Gore's surrogates are going around the country telling Nader supporters that their vote is wasted. This is a fundamentally undemocratic tactic. It smacks of authoritarian regimes enforcing approved lists of candidates and strict party discipline.

American democracy has always been sloppy; it was intended to be that way. The first parties formed — the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans — collapsed or split within a generation of the founding of the Republic.

In the past, socialists, abolitionists and others have contributed to national debates and sometimes captured the opinions, if not the votes, of the nation.

The Gore campaign has done all it can to stymie Nader's participation and stifle his speech. Gore and the party bosses kept Nader from the debate stage. In fact, they wouldn't even let him in the audience. And the debates suffered as a result.

Gore and Gov. George W. Bush neglected such core Nader issues as eliminating corporate welfare, radically stopping pollution and environmental poisoning, strictly regulating safety standards of consumer manufacturing and completely reforming campaign finance.

Does anyone believe that the Democratic Party will seriously embrace such issues after the election when it hasn't done so for the last eight years?

Now the Gore campaign is pulling out the stops. As a local Democratic Party activist in Minnesota told me, "The marching orders are 'savage Bush' but also 'undermine Nader.' "

A phalanx of celebrities, including Robert Redford, Melissa Etheridge and Gloria Steinem, has descended on Nader strongholds to persuade his supporters to change their minds.

A committee of former Nader "Raiders" has asked him to quit, or at least not campaign, in tight states.

The AFL-CIO and the Sierra Club are running ads and voter-outreach programs that praise Gore's stance on labor and conservation issues.

NARAL, the abortion-rights group, is buying ads in swing states to cow Nader supporters into voting for Gore.

Democratic pundits and editorialists push the "wasted vote" and "Nader helps Bush" line.

This assault is an effort to browbeat and guilt-trip citizens into not voting their conscience. It minimizes the differences between Nader and Gore on many basic issues: capital punishment, corporate power, globalization, health care, Pentagon spending, poverty and the misguided war on drugs. And with Gore "fighting" for "the middle class" and "working families," who but Nader speaks for the poor and the downtrodden?

This strategy may work on some traditional liberal Democrats. But it won't work on many young people, who are being energized politically for the first time by Ralph Nader.

The vast Democrat conspiracy against the Nader candidacy and his ideas is a sign of fear among the entrenched powers. Like all such campaigns, it is driven by the knowledge that the target's real danger is that he is telling the truth.

Copyright 2000 San Francisco Examiner

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