Revisiting Nader

An old friend from high school googled his way over here this weekend, and while writing to say hello he wondered about my support for Kerry here in the blog, and my rather sour comments about Nader. He suggested that voting for Bush or Nader would be more beneficial to progressives in the long run, and asked if I'd heard Nader on Democracy Now this week.

I'm going to justify the crapload of time I spent composing a reply by reposting it here:

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You mean keep Bush in cuz then maybe things'll get bad enough to wake people up and spark some real change? While Kerry will keep things just bad enough to be tolerable? I can understand that to some extent.

But A) I'm pretty skeptical about America's ability to wake up, and B) I don't think now's the time to go for that gambit cuz the effects of another Bush term could be so long-lasting, if not irreversible. Between the "War on Terror" and the looming Supreme Court vacancies, I see this as more of a stop-the-bleeding-before-we-flatline moment..

I just read this week's DN transcript, and I can't say it really moves me.. every party tries to get every other candidate off the ballot if they have a shot at
it, that's how politics works.. so when he wails about the Dems' "unprecedented dirty tricks" honestly it strikes me as Nader feigning naivete so he can paint
himself as the victim again..

And this whole "I'm running because the democrats are trying to stop me from running" thing doesn't fly for me.. if the main reason you offer for continuing to
run is a circumstance that didn't exist until AFTER you started running, what does that tell me about the reasons you started running in the first place?

This is the kinda stuff that always turns me off when I see or hear him this year, he comes off as evasive and disingenuous.. constantly switching up his reasons for running as previous explanations lose their
currency.. answering questions without really answering them, and protesting the myriad ways he's being personally victimized by critics of his
campaign, which just keeps making him look more self-absorbed..

To be fair to Ralph, I think a lot of this is just caused by his extreme lack of media-savvy. He just can't see that he's making himself look less sincere
and less committed than he actually is.

But even so, it just reinforces my original point when I posted about him on my site: that in 2004, no matter
how well-meaning he was and how right his message, he was the wrong man to deliver that message. That because of how things went down in 2000, any campaign he ran in 2004 would put far more focus on himself as a controversial personality than on the issues he's trying to push. I think at this point he's
proven me right on that.