I watched the documntary "an unreasonable man" and gained a great deal of respect for Ralph Nader, recognize his right to run, and hope he does no. if he does i hope he gets 0 votes.

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It's like having to watch "groundhog day" over, and over, and over again.
I agree in principal with his attempts to change the system, but he did in fact cause Gore to lose votes. If the unfortunate result of our electoral system is that it's "us against them" then he should choose a candidate and support them, or just STFU.
There is absolutely nothing honorable about derailing other candidates for the sake of his own ego.
All the early good he did in consumer protection will become a tiny little footnote compared to how he will be remembered as an election wrecking asshat.

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Stop blaming Nader.

It is not his fault that the Democrats have insulted people of intelligence by condescending to give us the "choice" of two candidates who have essentially the same agenda, same financial backers - insurance, Wall Street, and big pharmaceuticals - and same sorts of foreign policy advisors.

If the Democratic Party wanted Nader's votes, they could take them. To do so they just have to get behind an ACTUAL universal health care system, renounce the free trade deals that ship jobs to slave wage countries, and call Iraq the criminal atrocity that it is and leave, since all Iraqi polls indicate that leaving is exactly what they want the US to do.

But they won't do that. They're too addicted to corporate money. So instead we get "Change Revolutions" like 2006 whereupon the newly elected Congress immediately turns around and says that impeachment for the President who defied international law and the entire world and invaded a defenceless country is "off the table". We get candidates for President who are kind of, you know, against the Iraq war despite having voted for it/funded it, and hem and haw over what they'll do to leave.

The Democratic Party apparatus is irredeemably corrupt. Stop blaming Nader for not coming to them cap in hand.

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Then if the Dems find a way to lose again they won't have you to blame.

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Personally, my chief concern about Nader running is whether he intends to run for the Green Party's nomination, or go it alone again.

Much as I appreciate Ralph, I share the author's concern: "And I'd have a lot more respect for him if he made a concerted effort to make this point--and endeavored to either galvanize a vibrant third party or progressivize the Democratic party--in between elections,"

This is correct, and oddly out of character for Nader, who has spent his career building institutions, but has done little to build up a new, anti-corporate party. I think he enters politics very reluctantly, motivated by disgust and an effort to motivate the Democrats he worked with for decades. He promised a while ago that he would run if Hillary Clinton was the nominee, and that looks more and more likely.

If you're worried about "spoilers", go out and work for IRV or any electoral system that eliminates that problem. It would be a huge improvement, but the Democrats as much as the Repubs fight it tooth and nail because they think plurality voting and the spoiler effect keep out the competition. That it does, to a point: the point when people are so disgusted that they vote for "3rd" parties anyway. Then you get elections with tiny pluralities, like 38% in Mexico (same system) or 34% that elected Blair the last time (plurality voting and a parliamentary system with 3 major parties.) Or Clinton's 40+% in his first election.

Work on it fast, because Nader or no, the Greens are going to run somebody (Cynthia McKinney, if not Nader) just as hard as we can. If the Democrats engineer a close race against all odds, as they have the last two, then anything could happen. I'm looking forward to a wild electoral year.

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The biggest, let me repeat, the biggest regret of my life is that I voted for Nader in 2000. And yet I was in a state that was safely red -- no swing-state was it at the time. Still I am ashamed of my vote. If Nader tries again to run he will be laughed into shameful oblivion. No one takes you seriously any more, Ralph.

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Actually, Nader has done a lot to help the Green Party between elections. See to list of items below from the Green Party questionnaire for presidential candidates (full at www.draftnader.org).

And I wouldn't call fighting corporate rule, endless war, and global warming a "vanity campaign."

Nader and the Greens:

After the 2000 campaign through 2003, Ralph Nader:
• Wrote the book, Crashing the Party, touting the Green Party and its platform
• Spoke at 45 Green Party fundraisers in 31 states, traveling to them at his own expense, raising more money than
anyone for the Green Party at the national party, state and local levels
• Sent representatives to the Global Greens Conference in Canberra in 2001; the Hiawassee, GA meeting in 2000; the
Santa Barbara, CA meeting in 2001; and the D.C. meeting in 2003; Ralph Nader attended the Philadelphia, PA national
Green Party meeting in 2002.
• Met with dozens of Green leaders around the world when as they visited D.C.
• Went to Europe in 2002 for the 3rd annual Congress of European Greens in Germany, and visited the French and
Swedish Greens before their elections.

