Everything but Ralphing: Dems respond to Nader’s candidacy

If you turn south, squint your eyes, and open you ears, you can hear the not-so-faint sound of establishment liberals gritting their teeth. Ralph Nader’s decision last week to take a third run at the presidency has provoked a complicated collective temper tantrum that is interesting not just for its manifestations of plain-and-simple, ugly nastiness, but also for the way in which it has divided liberals into varying shades of Nader haters -- from the quiet regret of former supporters like Susan Sarandon, to the likes of distinguished Professor Bruce Jackson who wishes that Nader would just “douse himself with gasoline and exit this world…in a blaze of protesting glory.”

Right after the wild 2000 U.S. elections the argument against Ralph Nader went something like this: ignore the fact that 250,000 Florida Democrats voted for Bush, forget the corrupt Supreme Court ruling, forget that the votes of tens of thousands of working class black voters were thrown out, ignore the work of Jeb Bush and Catherine Harris, and never mind the fact that Al Gore was so politically impotent that he couldn’t even defend his home state against an inarticulate son of wealth with a horrific record. Forget it all ‘cause at the end of the day if Nader hadn’t run, the Democrats would have gotten all of his votes, and we wouldn’t have gotten Bush.

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