Site Presented By
Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
In an interview with Salon, Ralph Nader rejects the spoiler label and says Democrats "need to stop their whining and go to work."
Apr 12, 2004 | Though he failed last Monday to draw enough supporters to make the Oregon ballot, Ralph Nader is determined to run a full-bore independent campaign in swing states, whatever the consequences. And if his comments to Salon are any indication, he intends to bash the Democrats along the way.
With his February announcement that he would mount a third bid for the presidency, this time as an independent, consumer advocate Ralph Nader cemented his status as the other guy the Democrats love to hate. But it's not just Democrats that question his motives. With the 2004 presidential election shaping up as an apocalyptic, scorched-earth showdown between two major parties vying for the allegiance of an evenly (and deeply) divided country, Nader's decision elicited an explosion of anger in many of the liberal and progressive circles from which Nader drew his past support.
It is not that Nader's message has lost its relevance to progressives. His thundering denunciations of creeping corporatism, his characterization of the Iraq invasion as an imperialist war of choice sold to an unsuspecting public on a platform of outright mendacity, and his calls for major reforms of healthcare, labor and trade policies all ring true. It is his proposed solution to those problems, and his contention that there is not much substantive difference between Democrats and Republicans, that has caused so much consternation among "anybody but Bush" liberals. Perversely, he seems angrier at the Democrats than he does at the Republicans. For those who don't share Nader's scorn for the Democratic Party, the very palpable fear after three years of Bush-style "compassionate conservatism" is that this election could turn out to be a reprise of 2000, where in at least two states, Nader, running under the Green Party banner, siphoned off enough votes from Al Gore to throw the election to George Bush.
To all outward appearances, Nader remains unperturbed by the negative reaction. In making his announcement, he called on "the liberal intelligentsia" to "relax and rejoice" over his decision, claiming that he would aid the Democrats by opening a second front against Bush. He has said, counterintuitively, that he intends to draw more votes from disaffected Republicans and Independents than from Democrats. He has claimed he will keep the Democrats honest, pushing them to embrace badly needed reforms they might otherwise ignore.
Still, the conundrum for Nader is that the only way he can avoid irrelevance is by at least threatening to play the spoiler's role, thus forcing Democrats to take him and his message seriously. To this end, he categorically rejects entreaties not to run in swing states. Oregon, for example, where Nader garnered 5 percent of the vote in 2000, was a state Gore carried by less than 6,800 votes. That Nader can actually reprise his 2000 results, however, is unlikely. In his first high-profile campaign swing, a visit to Seattle and a ballot-access nominating convention in Portland last week, Nader suffered a significant setback, falling well short of the 1,000 supporters he needed to attain the Oregon ballot immediately. Only 741 registered voters came out in Portland -- a city where he drew 10,000 to a rally in 2000 -- a telling indication of the diminished enthusiasm for Nader's run.
But despite that tepid turnout, early polling shows that Nader once again holds the potential to undercut John Kerry in key toss-up states that the Democrats must win to have any chance of unseating Bush. He is clearly determined to make the ballot in at least the 43 states he contested in 2000, and ballot access experts believe he is likely to succeed. That this is a real problem for Democrats has not been lost on Republicans -- at least some of the money coming into Nader's coffers are donations from prominent Bush supporters.
Salon sat down with Nader last Monday in Seattle to ask him about his seemingly quixotic campaign. He defended his decision to run and blasted the Democratic Party as a decaying institution unwilling to champion progressive reforms. He called on his critics to "stop whining," flatly rejected the contention that he is a spoiler, and said that liberals are "so freaked out" by Bush that they have failed to ask anything of Democratic nominee John Kerry.
