DISPATCHES By Hank Kalet: Nader’s reasons for presidential run seem outdated and unclear.
By: Hank Kalet
Ralph Nader used to be one of my heroes.
Now he’s just irrelevant.
His decision on Sunday to toss his hat into the presidential election race smacks of nothing more than ego-driven politics, the urge to keep himself in the national limelight no matter what the consequences.
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I supported Mr. Nader’s candidacy in both 1996 and 2000, agreeing that the corporate-friendly policies of the Clinton White House and the Democratic leadership in Congress were no different than what a Republican administration was likely to follow.
His critique of the American political system remains valid but only to a point. There is too much corporate influence on policy and it is having and will have dangerous long-term consequences on our economy, our air and water, on our rights as workers and citizens. There is a need to rebuild democratic institutions, a need to cleanse the process of the obscene quantities of cash that infect it, a need for alternate voices and political parties.
There remain too many places in the United States where the minority party is nothing more than a shell, where the majority party faces little or no real opposition. I’m thinking in particular of Middlesex County Democrats, who raise nearly 20 times what the county GOP can raise and rarely garner less than 60 percent of the vote for freeholder, or of a town like Monroe in which the local Republican Party sometimes has difficulty even fielding candidates.
But while Ralph Nader is talking about building alternative party structures, his run seems a foolhardy way to do it. Rather than getting into the individual communities and creating a new party structure from the ground up, he is talking about running for president and running in a year in which his natural constituency, hard-core liberals and progressives like myself, has coalesced around one very specific goal: Beating George W. Bush.
That was not the case in 1996 when many liberals and progressives were angry at a Clinton administration that led the fight for punitive changes in welfare, expanded the federal death penalty and other legislation we found anathema to our beliefs. His critique of the Democrats in both 1996 and 2000 was valid and necessary, as was his challenge to the corporate-dominated election system.
But the political paradigm has changed since George W. Bush took office in January 2001, a change that Mr. Nader seems unwilling to accept. His reading of the American political landscape remains tied to the mid-1990s, when a pro-corporate Democrat was in the White House and the ideological gap between the two parties had narrowed to a degree that was dangerous to democracy.
But after three-plus years of the most ideologically driven administration in my lifetime, three-plus years in which the Bill of Rights has been under assault and the American economy has been mugged and robbed by the investor class, it is difficult for me to sit back and listen to an argument that essentially boils down to George W. Bush and John Kerry (or John Edwards) are one in the same man.
Give me a break, Ralph. The election of 2004 is not the election of 1996 or even 2000, when it could have plausibly been argued that the candidates running represented the opposite ends of a narrow ideological spectrum.
No matter how you slice it this time around, there is a stark difference in the choices represented by the two parties. George W. Bush is running as a war president and is boasting his national security credentials and claiming his tax cuts have jumpstarted the economy. Democrats John Kerry and John Edwards are running against President Bush’s war (though they did vote for it), one that is fast becoming a quagmire, and the president’s rather dubious economic achievements i.e., an economy that has hemorrhaged more jobs in his three-plus years than during any other period since the end of the Great Depression.
The recently ended campaign of Howard Dean, quixotic though it may have been, has energized the so-called Democratic base and has injected some much-needed backbone into a party that has been too timid to challenge the status quo for far too long. Dr. Dean’s supporters are the people Mr. Nader normally would attract and there remains some question about whether they will get behind the Democratic nominee. I suspect they will, given their rabid dislike of the president and desire to send him back to Texas.
Dr. Dean’s initial success in building a grassroots operation has altered the mindset of the remaining Democrats, freeing them from the mind-numbing conformity that had seemed to constrain them earlier in the campaign. Even the staid and patrician Sen. Kerry has become more fiery in his approach, taking the president to task on his handling of the war in Iraq, the economy and other issues.
What Mr. Nader can offer in this climate is unclear.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and the Cranbury Press. He can be reached via [email protected].