Ralph Nader announced today that he would again run for president. This will make many so-called “progressives” angry. They see Ralph as a spoiler. He 'steals' votes from the Democratic candidate especially in close presidential election like the last two. On the Huffington Post blog the Nader announcement garnered 508 comments. All the ones I read (that floated to the top) were hostile and demeaning of Nader. These whining fools still blame Ralph Nader for Al Gore's loss in 2000. They can't resist the received wisdom from the Democratic Party hacks who helped Gore run his pathetic campaign almost into the ground. They still believe that it was the foolish Nader voters in Florida who tipped the scales for George W. Bush. First of all Gore did not lose the election – it was stolen from him by a reactionary cabal by the way of a right wing Republican dominated Supreme Court who gave Bush the election. Gore also as I recall didn't even push for the whole state to be recounted – only several heavily Democratic counties like Dade County. Post election research by newspapers discovered Bush would have won had things been counted properly. But if you read the entire report all sorts of crooked voter suppressing legerdemain was uncovered like 'caging' (challenging voter registration of potential Democratic voters), and knocking thousand of non-felon Afro-American voters with similar names to felons off of off the roles by computer. Plus Gore with Joe Lieberman as his running mate (of all people to choose) ran a weak, uninspired campaign always with his eye on the 'undecided voters', those shallow-thinking airheads who so distort American politics, rather trying to energize the Democratic base (as Obama has). Also Bill Clinton was still in the dog house then (as he is again now) for nearly being impeached for getting a blowjob. So Clinton couldn't really be used to lend legitimacy and gravitas to the his erstwhile VP's presidential run even though Clinton had presided over a fairly successful presidency (aside from being an incorrigible Lothario) presiding over a robust economy.
Don't these so called progressives understand that Ralph Nader's laborious and symbolic runs for the presidency are not meant to place him in the position to be a real candidate? He is in there to keep our eye on the ball. Even if the points he makes seem inconvenient and ,yes, tiresome. These points are not tiresome becomes they are hackneyed and boring. They are tiresome because nothing every gets done to address them by either party, and they have to be brought time and time again. As the NY Times article in announcing his candidacy states “..Nader also criticized Republican candidate John McCain and Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton for failing to support full Medicare for all or cracking down on Pentagon waste and a "bloated military budget..” Nader know better than anybody else that the country is in the hands of a Janus faced single party. We have a single party with two right wings as Gore Vidal says. The problem is that whole spectrum has shifted so far to right since the Ronald Reagan years, the 1980s, that a moderate and reasonable European style Social Democrat type like Ralph Nader now looks and sounds like a left wing radical. Ralph has not slipped into the realms of the politically impractical (but maybe someday possible) visions of the real left. No it's the “It's the movies that got small”. The whole country has drifted year by year even while Clinton was in ever further into the dark arms of the corporate capitalist radical right. The seven miserable years of the megalomaniac George W. Bush with his clumsy mismanagement and geopolitical blunders has finally opened most eyes. The American have people finally collectively realized things have gone too far. Ralph Nader, the straight, suit wearing, consumer advocate has stayed pretty much in the same place. It's just the backdrop has shifted into 'cuckooland.' His calm demeanor and smooth empirical reasoning has not changed. The subject of it has.
Progressives should not resent Nader's entry into 'the race.' Just as Dennis Kicinich and finally John Edwards in the primaries did, he will serve to prod the Democratic presidential candidate to confront some realities. Otherwise the dialog with old warhorse McCain will be about who can be the most effective imperialist. Nader's involvement in the debates (if they let him in) should have a positive and salutary effect on the Barack Osama (or very unlikely Hillary Clinton) platform and will force them to get real on the military budget – among other things. The US at this late stage simply cannot afford guns and butter – not 'guns' at the trillion dollar price tag we are now dealing with. We simply cannot properly and responsibly address the long laundry list of accumulated needs without taking on the power players like the Pentagon, the Pharmaceuticals, the energy giants. John Edwards understood this, maybe Hillary does. Does Barack Obama? Really confronting global warming with a sustainable reconfigured green economy, providing a fully functional universal health care system and rebuilding our aging infrastructure while confronting residual poverty will not be possible if we have to continue to support a global military apparatus that almost as big as the rest of world's combined. Something has to give. Ralph is just there to keep their eyes on the ball, to keep things real. Also, and this is important, as the Democratic candidate confronts the Republican machine and mean old man McCain, he or she can afford to move further into a fully progressive direction as Ralph will be there to seemingly define the outer limits of discourse. In other words with Ralph there at the table the Demos will have some elbow room on their left.
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