He's Baaack! Nader Announces Prez Bid

On MSNBC's Meet the Press this morning, Ralph Nader announced that he is running for President again this year. He did not announce a running mate, but is said to have winnowed the field to tow choices, Yakov Smirnov and That-Thing-in-the Back-of-Your-Throat-That-Looks-Like-a-Punching-Bag. The trio are said to be ironing out policy differences.

In all seriousness, though, I've never been one of those leeberals who got angry with Nader and blamed him for Al Gore's defeat in 2000. Last time I checked, Nader isn't on the Supreme Court, didn't purge hundreds of thousands of Democrats from Florida and Ohio voter rolls, and did not roll over and surrender on recounts. I love Al Gore the filmmaker, but Al Gore the candidate ran an awful campaign, still won, then refused to claim his victory. After the jump, some more clips from Meet the Press, and some brief analysis that goes something like this: Nader is absolutely right.

Here's the announcement:

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PD toolbar!To see more, you can skip down and watch the 2 clips posted below. I'll wait. OK, so having watched all of these clips, I ask you to argue with a single thing he said. Granted, conservatives might quibble with him on policy, but besides that, I'd like to hear how he's wrong.

This is a familiar tune in American politics. People like Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Nader, and on a more mainstream scale, John Edwards, get painted as marginal nutjobs by so-called "realists", but when you listen to these guys, they make a lot of sense. (Edwards, while not painted as a "nutjob", was definitely marginalized for pushing for too much change.) If blaming Ralph Nader for 2000 makes you a "realist", I'll stay in the rabbit hole, thank you.

Barack Obama makes a decent point about Nader, that he trades a shot at practical influence for political purity. Nader's strategy is to influence debate by remaining pure and running his 3rd party campaign, but the noise from Democratic crybabies drowns out his message. It's a lot easier to dump on Nader than to actually show political courage.

That's really the crux of Nader's argument, that the Democrats have been robbed of political courage. He knows that Barack Obama, and most other Democrats, are committed to core Democratic principles, but set their sights at what is "achievable." The Right has been so successful at demonizing even debate about issues like defense spending and national healthcare that the Democrats don't even bother anymore.

Unfortunately, Ralph is doomed to be obscured by that giant "spoiler" sign. The people who should be supporting Ralph are the ones wielding the paintbrush. If you missed it in 2004, here's the infamous Randi Rhodes clip. Ralph was right then, too. John Kerry lost to a campaign that a 5th grader could have beaten.

What Ralph doesn't say, but probably understands, is that today's politics only allow for incremental courage, but someone needs to be there to light up the real target of people-powered politics so that, if we ever get within range of it, we'll still know where it is.

Here's some more from Meet the Press:


And the rest:


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