"I was not angry since I came to France!" Until I watched Meet the Press this weekend, I hadn't really gotten worked up about Ralph Nader's campaign. I just didn't have the energy to get pissed off at one more thing. But Ralph changed all that almost as soon as he opened his mouth Sunday morning.
When asked what the rationale of his candidacy was, he replied:
Politics is broken in this country. I think most people believe that. It's for sale. The corporations and their executives fund so much of politics. They put a "For sale" sign on many offices in Congress and government departments. And as a result, the necessities of the people are not being met. We have 47 million workers that work full time. The cleaners, the people who harvest our food who don't make a living wage, they work at Wal-Mart wages. We have 45 million, I think now, who don't have health insurance. The environment is still being devastated. They can't even count the votes on Election Day accurately. And giant corporations just have turned Washington into corporate-occupied territory.
What is his rationale? Not one of these problems well be better addressed by Bush than Kerry--and Nader admits so much when he says, "If the Republicans are as bad as John Kerry says they are, and they're worse . . "--so just what does he hope achieve? Apparently, four more years of environmental damage, four more years of Wal-mart suppressing wages, four more years of Bus's backers stealing the country right out from under us, is a small price to pay for Ralph making his statement. What he tells us he wants to do is to "jolt" the "decadent" Democratic party. That some of those uninsured millions will die for the want of medical care, that children will get sick as they handle pesticides as they work in the fields, matters little to him, so long as he can be the jolt that he thinks the party needs.
Nader is totally oblivious to the damage he has already done. About his role as spoiler in Florida, he said, "there's a statistical fallacy in taking one "what if" and segregating it out where there are so many others and...". Smart people learn from their mistakes, they don't repeat them after four years of watching the disastrous consequences from the last time.
God knows, I'm not a big fan of our current two-party arrangement. I'm a liberal in a moderately Democratic section of a conservative state. No one in Columbus or Washington talks about my values. But if John Kerry is, at worst, the lesser of two evils, at least he is lesser, and I'd rather vote for the guy that will do better than the guy that has already done much, much worse.
8:13:53 PM 
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