We've now heard from Ralph directly.  Let me tell you a little bit about who I am and why I'm here and how that relates to why you’re here and how that relates to Ralph Nader.

I identify myself as a Democrat for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that there are a lot of folks who say, “Well, isn't a vote for Ralph a vote for George Bush?” And there are many answers to that which I will provide.

What do you want?  Just tell me.  I can speak for anything between 30 seconds and a full semester. Five to 10 minutes? All right, but there is a lot to cover in that short a space of time.

I believe I have good Democratic Party credentials.  I've run for United States Senate from the state of Iowa. I've run for United States Congress from the state of Iowa. I've worked as a precinct captain in this county. I've been on the Johnson County Central Committee. I've worked with the Democratic National Committee on a task force to help create the Party’s Media Center when Pam Harriman found a million dollars in spare pocket change in the bottom of her purse and gave it to us.

I've received three presidential appointments from Democratic presidents.  Two from Lyndon Johnson -- Maritime Administrator and FCC Commissioner – and one from Jimmy Carter.  So I think I have been a pretty solid Democrat since 1948 when I worked to help elect Harry Truman.

I do not casually come out in public and recommend that folks vote for somebody other than a Democrat.  But I do it because I think democracy needs it for the reasons Ralph is talking about.

I don't know if you have heard of the organization Common Cause, but I talked with John Gardner, back in 1970, when the organization was created.  Our primary focus was on campaign finance reform.  I served two terms on the Common Cause national board trying to bring it about. It has been 30 years and we don't have it.

Actually, it was kind of obvious at the time, I don't know how we overlooked it, but it turns out that only incumbents can pass legislation.  Challengers don't get to do that.

If a system works for incumbents they ain't gonna change it.  And that's our problem.

Al Gore stands up there at the convention and says, “The first legislation I’m going to send the Congress is campaign finance reform.” And then he goes to dinner and raises another $20 million.

What he doesn't explain, like Nixon had a secret plan to end the Viet Nam war, apparently Gore has a secret plan to get legislation enacted without the need to send it through the House and Senate.

I mean, how is he going to get these people to vote for it?

Politics is not about doing the right thing, being moral, appealing to people's rational side.  It's about power.

Most of the progressive legislation in this century and the last has come from third parties.  A lot of it was from third parties that were organized by Iowa farmers who brought about the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate the railroads that were coming down heavy on the farmers.  And bank legislation, child labor laws, minimum wages, maximum hours, and safe working conditions, social security.

Do you think Democrats and Republicans came up with that stuff? Hell no, it came from third parties.  And only when those third parties gained enough power to constitute a real challenge did the two major parties, one or the other or both, say "me too."  And then the legislation got enacted.

So if we’re going to do anything about this cancer eating at the heart of democracy called corporate funding of campaigns, were going to have to do it through a third party.

This doesn't mean that after you vote for Ralph you can't vote straight ticket Democrat or straight ticket Republican, or Libertarian, whatever you are.  But Ralph is our primary hope for doing something to straighten out this system.

How this works came to me when I was in Washington. My first presidential appointment, when I was 29 years old, was U.S. Maritime Administrator.

The Senate Commerce Committee that held hearings on my appointment, my nomination, wanted to know what shipping experience I had.  I explained I once operated a canoe on the Iowa River but not very successfully. They thought that would be enough shipping experience since Lyndon Johnson was vouching for me and then there I was the U.S. Maritime Administrator at age 29.  It was the best job I 've ever had. I had my own flag.

But what I discovered came about reading casually in the newspaper. I noticed that the milk producers wanted to have an increase in the support price of milk. The Department of Agriculture responded by saying, "Look, we're here as your advocate. If there was any way we could justify raising the support price on milk, we'd do it. But there is just no way we can justify it.  You haven't had any increases in costs.  There is no reason why we should raise the support price on milk.”

And then the paper reported, about a week later, that the milk producers had taken $200,000 in cash to Richard Nixon.  And about a week after that the Department of Agriculture raised the support price of milk to the tune of $400 million dollars to American consumers per year.

Now, math is not my specialty. That's why I went into law, instead of "do you want fries with that?" But it was a fairly simple mathematical task to discover that the milk producers got back 2,000 dollars for every dollar they contributed.

So I started looking at what the shipping companies and the shipyards were getting for their campaign contributions and what the defense contractors were getting.  What various contributors were getting in special tax laws written just for them.  Price supports, restraints on trade, antitrust exemptions, defense contracts, subsidy programs, price supports.  What Ralph Nader's identified in 160 case studies of corporate welfare programs costing consumers and taxpayers billions and billions of dollars.  It’s a kind of welfare program nobody talks about very much: corporate welfare.

You are paying for that when you buy any product in the marketplace.  When you buy a pharmaceutical product, when you buy a car, when you buy clothes, when you buy food, you are paying that $1,000 to $2,000 return on some corporate executive’s $1 contribution.

There is no such thing as any campaign financing other than public financing of campaigns.  The only question is whether when you pay in the dollar as the taxpayer the dollar goes to the campaign, or are you going to have a major corporation give the dollar and you end up paying $1,000 more for their product.

