http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36565-2003Apr25.html the whole article is interesting analysis of the media this week excerpt 'Nader, who many Democrats and progressives blame for tipping the last presidential election to Bush in key states like Florida (where Nader won 96,000 votes), has not yet announced his decision about 2004. But according to national Green Party officials, Nader probably will run. 'I'm getting that sense,' says Ben Manski, one of five national Green Party co-chairs. Juscha Robinson, a member of the party's presidential exploratory committee, agrees: 'The co-chairs of the committee met with Ralph a couple weeks ago – it was a very comfortable discussion. It does look like he's leaning in that direction.' Great news for the Bushies.
Nooooooooooooooo! Do you think it's a coincidence that he looks *exactly* like the twisted result of a mad genetics experiment aimed at mixing the genome of Donald Rumsfeld with that of Paul Wolfowitz? + I tell you, Nader is the demon spawn of a super-secret GOP laboratory! Let's get our pitchforks and torches!
You know, Nader has done more direct good for Americans (hello -seat belts) as an advocate than most politicians. Granted, he comes off creepy in his interviews and is probably way too anti-corporation to ever be elected, but he doesn't deserve the scorn so many people heap upon him. If he wants to run, he's entitled and I wouldn't mind seeing him included in the debates either. At least he'd make things more interesting.
Locking him out of the debates was a real shame. It may have siphoned even more votes away from Gore, but if the guy is in the race, then he should be allowed to debate.
I agree. I don't agree with Nader, but I do respect him. He is the opposite of Bill Clinton- boring and honest.
I voted for Nader last election and I'll vote for him again if he runs. He is one ugly MoFo though. If the dems want to cry because he costs them votes let 'em.
I voted for him but it didn't matter in California, voted for McCain in the primaries. I, too, was disappointed he wasn't in the debates.
Scorn? Let me get warmed up for this guy, back from minding his mutual fund portfolios, back from the shadows, just in time for another egomaniacal more-destructive-than-even-quixotic episode of self-righteous one-note grandstanding. Falwell, Nader: tomato, tomahhhhhhhto. Consumer advocacy? Great, I'm all for it. I'm not sure that I've seen or heard much advocacy from him over the last three years, but I'm willing to assume his heart is in the right place and let him advocate his rich butt off for the good of Americans. Go for it. Stick with it, and stay out of politics. Oh, what's that? Politics is your big-time meal ticket and has been in Washington DC for the last three decades? I forgot about that. My bad. Why don't you form a "platform" out of a shallow, one-note, deluded wail against "corporations"? Why not criticize everything you see and then promise gold-lame jumpsuits for all with free trips to Mars? Why don't you again, with a straight face, tell voters that a democratic and republican whitehouse lead to the exact same policies? WTF? Does *anyone* on this board now think that it matters (for good or for bad) if a dem or a repub inhabits the whitehouse in times like these? Well, Ralph Nader thinks they are identical, (or so he'll tell you over a $1000 per plate fundraiser for one of his 19 secretive and non-taxed organizations). On the environment, on defense, on affirmative action, on gun laws, on abortion: ... the two major parties are identical. Yeah, that's a sincere, non-cynical message. Some references about this non-elected, self-appointed moralist: Slate's review of Ralphie's stock portfolio and as for his "transparency" for his own organizations... "Public Citizen's Non-Disclosure", Wall Street Journal, March 17, 1992 pA14 and for an excellent recent (March) shout out to Ralphie, see this Salon editorial: Charles Taylor okay, man oh man, a three post day for me. i'm so freaking weak, it ain't funny. I need, like, a BBS patch or something. edit: by the way, before I get labeled a "democrat" "crying" for votes or some such, I don't care about democrats or any candidate in particular. I do care in a major way about civil rights, the environment, education, and the plight of the bottom rungs of our socio-economic (rungless) ladder. I will vote for the candidate who sincerely has a chance to do anything remotely positive on these fronts, which would mean Bush before Ralphie.
Nader might run again. . . ............. GET OUT OF HERE!!! gggggrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh HULK SMASH!!!!!!