From 2005 until the present, Ralph Nader has:
• Campaigned, raised funds, and/or appeared/assisted with Green candidates, including Kevin Zeese, MD; Howie
Hawkins, NY; Carl Romanelli, PA, and Todd Chretien, CA for US Senate; Peter Miguel Camejo, CA, and Clifford
Thornton, CT, for Governor, CA; Donna Jo Warren for Lt. Governor, CA; Forrest Hill for Secretary of State, CA; Alice
Green, Albany, NY; Tony Gronowicz, New York City, and Jason West, New Paltz, NY for Mayor; Gloria Mattera for
Brooklyn Borough President; Jerry Kann, Queens, NY and Maria Allwine and Bill Barry, Baltimore, MD, for City Council;
Sally Soriano for Seattle School Board; and Green Party slates for statewide office in CA and CT.
• Spoke at educational and issue events and actions with Green speakers in Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, and Glenns
Falls, NY; Washington, DC; and Seattle, WA.
• Worked with DC Statehood Greens to stop corporate welfare for the Washington Nationals’ baseball stadium and to
protect public space and property, including public libraries.
• Initiated with New College “Greening the Political System” in San Francisco in December 2006 with featured
speakers Matt Gonzalez, former Green San Francisco County Supervisor; Ross Mirkarimi, current Green San Francisco
County Supervisor; and Gail McLaughlin, Green Mayor of Richmond, CA.
• Spoke at the Green Party national meeting in Reading PA in July 2007 and raised $4900 for the Green Party at the
meeting.

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Okay, all year long, every year, for decades, Ralph Nader has been actively involved in bringing about political change in Washington. He has a more exhaustive list of non-profit organizations that are active AND effective than any public person you can think of. He writes weekly articles decrying the government and the influence of corporations over America. He speaks all over the world advocating the things all progressives should be supporting, universal health care, repeal of NAFTA, meaningful emissions standards, etc.

One person actually suggested that unlike Al Gore Ralph has been sitting on the sidelines for the past 30 years. Before 2000 Al Gore was about as far from a real progressive as Joe Lieberman is. You remember Joe, don't you? Al's running mate in 2000. Al Gore was a pro-military corporate candidate who was trying to court the right wing evangelical base. He had one thing, the environment, to appeal to the left.

I'm not even going to get into the cognitive dissonance required to blame Nader voters and not the 90,000,000 people who voted for GWB, but I will say that the Democratic party lost my vote when they nominated Gore in 2000. Anyone who thinks he would have been fundamentally different from Bush forgot the bombing of Bosnia, Operation Desert Fox, and the DMCA, not to mention Clinton's attempts to require all encrypted email to have a secret back door the FBI could peer into.

Ralph Nader has been advocating progressive ideals since the 1960s, he has been a more influential advocate against unchecked corporate power and greed than any individual since Upton Sinclair, from the auto industry to the nuclear industry Nader's influence is ubiquitous from every breath of clean air you take to the seat belts you depend on to protect you when you go for a drive.

It's time for people to take responsibility for what they write and do their homework. If you want to decry a person in writing, then spend a little time researching them. If you don't believe a third party should be able to run for office, that's fine. But you should admit that your problem is with democracy as it should be practiced, not some ignorant straw man about spoilers and blatant lies about a man who has done nothing but good for this country for the past fifty years and continues to do so to this day.

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...that we have someone spend the time and energy running and promoting our ideals, and in return he gets comdemned for supposedly being an egomaniac.

I'm tired of the half-hearted liberalism the Democrats dish up. Where has it gotten us?. The last Democrat in office left us with more people rather than less without health care, more people in prison, more capital offenses on the books, less manufacturing jobs, more monopolization of the media and more gay people being kicked out of the military. Is that progress?

How many times are we going to hear this argument that it's fine for Nader to galvanize a progressive movement, but not during a presidential campaign year? When else is he going to get any media attention? And the notion that he should work from within the Democratic party to make it a bastion of progressivism is absurd. How far did Kucinich get by taking that approach? I think Nader is above subjecting himself to the humiliation of not being allowed in his own party's debates.

I hope he does run, as well as Bloomberg, Ron Paul and anyone else who insists on speaking with candor and courage.

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Ralph Nader would make a far superior president than that corporate lawyer and that bootstrapless Ivey leaguer

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what I really meant was,,,Obama and Clinton neither one have the guts or the slightest intention of putting corporations where they belong. they owe waaaaaaay too much

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I get the impression that Nader has been impatient with the failure of America to change overnight for many, many years

WHAT??

