The Nader Concession

According to TheNaderFactor.com, "Republicans have launched concerted, coordinated and well-crafted efforts to boost [independent presidential candidate Ralph] Nader’s ability to get on the ballot in Arizona, Oregon, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida."

These Republican efforts, in fact, turn out to be better organized and more determined than the Nader campaign, as Sharon Emery reports from Michigan on MLive.com:

The Nader campaign submitted fewer than 5,400 signatures seeking ballot access for the consumer activist and 2000 Green Party nominee as an independent candidate.

The Michigan Republican Party collected and filed the rest, nearly 45,000. A minimum of 30,000 were required.

This has gotten a lot of attention from Democrats who are begging Ralph to quit playing third-party pooper and get out of the race. Folks like Eric Alterman have noted -- at length -- what all this suggests about Nader's principles and his motives for running in this way.

What has gotten less attention is what all this says about Republicans and, particularly, what they really think of their own candidate.

If some hypothetical conservative fringe candidate -- Roy Moore, say, or James Dobson -- were to decide to jump into the race, I think most Democrats would be pleased. Such a candidate would take away support from George W. Bush and we would welcome that. But we wouldn't contribute our time or money to the Dobson or Moore campaign because we're already busy supporting a candidate we actually believe in.

I just signed up to volunteer with MoveOn's "Leave No Voter Behind" campaign. I'm going to be working hard to get my neighbors out to the polls to vote for John Kerry and John Edwards. This will involve introducing myself to strangers. That's not my strong suit, but it's worth it and it's not hard to do when you have a candidate you genuinely support and whose election would result in a better future for the neighbors you're trying to persuade.

If the Republican canvassers in Michigan genuinely believed in their candidate, they would've spent their time telling people about him -- bragging about his accomplishments and laying out his vision for a better, stronger America for all.

But, alas for them, they can't brag about their candidates accomplishments because he hasn't actually accomplished anything. Except for twiddling his thumbs while 1.5 million jobs evaporated. And turning trillions of dollars of projected surpluses into trillions of dollars of unending debt. And ignoring the threat of terrorism after 9/11. And, oh yes, misleading the country into a costly and unnecessary quagmire that has cost the lives of nearly 1,000 Americans and made Osama bin Laden a more successful recruiter. But those aren't the kind of accomplishments you can really brag about.

(To his credit, he did get Afghanistan right. For about three months. Then he screwed that up too.)

And as for laying out Bush's vision -- let's just say trying to sell swing voters on four more years like the last four isn't easy.

So what are they to do? They can't expect or hope that swing voters will vote for their candidate based on the last four years, but maybe they could get some people to vote for somebody else who wasn't John Kerry. Maybe they can get Ralph Nader on the ballot and get 2 or 3 percent of the electorate to vote for him.

By supporting the Ralph Nader campaign, Republicans in Michigan -- and in Arizona, Oregon, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida -- have conceded that it is easier to convince people that Ralph Nader deserves their vote than to convince them that George W. Bush does.

They may not admit they know it -- they may not even realize they know it -- but that proves that at some level they know that their party's candidate is not qualified for the job.

Comments

[julia]

Meanwhile, given a choice of abu Ghraib, overtime, Najaf, environmental regulations going bye-bye, the gutting of OSHA, the end of nuclear verification and the politicization of the intelligence process, Ralph wrote another Op Ed piece for the Washington Times yesterday about - you guessed it - whether there should be major league baseball in DC.

[tps12]

It's hard to say what Democrats would do to help get a right-wing spoiler on the ballot. Apparently, PA Dems helped gather signatures to get James Clymer in the Senate race: http://www.lancasteronline.com/pages/news/local/4/7868

I don't think there's really anything wrong with it. Republican support of Nader reflects poorly on Nader, not necessarily on the GOP, who are just playing politics.

[Patrick Mullins]

Bravo to your tireless work, Fred, and your fine energy, which has seemingly been growing to match the heat of the convention. You ought to do okay with the "strangers."

I sent it to someone, but I believe it was Alterman who wrote an article 3-4 months ago in the Village Voice already about Nader's concealed desire to get Bush elected in 2000, which he did help do, so I tend to agree with tps12 that the Republicans are just playing politics and that it reflects primarily on the unbalanced personality of Nader.

[Patrick Mullins]

No, this was The Village Voice article. It's a must-read for anyone who wants the story.

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0418/levine.php

Ralph Nader, Suicide Bomber
by Harry G. Levine
May 3rd, 2004

[David Weisman]

The problem is, the best potential Republican spoilers are open or thinly veiled racists. Could we support one even for a good cause?

[Beth]

I had an encounter with a Naderite a few months ago. She was collecting signatures to get Nader on the ballot, or, as she put it, defending his right to run for office. When I steadfastly refused to sign, she became outraged. "He has a right to run for president!" she shrieked. "Yes, and I have a right not to support him," I shot back. The whole thing left me a bit shaken, as encounters with raving lunatics often do. Nobody has an automatic right to get their name on a ballot. Nader, like everyone else has to meet state requirements in order to qualify. Obviously, this woman didn't see it that way at all. By refusing to make a special exception for St. Ralph, the state was threatening democracy itself, and by refusing to sign, I had shown myself to be an enemy of freedom. I suppose over the past few years, I've come to associate that sort of for-us-or-in-league-with-Satan thinking exclusively with the Right. It was a shock to realize that leftists can be just as blindly fanatical.

It's this same monomaniacal thinking that lets Naderites join forces with Republicans and worse. I suspect that even if you could guarantee a Naderite that Bush unleash a nuclear holocaust if he were re-elected, they would still take every vote they could from Kerry. They'd die happy, knowing Nader got that one extra percentage point.

It's ironic. I actually agree with much of what Nader stands for, and four years ago I was very tempted to vote for him myself. Ttoday though, I consider him an enemy, not just because he's playing spoiler in a watershed election, but because it's slowly become clear that behind all the fine words and phrases, there stands a raving Manichean, and I've had enough of those to last a lifetime.