ralph Nader, Green Party presidential candidate for 1996 - Crashing the Parties - Cover Story

Chants of Go, RALPH, Go filled the auditorium at the University of California at Los Angeles, where more than 350 Greens gathered, anticipating the acceptance speech of their first-ever Presidential candidate, Ralph Nader.

The long time advocate of citizen rights and consumer safety delivered a two-and-a-half-hour acceptance speech that lambasted the corporate oligopoly and the Republican and Democratic "duopoly." In his customary way, Nader went on to offer a systemic overhaul--and hope.

Nader reminded delegates of the many historic victories brought about by the work of private citizens--women's suffrage, civil-rights laws, the Constitution. "One person can make a difference," he said.

"What we're doing is building for the future," Nader said. "The Greens and other progressives are in the early building stages of a people-first democratic political movement for future years. They deserve our attention because they are centering on the basic issues of representative government." Quoting Thomas Jefferson, Nader said one of those issues is "to curb the excesses of the monied interests."

The Democrats can no longer be counted on to perform this function, Nader said. "It's gotten so you can't tell Democrats from Republicans anymore in this country: They're both totally beholden to corporate America."

Nader vowed to curb corporate welfare, which has reached $140 billion each year, according to estimates by The Wall Street Journal, he said. But if you include "subsidies, bail-outs, giveaways, inflated government contracts, tax loopholes, and forgiveness of corporate debt, aid to dependent corporations" is easily up to $200 billion, he said.

He has no use for Clinton, whom he called a "RepDem hybrid," and he urged liberals not to sell themselves short. "Many Americans who call themselves liberals have so lowered their expectations about what politics can mean to this nation's future that they are settling for diminishing returns," he said. "Politics has been corrupted not just by money but by being trivialized out of addressing the great, enduring issues of who controls, who decides, who owns, who pays, who has a voice and access."

Already, Nader's candidacy has sent small tremors through the Democratic Party--enough to garner several solicitous requests for his withdrawal. But he spurns such approaches. Party strategists, like James Carville, are worried that Nader will siphon away enough votes from Clinton, especially in the key state of California, to give Dole a chance.

Nader has hoisted the Greens into the public eye and attracted enough members to qualify the party in eleven states. Organizers hope to be on twenty state ballots by the time of the election.

But the Greens are not the most organized bunch. Fierce infighting over proposed convention locations nearly caused the Congress for the Green Party USA to absent itself from the party's first convention. And convention organizers actually left their keynote speaker, the Sierra Club stalwart David Brower, stranded at the Los Angeles airport for hours. With no replacement available, disappointed Greens milled around, muttering under their breath.

The inability of party organizers to communicate and organize effectively has meant that the American public is not taking the Green Party or...