Sing it, brother! You've summed him up very nicely. He is hypocricy personified. The primping fool with his bogus bad suit has already reached his nadir. May he sneeze in the dustbin of history forever. Glad your back.
He doesn't have to be a Democrat, treeman, to think the people who voted for this chump made a grave error. Those same people only have to look at the results. The results speak for themselves, assuming a person cares for those issues which Nader claims to espouse.
First of all, Nader did not cost Gore the election. Gore won the election. Scalia, Rehnquist, Thomas, Kennedy and O'Connor caused him to lose the presidency. Second of all, I voted for Nader. And I'll do it again if the Democratic party nominates another noncandidate like Al Gore. Being in a political party is not the same thing as having a favorite basketball team. If the Rockets sign the wrong guy or get beat by the Heat, Cavs, Clipps, I am not going to jump ship and support another team. They are my team. I was born and raised with them and will stick with them whatever they do. If the Democrats nominate a candidate that I think is more a friend of big business than of working Americans (like they have since 1992) I will pick another team. I voted for Ralph Nader and am proud. I voted my conscience. I voted not for the lesser of two evils, but for the person I thought better represented what I thought would be best for this country and this world. Hopefully, I wont have to vote for him again.
Nader costGore the election. Without siphoning votes, the US Supreme Court wouldn't have been in the position to give the election to Bush. Nader is an example of the Peter Principle in action. A very effective consumer advocate, he got in over his head when he went into electoral politics. As a consumer lawyer ,who eschewed electoral politics for most of his life, he eventually got frustrated by the fact that conservative politics produced right wing judges who made his law suit approach to social change impossible, likewise with heretofore efective lobbying of politicians for the environment, product safety etc. He blew a gasket and got pissed and became irrational. I agree largely with the article below. Nader lied over and over again when he said there was no diference between Bush and Gore. I decided at the last minute, even though I live in TX, on the day of the election not to vote for Nader, though he has few stands I don't support, because I was pissed that he focused his campaign on the states where he could possibly swing the election to Bush. This focus was apparently on purpose as it was the only way he could get media coverage. A rally of 10,000 in California which was not up for grabs generated a yawn from the national media. but a similar sized one in Wisconsin, Florida or Oregon, states where he could swing the state to Bush became a big story to the media which was focused on the two main candidates. In things I have read on the web, he told friends in private: "Listen, I'm not stupid, I know a lot of people will be hurt if Bush wins rather than Gore , but I still think it is necessary because............" Ralph has lost somce close personal friends of many years over this issue. ************************** Speaking Lies to Power Ralph Nader fudges the truth just like a real politician. By Matt Welch Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President, by Ralph Nader, New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 383 pages, $24.95 The subtitle of Ralph Nader’s new campaign memoir is "How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President." On page 261, Nader states flatly that it’s "not true" most of his 2.8 million votes otherwise would have gone to Al Gore. His evidence? "Exit polls by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg showed that 25 percent of our voters would have voted for Bush, 38 percent would have voted for Gore, and the rest would not have voted at all." In a February appearance on C-SPAN, Nader quoted the same figures as fact, without attribution. Well, it is not a fact, and it is not "the truth." More accurately, it is the one survey Nader could find that comes close to serving his own personal agenda -- in this case, to suggest despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary that maybe he didn’t cost Gore the election after all. It turns out there were other surveys addressing this very question, but Nader doesn’t like bringing them up. The Voter News Service, which interviewed 13,000 voters instead of Greenberg’s 1,000, estimated that Nader supporters would have chosen Gore over Bush by 47 percent to 21 percent, with the rest abstaining. A CNN study of Florida -- where Bush beat Gore by 537 votes and the Green Party candidate received more than 90,000 -- put the Gore preference at a whopping 60 percent. Both polls were in the public domain by November 8, 2000, when Nader answered his first two "Did you spoil the election?" questions at the morning-after press conference by quoting that legendary number-cruncher, Tom Brokaw. First, he offered this: "Tom Brokaw said that most of my vote came from nonvoters who came in for the first time, young voters, and