--and if only he'd been boringly, unceremoniously slogging it out all those years, like Gore and his 30-year-crusade, America would be different.

Oh, my aching arse but you are too funny.


But, alas, he does not seem to be a man who is satisfied with incremental progress, so still he guns for a lightning strike that will never come.

Thus Spake She Who Is Fact-Free.

Thanks for this. It was an object lesson in how you don't have to be factual, grammatical or in any way helpful, pertinent or correct to get people to read your stuff.

And it truly is hilarious.

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Nothing friggin' else, hubris....

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Cynthia McKinney

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You know, I don't really care about how hard Nader works in the off years. I'm a pragmatist. Splitting the liberal/left vote will benefit Republicans. No matter how much you may think that Hillary and Obama are corporate schills or whatever, the fact is that either of them would be heads and shoulders above McCain or Romney.

Anyone who think there's no difference between the parties needs only to contemplate the types of Supreme Court justices that President Hillary would appoint as opposed to President McCain. Sure, there's not enough difference, and the Dems really don't support a true progressive agenda, but bottom line? The next president is going to be either a Democrat or Republican, so can we just cooperate to make sure it's the Dem?

Build that third party, whether it's the Greens or some other group, through local elections, off year elections - it takes years to build up a reputation, so take the long view. Get city councilpersons, mayors, state legislators, etc. elected from the third party and eventually it will be taken seriously at the national level. But not yet. Not now.

Now, we protect reproductive and gay rights, stop the torture and the assault on our civil liberties, get out of Iraq, do something about health care, even if the Democratic plan falls short of what most progressives would prefer to see. Incremental steps are better than going backwards.

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How can many of you display such hatred for such a great man withing the progressive movement!

Your two party system has blinded you! Political bigotry is right!

Do Labour voters in the UK call the Liberal Democrats "spoilers" when they lose? No. Because it is the Labour parties failure to sway the Lib Dem voters.

When the Labour party was formed in the 1930's the useless corporate bought Liberal Democrats probably called them spoilers, but when the Labour party came to power 20 years later it was they who brought about real and positive change for the country!

Even if Nader runs I will be supporting Obama, but I would NEVER call a more progressive candidate a spoiler to the less progressive one!

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A lot can happen between now and the end of the primaries, but right now it's shaping up to be Clinton v. McCain. If that turns out to be the case, I'm thinking of casting a protest vote for the Green candidate, whoever he or she is.

Forget about that repeated mantra: "We must elect a Democrat this time." The only real difference between Hillary and McCain is that she spouts the typical election-year Democratic boilerplate, and he spouts the typical Republican election-year boilerplate. But no matter who wins the presidency, how the one governs will not differ measurably from the leadership of the other. Hillary will still keep us in Iraq (for the oil, you know), and John will strive to keep abortions safe and legal. Hillary was a corporate lawyer for most of her career, and John was a maverick whom the corporations and Wall Street distrust. So they really meet in the middle--which is actually a bit right of center. Think back to Eisenhower for how this sort of presidency would play out.

So a protest vote by progressives really wouldn't harm the country. If that vote is large enough, then neither candidate would be tempted to say, as George W. Bush famously said, that he or she has a lot of capital to spend--and then spend it in all the wrong places.

What I'm hoping for, however, is that Obama derails the Clinton express. Although he's promised to forge bi-partisan agreement, he was always against invading Iraq, and he was never a corporate lawyer. With Obama, the progressive agenda has some chance of advancing. That's why I've removed my "Kucinich for President" bumper sticker to replace with an Obama sticker. Here's a guy who not only talks the talk, but who has already walked the walk in Chicago's inner city.

If it comes down to McCain v. Obama, there really is a measurable difference, and progressives should grab the opportunity to make progress, rather than continue to wait in the wings for a better candidate to appear; because that might take a very long time.

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One would think that the old fool could have learned something from last time, since he is directly responsible for Bush winning the White House. Apparently he has not damaged the nation as much as he would like to, so here he goes again. I only hope the idiots that voted for him last time have learned their lesson, as he obviously has not.

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If we had run-off elections then we would not have to fear a spoiler like Nader. We need run-off voting for president.

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8 yrs. ago i asked you to go to the himalayas and f yourself, you let me down. is there any perimeter to your ego, or is it like the universe, ever-expanding.

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