Negative Responses To Nader Announcement

Less than an hour after Ralph Nader announced his candidacy, the text messages began rolling in.

"What is he doing?" one person asked.

"Why so late?" asked another.

"What a jerk!" a third declared.

A number of other messages came through that are too profane to reprint here. Suffice it to say the majority opinion has been negative. People in Winsted are echoing the sentiments of many across the country who think this Laurel City native is wasting his time.

This is Nader’s fifth consecutive foray into presidential politics. His first began and ended in New Hampshire in 1992 when he encouraged voters to write him in as a candidate. He received about 5,000 votes. A more concerted effort followed in 1996, when he garnered 0.6 percent of the vote behind Bill Clinton, Bob Dole and Ross Perot.

Nader’s 2000 campaign was the one that made him a pariah in the eyes of many Democratic voters. Taking 2.74 percent of the vote, he was credited with helping Democrat Al Gore lose Florida — and the entire election — to the disastrously incompetent Republican George W. Bush. In 2004, Nader’s dramatic decline in influence was seen at the polls when he received 0.38 percent of the vote, while Bush won a second term.

When Nader announced Jan. 30 that he was forming an exploratory committee to decide whether or not to run, the candidate said he still hadn’t made up his mind. An army of pro bono attorneys and volunteers would be required to establish a viable candidacy, which would include an uphill battle to get onto the ballot in all 50 states.

It seems questionable that such an undertaking would only require three-and-a-half weeks of work. Could it be Nader has been planning all along to run in this year’s election? That’s what we’ve always believed, but we’re still not sure why he’s running.

Nader has repeatedly claimed he does not run for president in order to be a spoiler and that he runs to win, but it is clear at the outset his campaign has absolutely no shot at victory. If his contention is that he will force Democrats to discuss pertinent issues, one need look no further than Barack Obama’s response to Nader’s candidacy, in which the Illinois senator and candidate for president said Nader clearly "didn’t know what he was talking about" when he repeatedly suggested in 2000 that the difference between Gore and Bush was negligible.

It is saddening to see someone as intelligent, good-hearted, friendly and genuine as Ralph Nader lose his legacy as a reformer and consumer advocate because of repeated political failures, but it is also difficult to imagine anything else coming of this year’s campaign. The end result will be more damage to Nader’s agenda as he is further marginalized — albeit unfairly — as an unyielding radical figure in American politics.