Nader once again listening to that silent dog whistle call.
Friday, November 14, 2003
Ralph Nader, who in 2000 was the worst thing to happen to civil liberties and poor people in quite a while, is winding up to do them another favor. The former Green candidate for president is traveling the college circuit, coyly hinting that he'll decide about his political plans later, but few people think he'll sit it out.
Even fewer think his running again would be a good idea.
This week, at the University of Wisconsin, Nader again dismissed his effect on the outcome in 2000, saying, "I think the Democrats can fairly be charged with chronic whining, and they ought to look to themselves first and foremost."
Nader not only elects Republicans, he's starting to sound like them.
At the beginning of October, he told The Associated Press that he would wait until the end of 2003 to decide whether to run for president next year. If, Nader promises, the Democrats nominated Al Sharpton or Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, he'd be perfectly happy.
Of course, so would George W. Bush.
It would only be the huge majority of Democrats who would be dismayed -- not to say astonished.
But in the absence of the Kucinich-Sharpton ticket, Nader will likely feel obliged to offer himself to the nation again -- even responding to a call that few other people can hear.
In the current issue of The Nation, Micah Sifry -- previously a third-party cheerleader -- finds that Bush environmental policies have left a lot of Greens scared white.
"Core elements of progressive constituencies, exactly the groups that the Greens need to build upon, will revolt with open contempt -- far worse than 2000 -- to anything that helps keep Bush in office," Robert McChesney, president of the professors' council of US Campus Greens, told Sifry. "Running a presidential candidate in 2004 for the Greens is probably a quantum leap off a cliff. It is the Greens' Jonestown."
Does Nader think who wins an election actually matters? Well, it depends.
In the AP interview, right after saying he would send his agenda to the two major parties and see what happened, Nader said, "The highest priority is to defeat President George W. Bush and his administration, which is running this country into the ground."
At virtually the same time, speaking on Fox News just before the California recall vote, he urged, "I think if people would stop saying, `Well, I'm going to right away go for who I think is going to win,' they're going to never be able to support a regeneration of politics, which often starts with small starts."
So it's important to win, except it isn't.
Nader has followed this have-it-both-ways strategy consistently. After Gore lost Florida by 537 votes while Nader won 97,000, Nader insisted that it didn't matter, that there were hardly any differences between Democrats and Republicans. Then, after Vermont Sen. James Jeffords left the GOP and changed control of the Senate, Nader boasted that he had delivered Senate control to the Democrats, because Green voters he'd brought out provided winning margins for Sens. Maria Cantwell in Washington and Debbie Stabenow in Michigan.
In June, telling USA Today that he was thinking of running again, Nader offered the same heads-I-win, tails-you-lose approach. "It is quite clear that the Democrats are incapable of defending our country against the Bush marauders . . ." he explained. "They won't go after him the way I could."
But anyway, he added, his running would elect a lot more Democrats to Congress.
And no major Democratic candidate, in Nader's mind, could possibly compare to himself. Howard Dean? "He can't deliver," Nader dismissively told The Nation. "He can be George McGovern on steroids, but when he gets into the corporate prison called the White House, he can't deliver."
Much better concentrating on efforts that won't ever get near the White House, no matter what the actual effect on people's lives.
davidsarasohn@news.oregonian.com |