Now I think it's cheaper to give a buck than to give $1,000.

When Ramsey Clark was Attorney General of the United States he explained that a single price fixing conspiracy in Pennsylvania involving plumbing fixtures cost the people of Pennsylvania of more money in one year than all Americans lost in all the burglaries, robberies and larcenies throughout the entire country that year.

We're talking billion dollar rip offs that are coming about through this present system.  That's what Ralph's talking about. That's what we have to change. And were not going to change it by going around saying "Oh, oh but I don't want Mr. Bush to win."

Let’s talk about Supreme Court appointments. I clerked at the U.S. Supreme Court.  I knew a couple of Republican appointees. Chief Justice Warren and Justice Brennan.  They weren't so bad. In fact, they were great. What is the percentage of Americans supporting the right to choose -- 70-80%?  Something like that.  I mean, who's nuts enough as a politician to put somebody on the Court who is straight out saying, “I'm going to overturn Roe v. Wade.” The Republican appointees haven't.

So what is all this about?

Since my time is very very limited I am not going to tell you the whole story about the sub-government and how Washington works and why power is not in the White House, or the Congress, or the court system.

Let's just talk about why a vote for Nader is not a vote for Bush.

For starters, Gore does not own these votes.  To hear some people talk you'd think he had them in a damn vault somewhere and Ralph broke in and stole Al Gore's votes.  Al Gore can go after those votes the same way that Ralph Nader and George Bush do.

Note that a sudden streak of populism has come into Al Gore.  Now why do you suppose that happened?  Because he saw that 15% of the independents are supporting Ralph Nader, 11 % of the liberal Democrats, 7% of all voters nationwide.  That's a lot of voters.  They’re responding to something Ralph's saying.

But there is something Al Gore doesn't realize. It’s not just what Ralph is saying it's what Ralph Nader has done with his life.

I’ve worked with him for 40 years.  I know this guy inside and out.  I used to take my girlfriends to meet his mother to see if she would approve of them. After 15 years, finally, she approved of one and I married her. I knew Ralph's dad. He ran a restaurant and makes Ralph look like the mildest kid on the block by comparison to his dad. When a salesman would come in Ralph’s dad would grab the salesman's hand and sit him down at the counter. He wouldn't let him go until he pitched him about the evils in our society and what ought to be done about them.

Ok, so number one these votes aren't Al Gore's votes.  If he wants to go after them, which now it looks like maybe he does, let him go after them.  See who gets them.

Number two, we're not talking about that many votes.

Bear in mind I'm talking about Iowa, because there may be some of you who vote elsewhere than Iowa. But most of you in this room vote in Iowa and at least I hope you vote.

Three, most of the voters that Ralph is bringing to the polls are people that are so pissed off they normally stay home.  The largest political party in America is the "I'm so damned disgusted, I am not going to vote for any of them" party.  That was 51% of the voters in 1996 -- 51%!

At what point do you no longer have a democracy?  Right now, I'm worried about the schoolboard election September 12th.  In this county, with the highest educational level of any county in America, we’ll be lucky to get 8% of the people out to vote.  We have serious problems in this country.  And people are understandably alienated and cynical and turned off.  Why wouldn't they be when you see $100,000 campaign contributions, million dollar contributions?

There were evenings of entertainment put on by corporations for the delegates at both the Democrat and Republican conventions. Sometimes they were half-million-dollar parties. The press was kept out.  I mean, who wouldn't feel alienated?  There are good reasons to be.

All right, so a lot of the voters that Ralph is bringing in are voters that Al Gore is not going to have anyway.  They're people who would otherwise be staying home.

There was at least one poll after the Democratic convention that showed Gore got a bigger bounce with Nader in the poll than when it was head-to-head with Bush. At least that poll showed that Bush dropped four percentage points with Ralph in and Gore only dropped three. Now I am not saying that a vote for Ralph is a vote for Gore, but I really don't think you can say that a vote for Ralph is a vote for Bush.

I think there is considerable evidence that Nader is pulling from the Republican Party, from people who otherwise wouldn't vote at all, from independents, libertarians, the Reform Party -- and yes, some Democrats.

But the final reason is this, as you probably know, hopefully you know, we do not have a direct election of the president.  We have something called an Electoral College. At the beginning of the last century Iowa used to have 13 votes in the Electoral College. It now has seven. Never, I repeat never, in the 20th Century would a swing of Iowa's electoral votes from one candidate to another have affected the ultimate outcome of a presidential election.

So the odds of a vote for Ralph Nader resulting in Iowa’s electoral votes going for Bush rather than Gore, and as a result of that the national Electoral College votes going for Bush rather than Gore, is somewhat between very, very thin and none at all.

It's essentially a free vote for Iowans.  It's an opportunity to say to the Democrats and the Republicans, “Enough.  I've had enough. Thirty years you've promised us campaign finance reform and you don't deliver. Thirty years, that's long enough.  We've had it.”

We're going to take care of the Iowa legislature as we see fit, and the Iowans in the U.S. Senate and House. But we are sending a message to the National Committees of both major parties. And the message were sending is that breaking the corporate stranglehold on American democracy is important enough to us that we're voting for Ralph Nader.