Ralph Nader: Running Dog
I'm guessing that Ralph Nader's ill-advised entry into the 2004 presidential election won't make much difference to the results. If it does, the difference it makes will be to help President Bush. That would be unfortunate, in my view, but is there some other good that might come from his exercise in windmill-tilting? I can't imagine what it could be.
Mr. Nader thinks that both parties are in the pockets of the corporations. That's not just crazy and it matters. Let's give Nader full marks for insisting on a serious issue. So what do we do about it? Ah! I know! We get Ralph Nader to run for President. And this will help because...
Fact is, it won't help at all. To help, it would at least have to get people riled enough to join a movement. The only movement Mr. Nader is likely to start is one to run him out of town on a rail. A good many people who might otherwise have been sympathetic to him are just going to get mad. Chances are he'll lose much of the support he once might have had and he won't pick up anyone new on the way down. Ralph Nader, in other words, has just thrown his weight behind the establishment he claims he wants to fight.
Unfortunately, it was already pretty clear that Ralph Nader isn't actually interested in thinking seriously about what he's doing. In an interview a few weeks ago on NPR, he was asked about all the people who asked him not to run. The grounds they gave were that defeating President Bush was the highest priority and Mr. Nader's candidacy would work against that. Someone who was reasonable would have argued against that priority judgment. Ralph Nader simply brought out the charge of censorship.
Censorship? No one told Nader he couldn't run. No one was trying to prevent him from having his say. People were trying to reason with him. If that counts as censorship, we're in a hell of a lot of trouble. Maybe the reasons were bad. The reasonable person's response would be to say why. That's not what Nader did, and I'll leave it to you to complete the syllogism.
Still, someone might say that I'm being unreasonable myself. Even if Ralph Nader wasn't up to offering the arguments in that interview, there's a case to be made. It goes something like this: it will always be possible to trot out the argument that a third-party candidate shouldn't run for president, because it will always be possible to argue that some other issue should get higher billing. But if we buy that, the argument would go, no third party will ever be able to get anywhere with its agenda.
I've heard people argue this way, but the trouble is that it's sheer sophistry. Let's start with a simple question: would it be a good thing for Ralph Nader to get himself elected president, assuming he had a belch's chance in a barroom of actually pulling it off? If you think the answer is yes, my guess is that you are very naive about what it actually takes to govern. Presidents can't make laws. Only Congress can do that. To get Congress to do what you want, you need some support in the Congress itself. Mr. Nader doesn't even have a party at the moment. That wouldn't change after November, but what would change is that members of Congress who might have had some sympathy with him would be mightily annoyed. He'd be sitting on a very lonely throne.
But that's not the nub of the matter. The sophistry is in trying to create the impression that it's either run for President or nothing. I might be persuaded that what the political system in this country needs is a strong, healthy third party. The way to do that is not to start with with the presidency. The way to do it is to get candidates elected to office -- enough of them that the third party has the legitimacy and the clout to make a difference. Run candidates in races where they have a serious chance of getting elected. Frame the issues in ways that don't just appeal to people on the fringes. That might seem like a long, slow slog, but welcome to life in a representative democracy. And it's also worth keeping in mind that it needn't be nearly as slow as it seems. In an otherwise close House or Senate, even a small third party could make a real difference. It doesn't take a majority to have real clout.
Ralph Nader's run is not just Quixotic. It's disingenuous. It's not the act of a man who's serious about changing American politics. Nader will do nothing to enhance the status of third-party politics, but in trying to be a political pit bull, he's likely to end up acting as the establishment's unwitting lap dog. It's a bad joke, but Mr. Nader isn't laughing