people who dropped out of voting for many years." When confronted with the Voter News Service data, Nader replied: "First of all, I really don’t know the way these figures play out. If you hear Tom Brokaw, you would think that was not the case." Eighteen hours earlier, I had watched the Nader 2000 crew engage in a far more flagrant manipulation of the truth, more egregious than anything else I witnessed during my two months covering the campaign for the lefty news site WorkingForChange.com. Even before the first preliminary exit poll data crossed the wires, young staffers, on the orders of campaign headquarters, were frantically devising multiple formulas to "prove" that Nader didn’t cost Gore the election, no matter what the results might say later. "That’s shocking," I told one of the harried idealists charged with carrying out the deception. The faces around the computer, for what it’s worth, did not register any surprise. We’ve come to expect this kind of professional dishonesty from the two major political parties, which is one of the reasons many of us find them repellent. But coming from a "purity" candidate who wants to lecture us on "how to tell the truth," it suggests a certain self-delusion. It’s one thing to display the schizophrenia inherent in trying to cobble together a coalition of disaffected lifelong Democrats and party-hating anti-globalization activists. It’s quite another to "speak truth to power" by fudging it. On the campaign trail, I saw Nader tell a variety of whoppers: that "the Social Security ‘crisis’ is a phony problem invented by George W. Bush to make his Wall Street buddies even more rich," that Western Europe had "abolished poverty," that Americans get "90 percent of their news from television." In Crashing the Party his tall tales range from the banal (saying that a disastrous appearance on The Tonight Show "went well," without mentioning that he was mocked by Jay Leno, a guest, and several newspapers after blurting out the word "Strawberries!" when asked what he does for fun) to the vindictive (falsely accusing several reporters of being uninterested in his appeal to "nonvoters" because "their experience had taught them not to inquire into such elusive quests") to the fantastic ("Most of our stands and positions are supported by most Americans"). Most Americans, it seems safe to wager, are not in favor of abolishing the death penalty, doubling the minimum wage, taxing every stock transaction, beefing up the Internal Revenue Service, reorienting the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to "fight global infectious diseases," charging broadcast companies "billions" in spectrum "rent," rewriting the Constitution to create European-style proportional representation, and erecting a Museum of Tort Law in Winsted, Connecticut. Yet Nader seems to believe that if we just remove the corporate blinders from our eyes, Americans will naturally embrace this political program and the Greens will become a "majoritarian" party. This delusion would be harder to maintain if people actually challenged Nader on his positions, but they generally don’t. His campaign was woefully undercovered by the national media -- WorkingforChange was the only news organization, to my knowledge, that followed him around full time for as long as three months -- and the cross-examinations he did receive were almost exclusively limited to his impact on the Gore-Bush race. In left-liberal circles, the policy debates usually centered on Ralph’s preference for "indiscriminatory injustice" issues over identity politics. His simplistic and extremely rare forays into international affairs -- which rarely went beyond withdrawing unilaterally from trade treaties and orienting policy to "support workers and peasants for a change instead of dictatorships and oligarchies" -- were basically given a bye. Nader’s all-consuming ideology, the lens through which he views everything from auto safety to "chit-chat," is that corporations, if left unchecked, will seize control of everything and enslave mankind. Corporatists, Nader writes, "opposed the Revolutionary War...maintained slavery, opposed women’s right to vote," and fought against "civil rights, civil liberties, consumer and environmental protection, Medicare, Medicaid," etc. Not getting enough press coverage? That’s because "corporations...are not likely to go out of their way to cover candidates who are critics of their major advertisers." What’s the worst thing you can call George W. Bush? "A corporation, disguised as a human." If you are willing to say bad things about corporations and good things about the Green Party, you are a Friend of Ralph, no matter what lunatic nonsense you may also spout. Nader rallies usually contained the classic elements of any IMF protest: "**** Capitalism" banners, middle-aged American revolutionaries praising Fidel Castro, kids handing out Maoist newspapers, pig puppets for freeing Mumia. Post-speech question-and-answer sessions frequently were showcases for doctrinaire Marxists quoting ready-made lies about American foreign policy and shadowy media cabals. Not once in two months, or in 383 pages, did I see Nader try to call