Populist may run for President again
Opinion and analysis from a Western Voices reader
Ralph Nader, consumer advocate and patriotic populist, may throw his hat in the ring for another presidential run, according to news sources. The information comes in the wake of the announcement that John Edwards, the Democrat Nader had supported, was withdrawing from a race that sees the Democrats locked in racial turmoil.
A Nader push will dismay the Obama and Clinton campaigns, which, despite their corporate agendas, have counted on leftist support as a matter of course. Nader’s run in 2000 is widely blamed for breaking off enough progressive votes to sink Al Gore’s White House hopes.
Derided by Democrats as a “spoiler,” Nader may play the same role as Ron Paul plays in the Republican camp, as the voice of principle and substance, exposing the hollow, ideologically bankrupt scam of the media created Barack and Hillary show.
Ralph Nader personfies the “left/right” crossover continuing across most Western nations that has been going on since the end of the Cold War. Nader’s protectionist populism and foreign policy “isolationism” have a lot in common with “Old Right” forces championed by the likes of Pat http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3163 and elsewhere.
Nader is a much needed voice of reason on the left. As his site, Nader.org states, there is little substantive difference between either Establishment party, and neither elite group cares about ordinary people. But the Clintons are the worst: “For Bill and Hillary Clinton, the ultimate American dream is eight more years. Yet how do you think they would react to having dozens of partisans at their rallies sporting large signs calling for EIGHT MORE YEARS, EIGHT MORE YEARS? Don’t you have the feeling that they would cringe at such public displays of their fervent ambition which the New York Times described as a “truly two-for-the-price-of-one” presidential race? It might remind voters to remember or examine the real Clinton record in that peaceful decade of missed opportunities and not be swayed by the sugarcoating version that the glib former president emits at many campaign stops.”
Of Obama, Nader has said that “…he’s going to one economic sector interest after another raising money. And so, the question is whether he’s going to mobilize the people or he’s going to parade in front of the people. And if he does that, he’s not going to be a distinguished winner if he wins. I was very upset the other day when I heard him say publicly that he wanted to expand and modernize the military.”
In foreign affairs, Nader bemoans the squandering of the “peace dividend” America could have spent wisely in the wake of the Cold War. Instead of seeing the collapse of the Soviet Union as a chance to roll back the military/industrial complex and invest in America’s infrastructure while building renewed friendships across the world, America’s leaders looked for (and found) new enemies, allowed Russia to fall into the hands of the Yeltsin kleptocracy, and engaged in belligerent behavior across the globe.
While Nader’s campaign is unlikely to succeed in putting him in the White House, it exposes the vacuum of ideas at the top of the ruling elite, while showing the public that the Republicrat puppet show is devoid of solutions to America’s many ills.