Ralph Nader: Return of the Spoiler

Last week, Ralph Nader announced that he would run for the presidency again this coming fall.  His decision was  “driven in part by his frustration over the efforts to thwart his last run.  ‘If there was no other reason to run — other than the civil liberties, civil rights issue of ballot access — it’d be worth it,’ Mr. Nader said in a telephone interview after announcing his candidacy on ‘Meet the Press.’”  While I applaud the notion that civil liberties are what distinguish America from many other countries, I question Mr.  Nader’s motives.   He seems to conveniently enter himself into crucial elections in which his votes can indirectly play a deciding role.    In an interview with US News & World Reports, he gave his reasons for running:

Because there are too many necessities of the American people that are being opposed or ignored by the major candidates in the Democrat and Republican parties… They are opposed to a single-payer health insurance [and] Medicare for all, which is supported by the majority of the American people. They are opposed to cutting the huge bloated military budget, which now consumes half of the federal government’s operating expenditures, and there’s no more Soviet Union. They are opposed to cracking down on the corporate crime wave that has drained and taken trillions of dollars in the last 10 years from pension holders, investors, and workers….

Hmm…sounds like he has chosen to completely ignore the campaign of both the Democratic candidates.  For instance, Obama is for a universal health care system, a withdrawal in Iraq, a fundamental shift from our unilateral war hawk mindset to a more balanced outlook on foreign policy, and he is the most viable anti-lobby candidate that the Democrats have had in recent memory.  If Nader truly cares about having his voice heard, I’d suggest that he meet in private with the Democratic nominee and agree not to run if the nominee agreed to lend credence to some of Nader’s issues (without of course actually mentioning Nader’s name in any speech since that would be political suicide). 

I’ll end this post with a fitting quote from Obama, who always seems to know how to tie things up both accurately and concisely:

Ralph Nader deserves enormous credit for the work he did as a consumer advocate. But his function as a perennial candidate is not putting food on the table of workers.