Ralph Nader has long since earned the right to run for president any damn time he pleases.
There is no U.S. citizen who has more thoroughly dedicated his life to improving the lives of ordinary Americans, to giving effective grief to those whose allegiance is solely to self-interest and the corporate bottom line, and to creating effective and independent political institutions in defense of the public interest, both nationally and state-by-state. Nader is reflexively described in the mainstream press as a “consumer advocate” – sort of a two-legged quality-control machine. In fact, through the numerous independent organizations he has founded or strongly influenced over several decades, he has measurably improved the political life of the nation and, through federal and state legislation, the lives of ordinary citizens.
Capitol observers know only too well the importance of Nader-influenced organizations and activism on Texas politics. Every time Tom “Smitty” Smith of Public Citizen, Craig McDonald of Texans for Public Justice, Sparky Anderson of Clean Water Action, Dan Lambe of Texas Watch, Fred Lewis of Campaigns for People, or the folks at the Center for Public Policy Priorities lobby or testify on behalf of some progressive legislation, they are paying homage to the public advocacy tradition embodied by Ralph Nader. Last year, when Public Citizen’s national leader, Joan Claybrook, came to Austin to try to derail the corporate highball express promoting “tort reform,” her advocacy helped moderate the worst excesses of the corporate-protection racket. It wasn’t enough – of course; it’s never enough. But were Nader’s progeny to close up shop, leaving ordinary citizens to the tender mercies of the Republican and Democratic parties, there would be virtually no independent advocates for progressive change in Texas.
On the electoral side, the picture isn’t much better. To quote the Vote Nader Web site: “All the Democratic voters can vote for the Democrats. All the Republican voters for the Republicans. And still there would be 100 million plus nonvoting people to approach for their votes.”
Why Not Ralph?
So I don’t think it’s a slam dunk, as so many now presume, that Nader running for president is a bad idea. The fact that The New York Times, which institutionally considers itself virtually a fourth branch of government, condescends to lecture Nader on “damaging his legacy” by presuming to run only argues in his favor. And that liberal Democrats everywhere are now howling for Nader’s blood – instead of holding their own party’s candidates’ feet to the fire on their supposed differences with the Bush administration – suggests that, once again, the Dems are already looking for a scapegoat. Nader got 2.7% of the vote in 2000, an election won handily by the Democrats and stolen by the Republicans – but Nader is to blame for George W. Bush?
Finally, the arguments that this is all about Nader’s “ego” are unpersuasive – if the notoriously curmudgeonly Nader wanted stroking, all he’d have to do is endorse John Kerry, and the accolades for his self-sacrificing wisdom would pour down on his shoulders like honey. If anything, Nader has behaved characteristically by responding to the liberal supplications – “Please Ralph, don’t run!” – by telling The Nation, Bill Richardson, and everybody else just to shove it. The Greens cratered months ago, and Nader is now advertising for enough supporters to mount petition drives. If he does manage to get on a significant number of state ballots, he will likely do no better than Dennis Kucinich.
Yet will anybody else on this campaign trail be consistently pointing out the obvious: “The corporate lobbyists are still swarming over Congress. Money is still pouring in from corporate interests. Washington is corporate-occupied territory, and the two parties are ferociously competing to see who’s going to go to the White House and take orders from their corporate pay masters. So they may be different in their mind, they may be different in their attention, they may be different in their rhetoric. But in the actual performance, these corporate interests and their political allies are taking America down.”
Dems: Suck It Up!
If the Democrats find Nader so objectionable, let them steal his thunder by living up to their election-year rhetoric.
My real objections to Nader running for president are not that he’s just another politician, but that he’s not politician enough, not at least for this sort of rigged contest. The Clinton-Gore administration was essentially center-right, clinging to power by repetitively putting a friendly face (“This is going to hurt us more than it hurts you!”) on reactionary social policies and military adventurism. In 2000, Bush ran like a moderate, and has governed like an extremist – and the current survivors in the Democratic field, Kerry and Edwards, have distinguished themselves in the Senate largely by signing on to White House policy, though with heartfelt regrets. Bush is already dismissing Kerry as a “waffler,” and though Bush’s know-nothingism is truly repulsive, neither do we need in Washington a more intellectual, more respectable, more deeply reflective version of the Same Old Shit. However much that might please The New York Times.
And what bothers me about a Nader run is quite similar to what has happened to the Kucinich candidacy – the marginalized ineffectiveness of populism-from-the-top-down tends to discredit truly progressive activism at the grassroots, when the real work is always going on in the neighborhoods, in the city councils, even in the state houses. Nader (and the Naderites) are really great at what he does best – demanding, negotiating, and occasionally litigating progressive change from soporific institutions wedded to entrenched power. He is not so good at soberly hectoring the voters from the campaign pulpit, especially when millions of the most progressive of those voters will now be further convinced that he’s (wittingly or not) in league with the forces of darkness. That’s not good for Ralph Nader, and it’s not good for the country.
Whatever happens in November, Ralph Nader’s legacy will remain quite fine, thank you, which is more than can be said of either the Republicans or Democrats. But this year looks like one of those dreary moments when the perfect is the enemy of the good. 
This article appears in February 27 • 2004.
