Use your delusion
Ralph Nader says he's re-entered the race for president.
Elsewhere in this blog, I've written -- some would say gushed -- about my admiration for candidates who run for office on principle with little chance of winning. At the risk of contradicting everything I've written on the topic thus far -- is this guy on freakin mushrooms?
Most Democrats and assorted other left-of-center types still fault Nader for being a spoiler in 2000, leading to two terms of the Bush administration. Even the Green Party didn't endorse him in 2004. Nader supporters (yes, there are still a few) take issue with that assertion.
Whether or not the spoiler thing was true in 2000, it isn't likely to apply this time around. Nader's popularity has fallen off since then. He probably won't be enough of a factor in the race to merit "spoiler" status.
The guy's got a right to run, of course. And you could argue that if it's not likely to do any harm anyway, why not run simply for the sake of publicizing some issues?
My thinking is that most people who might be otherwise sympathetic to his viewpoints are still so sore at him that he could get stink juice on anything he touches. Even the most liberal candidates in the Democratic primary weren't exactly clamoring for his endorsement, which I'll bet would have counted for something among Democrats if not for his 2000 presidential bid. Whatever else you say about the guy, he still wrote "Unsafe at Any Speed."
I think the best thing Nader could do at this point would be to make himself scarce for a while, where public life is concerned.
Maybe write a few scholarly articles. Give a few lectures. Head over to Noam Chomsky's place for Playstation Night. All he'd have to do is live long enough to let people cool down and forgive him, then re-emerge as an admittedly flawed but revered elder statesman of the American left. I think Nader could hang in that long. He doesn't strike me as one of these cigar-and-single-malt kind of politicians.
Of course, these days Republicans may have a Ralph Nader of their own.
I've spoken to a number of Ron Paul supporters recently. And I give them credit for their dedication. But in their talk of principle over political expediency, I hear echoes of all those Nader supporters back in 2000. A lot of them started out backing Dubya, but became disenchanted with him over two terms, not unlike the relationship between many Nader supporters and Bill Clinton circa 2000.
Will the Paul supporters end up kicking themselves, as so many Nader supporters did after November, 2000? It's way too early to say, or course. But it would constitute a certain karmic symmetry.
