I would love to see the possibility of third and even fourth party candidates on the ballots for president. This country would benefit immensely if we could get more ideas out on the tables to discuss from a variety of viewpoints that are not just the two-sided voices of corporate America. However, there is something wrong in just attacking the corporate side of American life.
For one thing, not everyone agrees that what is good now for General Motors is indeed good for the country but not everyone also agrees that getting rid of General Motors will solve our problems. There are some systemic problems here that no one is truly addressing. They go beyond the issues of racism and sexism, though, of course those issues are of importance. Yet there are other issues that are not being discussed and that is because the candidates are in the throes of needing to get their party's nomination. They, McCain, Clinton and Obama, still need to get through a convention and to rally the troops after that convention to spend the next 3-4 months helping them to get elected.
Then up steps Nader after Dennis Kucinich has had to drop out of the race, has been carrying the progressive banner single-handedly for many, many months. Ralph Nader has not said one word about what Dennis Kucinich fights for so he does not credit him for trying to get the message on the table to be discussed.
Nader steps into the middle of the campaign season to announce his decision to think about running for president. He gets lots of press and then continues to dangle the possibility of his running for president in front of us all who care about some form of progressive response to the abuses of power we see. But then it begins to look to me that the corporate media is playing Ralph Nader and his followers. They are granting him the kind of access they have denied to other progressives, namely Dennis Kucinich. However, if this new Nader campaign does not wake up soon and look at who is helping to get their message out, they will continue to be played for the fools of the media that they are fast becoming.
But before we even enter into that discussion, let me ask if anyone has gone to Nader's website and looked at the 12 issues he thinks are worth fighting for. If you have, there is a terrible hole in the agenda he is building his campaign around. If you really want to be blunt, he has left out of his equation the people Dennis stands up for, has always stood up for and will never drop because they are politically inconvenient: the LGBT community and workers and those who have had to come to this country because of economic as well as political necessity.
Nowhere on Nader's website is there any concern for anyone's civil rights. It seems to me that at this point in our history, not just our civil rights legislation but the constitution itself has taken a real beating and continues to. Yet, this is not of interest to Nader. He is in favor of impeaching the president and vice president but I don't see any restoration of the balance that should be there between the three branches of government by ending the Patriot Act, by cancelling the Military Commission Act, by ruling out the use of wiretaps and other illegal means to spy on Americans.
I don't think we can afford a one-issue president. His one goal is to end the corporate control of the government and were that our only problem, he might have my vote. But that is not all that is going wrong here; the picture is larger, more frightening than he is suggesting and his whole way of presenting this set of issues makes me wonder why he is not more front and center with them on his site.
Now I can return to the issue of how the media may be playing Nader. I do think they have a vested interest in two things: selling advertising and nothing does that like a big fight, they also have a need to keep his name out there in the hopes of pulling off some kind of coup. No, I don't think it was Nader's fault that Bush became president. I think a multiplicity of reasons converged that included the complicity of the Supreme Court in a case they never should have heard, in a candidate (Gore) who refused to fight it out and a population so cowed by the events that plagued Clinton in the final years of his presidency that they were thrown off balance by this odd turn of events that they had never experienced before. Yes, Nader can be added to the mix but he is just being used as a scapegoat as far as I am concerned. It is just easier to say it is his fault than it is to look at what a mess that whole election became.
But now, Nader is crowing about getting attention for announcing his candidacy and for the ways in which the media is giving him his due. That seems to me naïve and/or disingenuous. I wish, though, that he would have stood up for someone else for a change rather than needing to blow his own horn. Also, I wish he would include his concerns for more of us than he does. He has lost my vote and my efforts due to this severe discrediting of an essential issue that needs to be addressed -- full civil rights for everyone.