Ralph Nader's Election Night Speech

Ralph Nader gave the following address to campaign staff and supporters gathered at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on election night.

First, let me thank all these people who worked on the campaign. What we know for sure is that we're coming out of this election day with the third-largest party in America, replacing the Reform Party. Building a long-term progressive reform movement. That's really quite an achievement, it took lot of people from all over the country to do that, so, great staff, working day and night here in Washington, and above all it took a commitment by people to no longer settle for the least of the worst or the lesser of two evils, where at the end of the day you're still stuck with worst and evil.

To try to challenge the entrenched two-party system, this is really a lot what the campaign was about. The two parties raised these statutory barriers to get on the ballot, and they campaign with most of the money by raising corrupt soft money, and corporate money and PAC money -- all of which we rejected, because we wanted to set an example of what is necessary for real reform of our corrupt campaign system.

And of course you're up against (the fact that) most of the coverage on the horse race was between these two horses. They're tired and hollow, and have forgotten even to eat their oats in order to reinvigorate themselves. And then, the two parties control the debate commission which is really a private company. And they exclude Third Party candidates, so really it's a quite amazing and varied system of rigging the election for the two major parties. ... It's why the two major parties can't regenerate themselves because their excluding all kinds of competition, and instead, imitating themselves.

The Republican and Democratic parties take more money from the same sources, they morph into one corporate party with two heads, and (then Americans) presume that it really matters for the State Department, or Defense Department or Treasury Department, or Department of Commerce, Labor, Agriculture, or the health and safety regulatory agencies ... whether Gore or Bush is in the White House (but it isn't) because they don't make the decisions. The decisions are made by the people we trip over in Washington D.C. every day: 22,000 corporate lobbyists, and 9,000 political action committees pumping money into both Republican and Democratic coffers.

This is what we expected was gonna happen, and we took 'em on. And the important thing here is we've reached a take-off stage in the Green Party, and that this is the last time that the two parties in a national election will have a monopoly power to exclude significant Third-Party members from the debate. ...

Going around the country you get the feeling that there are millions of people who are really ready for a new progressive political movement, and it takes a lot of work to get them together, and to believe that they can do it, because of the dominance of the two-party duopoly.

But we have now seen enormous talent come out from all over the country, not just in local state Green parties, like Medea Benjamin in California, but we've seen seasoned citizen activists, who recognize that the civil society has been crowded out in Washington increasingly the last 20 years by the two corporate powers, and we have to heed Thomas Jefferson's wisdom, that when our country is taken away from us, we have to go into the political arena and mobilize new political civic energy throughout the United States in order to come back and take our government back from the corporate supremacists who think that there's nothing they can't control, there's nothing that they can't commercialize, there's nothing that they cannot daunt. And we're going to prove them wrong.