any of his supporters on their wrongheaded ravings -- unless they had something to do with identity politics or with tipping the election to George Bush. If anything, Nader has bent over backward to portray his beloved "Seattle Coalition" as a remarkably coherent movement of reform-spirited democrats grossly misunderstood by the corporate press. "What, pray tell, were they protesting that the media found so difficult to describe?" he writes about protesters at the Republican Convention. After a laundry list of causes, he answers his own riddle: "Simply put, the entire agenda for progressive liberal politics." So you have a movement of people whose incoherent fantasies are not challenged by their putative leader and a candidate whose fibs and crude renderings of international affairs receive little scrutiny from either the media or his own supporters. This is the politics of soft consensus, not a rigorous culture of truth telling, and the sooner Greens confront this disconnect, the sooner they will escape from the political margins. What do Nader supporters agree on? Almost all share his anti-corporate ideology, most are reflexive critics of American foreign policy, and many harbor the conceit of considering themselves part of the brave minority courageous enough to voice "dissent." When talk about global issues gets too specific, they’re more than happy to defer to Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and Howard Zinn, each of whom Nader singles out for praise in the book. Taken together, it is an intellectual feedback loop, and feedback loops make for slippery footing when the hammer of history crashes down. That is what happened on September 11. And the reactions from the Naderite left were disastrous. In the first days, anti-globalization protesters made new signs and became the anti-war movement without missing a beat. The Seattle Coalition’s chaotic mouthpiece, Indymedia.org, ran articles calling the Pentagon victims "war criminals." Chomsky, in his first published paragraph after September 11, compared the attack to a previous U.S. bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory. Said complained of "people flinging about words like ‘terrorism’ and ‘freedom,’" terms he considers "large abstractions [that] have mostly hidden sordid material interests." Zinn suggested the U.S. will never be truly safe from terrorism until it adopts universal health care. An Ohio Green, Jim Klosterman, wrote -- on September 11 -- that "the United States’ foreign policy with Israel and the military aid to them may be the [ex]acerbating fact that lead [sic] to the sad events." Bogus statistics about dead Iraqi babies competed for space with aggrieved rants about Henry Kissinger. While warm bodies were still being pulled from the World Trade Center rubble, a bruised nation was receiving earfuls from its "dissidents" about how the U.S. was finally getting a taste of its own medicine. Those who took note of the rhetorical onslaught might never forget. Nader, wisely, kept a very low profile at first, declining to be interviewed and discouraging public questions about September 11. As far as I can tell, his first published column after the attacks didn’t appear until late October; it was about nuclear plant safety. His first major speech on the topic, on October 11, reiterated his "workers and peasants" formulation, asserted that "we’re not going to be able to bomb our way to justice," and warned, "How many hundreds of thousands of Afghanis are going to die or starve to death or be sick to death because they don’t have medicines as a result of this destruction?" During his book tour, he’s been repeating a line about "burning down a haystack in order to look for a needle -- and they still haven’t found the needle." When asked by interviewers what he would have done in lieu of bombing, he speaks of invoking "the doctrine of hot pursuit" using "spies, bribes, and commandos." And then the conversations quickly move on to "wartime profiteers" and cockpit safety regulations. September 11 showed that when it comes to foreign policy and critical thinking, the Naderite left is not yet ready for prime time. Which is a shame, because the consumer advocate and his followers have many useful things to say about corporate welfare, third-party access, political hypocrisy, civil liberties, drug legalization, and a host of other issues the Democrats and Republicans largely ignore. And for all its excesses, the leftist foreign policy critique about supporting dictators and addressing "root causes" has found new resonance in the past months. Nader is clearly licking his chops at the Enron collapse, and all signs point to an even more vigorous run for the presidency in 2004. But you can’t launch a convincing "purity" campaign if you don’t respect the facts. When the filmmaker Michael Moore introduced Nader at campaign rallies, he was fond of saying that the candidate was "ready to rock this nation with the truth!" Since September 11, that’s been about backwards: The nation has shown it is more than ready to rock Michael Moore and his pals with its very own version of "the truth." Ralph Nader needs to learn that there are people