Thought once he was a fine man

A very close friend of mine voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. She didn't live in Florida back then - she was in a decidedly red state at the time (before the time when we referred to red states and blue states, a vestige of the 2000 elections) - and has convinced herself that, living in a state that George Bush was clearly going to win, her vote was a reasonable protest against two party dominance and the so-called corporate ownership of the political process, and that she has nothing to regret. Ralph Nader, you see, was right, and her leanings still run toward him, although political reality has somewhat eclipsed the dream.

I've never really understood protest votes all that much, particularly where the protest is isolated to one side of the political spectrum, attempting to undermine the candidate that is closer to your viewpoint. People are welcome to believe what they want to believe, and see the world through whatever prism they favor, I guess. And I am extremely fond of that friend and her judgment.

For my part, however, I have always believed that Ralph Nader's brand of consumer advocacy makes no sense in the political context, that Nader just doesn't understand the political process or leadership, and that a failure to recognize that is pie in the sky. (As any consumer advocate can tell you, pie in the sky is dangerous - it's going to fall back to the ground and someone is likely to get hurt.) I was convinced, early in 2000 and long before election day, that Nader was delusional, overbearing, self-important. With Nader, everything is evidence of a corrupt, corporate-owned political system.

That does not mean that there's nothing broken in our political process and in the power of a limited number of big donors to influence that process. And I agree that there are significant issues with the absence of regulation, which passes on the costs of bad business practices to customers who do not have sufficient information in order to know that they are being taken advantage of. The past couple of months have clearly shown this with respect to the financial markets, and the problems are not limited to financial institutions - for example, lax regulation of the energy industry and distorted regulation of home building which encourage urban sprawl. But to have placed Al Gore and the Democrats as a whole on the corporatist, anti-regulation side of the coin (rather than on the side of realists who understand that an efficient market requires cooperation between the government, business and the consumer public) required complete ignorance about Al Gore, and could have been easily resolved by, among other things, simply reading Earth in the Balance, which argued forcefully against polluting corporations passing the environmental and health costs of their business practices on to the public and in favor of reforming corporate behavior by monetizing those costs and pushing them back on polluting corporations. Gore wasn't perfect, but his values represented a world of difference from Republican values. It was clear then, as it is more vivid today, that Gore and Bush were not the same.

Unfortunately, Nader (and his vocal supporters like Michael Moore) sadly confused an orientation toward market-based solutions with a corporate bias.

Moreover, contrast the corrupting influence of corporate lobbyist campaign fundraisers with the reliance by now-President-elect Obama's campaign on innumerable small donors, making his dependence on the American people as a whole rather than on a few special interests, despite what John McCain disingenuously would have had voters believe. It's an approach that a reasonable consumer advocate, short of the unrealistic and counterproductive fantasy of eliminating the dependence of campaigns on any financing at all, should prefer and praise.

But Ralph Nader is not about being a reasonable consumer advocate.

In 2000, I argued - to no one who could change anything - that Al Gore was making a mistake by not backing Ralph Nader's request to participate in the presidential debates. Some Gore supporters feared that by showing Nader the respect of being at the debates, he would have been more of a threat to hijack liberal votes from Gore. My view, having watched Nader, was that Nader's participation would have revealed his complete lack of comprehension of the issues that faced America. Every issue does not boil down to "corporations control America". More importantly, however, it would have also enabled Al Gore position himself as the reasonable candidate in the middle of the political spectrum, which is where he belonged. In addition to giving him a second voice in opposition to the brash Texas governor, taking hits from Nader from the so-called "left" inhabited by Nader wouldn't have hurt Gore, it would have revealed Gore's reasonableness. Governance matters, and since that was Al Gore's key argument, I believed it would have served him well in the debate. The ridiculousness of Nader's charges would have become readily obvious. Perhaps I am wrong about all of that; perhaps Nader's presence at the debates would have led to Nader receiving Perot-like percentages in 2000. Perhaps forcing Gore to discuss his positions on effective regulation would have damaged him with so-called moderates. I think that is wrong - or at least should be wrong - but we'll never know because history took a different course.

Following the election, most of America's progressive movement came to resent Nader's role in putting George W. Bush in the White House, his selfish behavior that led to an eight year period that proved that it does in fact matter who holds the presidency, eight years that President Obama will have a hard time undoing (altough it does offer Obama the opportunity for true greatness if he can succeed).

But beyond the resentment and anger around that particular event, I think many people have failed to truly come to terms with Ralph Nader. For instance, Nader received a respectful hearing earlier this year on the Daily Show.

Sometimes, self-satire can be more revealing than cultivated image. Back in the late 1980's, long before anyone had heard of "hanging chads" (itself requiring a rational consumer advocate, although I don't recall hearing Nader's voice on remedying that product defect), Raph Nader introduced himself to America's children on Sesame Street. Before the 2000 election fiasco, I had watched this clip innumerable times with my daughter on the Sesame Street 25th Anniversary video tape. While presenting himself as a person in our neighborhood, Ralph, in the name of advocacy, harms the consumer - Bob - by destroying something that Bob enjoyed and valued. By demanding perfection, Nader self-righteously leaves everything in tatters. But that's okay to Nader and his supporters, because it just proves that Nader was right all along, consequences be damned.



And so, eight years after that fateful day on which the nation began a month long struggle counting chads and battling in the courts, a day that ultimately changed the course of America in ways that nobody on any part of the political spectrum could have foreseen, and despite the fact that Ralph Nader told us that it didn't matter who was elected president since both Gore and Bush were effectively the same, Ralph Nader - the sanctimonious leader of the church of anti-corporate consumer advocacy - used the occasion of the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States to succinctly and directly lay bare - without satire or any sense of irony - his own true nature.



So we witness in real time the wheels coming off the wagon, the sleeves off the sweater. The message has become dangerous, and the messenger himself defective.

Caveat emptor. Buyer beware.