who care as much about the issues as he, yet honestly arrive at very different conclusions. He needs to stop judging people’s virtue by whether they support him for president. And unless he wants to become the same kind of politician he claims to despise, he needs to stop treating facts like pastries in a buffet line. "Politics, as it is practiced, is the art of having it both ways," he writes, with some disgust, on page 8. A year into the Bush presidency he helped deliver, Ralph Nader looks very much like he’s practicing politics. Matt Welch covered Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign for WorkingForChange.com and despite this actually voted for the Green Party candidate. He is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles, where he runs a Web log. nader
When I voted for Nader, which I am still proud of, I knew very well that it was possible for him to cost Gore the election. I am a Democrat. I felt like my party had betrayed me, as I felt after the midterm elections. My vote for Nader was my way of crashing the party. My way of shouting to the party that I will not accept candidates that are too scared to stand up to Republicans and corporate America. Yes, I was fooled by Bush. Nobody I knew thought he was going to be as bad as he has been. I figured he, like Gore, would be relativlely middle of the road. But after 8 years of Clinton, who shifted the Democrats so far to the right, where was Bush supposed to go? (By the way, I blame Clinton as much as I blame anyone else). I thought 4 years of Bush was a hefty price to pay to get the party back, but if not 2000, when? Eventually, it would have to be done. The Republicans got power in the Gingrich revolution by appealing to their base, not fighting over the middle. When you spend all of your energy trying to prove that you are not too extreme, people stay home. Why bother voting when the two candidates agree on everything during the debates. Republicans dont stay home. The Christian Right does not stay home. They were energized by a party not afraid to take extreme positions. I think the Democrats got the message, a little, when after the midterm election they replaced Gephardt with Nacy Pelosi. Hopefully they can get the message come 2004, and nominate a candidate that Democrats, and Americans, can rally behind. I really dont want to vote for the Green Candidate again, but I will not vote for someone just becuse I think they can win, if that was the case, I'd vote for Bush.
If Nader wants to run, he has that right as long as he's over 40 and an American citizen who was born in the U.S. However, multi-party elections do bring up an interesting point. Lets say that you have three major candidates and one candidate gets 40% of the vote and the other two get 20% each. That means that 60% of the population DID NOT want the guy who won to win. And in this case, the winner clearly got the most votes. So, I say have multi-party elections (I think the two party system causes lots of problems with polarization of issues, etc...) but in the end, require the top two vote getters to have a run-off. That way you eliminate the candidates who the majority of the people clearly don't want. It will never happen as it would require people to vote at least twice and we can't even get people to vote once but it's a nice idea, just the same.
I just hope if Nader runs then Perot runs as well to balance out the voting. I would say more, but Glynch's post pretty much sums up my feelings on Nader. I can't believe we're already talking about the Prez elections...
if we got rid of the Electoral College, there would be runoffs. 35 is the minimum age for Presidents.
Wowming, I'm all for a parliamentary system or changing laws to level the playing field for third parties. Bush's crazy militarism shows that when you have literally the leader of the world with the majority of the weapons of mass destruction in the whole world, you don't screw around with protest voting, which is all you've got till you change the electoral system. Nader owes a lot of dead Iraqi's an apology, though we have seen that he did disagree totally with our Iraq policy. We won't get it. Nader's great strength, stubborness and never yielding to others arguments or opinions , an asset perhaps in litigation and single issue politics, turned into a weakness when he started messing with electoral politics. If Nader had withdrawn at the end, cut some deals with Gore, he would have achieved 99% of what he did, which was to have a platform for his views, and he would have avoided such fiascos as the Iraq invasion and occupation; or the tax cut that was done to avoid the horror ( to them) of such government spending as bailing our social securityor doing an efective senior drug plan-- both types of government spending spending which unlike military spending Bush contributors families and friends can't use as a profit center for them. To be fair to Nader and you and me also , it was hard to predict what a militarist and extreme conservative Bush was going to be , given his campaign talks about compassionate conservatism, and his parroting of the Democrats on health, education and welfare issues
