ENDORSEMENT: RALPH NADER '08
BY JASON GANTENBERG I NOVEMBER 3, 2008
Before I kick start this thing, I should make abundantly clear that this endorsement of Ralph Nader for President doesn't necessarily reflect the views of my Sloth Jockey co-founders or anyone even remotely affiliated with me as a person. The recent political climate has become so vitriolic toward third-party candidates that I would hate to implicate an innocent friend or relative in the practice of what is largely perceived as the electoral equivalent of voodoo. Any hate mail should be sent to my address. Leave everyone else out of it.
I wasn't old enough to vote in 2000. I was sixteen years old, but I followed Gore v. Bush —the campaign and the Supreme Court decision —rather closely. To me, the outcome should never have been close.
Al Gore began with the whole election gift-wrapped and over the course of his campaign proceeded to foolishly tear and gouge away at his lead. He seemed overconfident and only marginally abler than George W. Bush, who made an immediate caricature of himself with folksy colloquialisms and vague accusations of "fuzzy math." Remember that? It was a long time ago, now awash in a subsequent, pockmarked history of terrorism, war, and oil. The eight years that followed were a suffocating fraud for which we should all be ashamed. To have given even momentary credence to a witless cretin like Bush wasn't a mistake; it was a crime.
(And don't buy the hogwash that Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election either. The majority of voters that cast ballots for Nader most likely wouldn't have voted if he wasn't on the ticket, not to mention the 50,000 votes for other third-party candidates that conceivably diluted Bush's draw as well.)
That crime was repeated in 2004 when the Democratic Party somehow propelled an unlikable John Kerry to the nomination and watched him flounder against a ruthless, Rove-powered machine that managed to make his war record a matter of contention at the same time they were running a draft-dodger on the Republican ticket. This was a war-time election, and a Vietnam Conflict veteran who was in The Shit was made to look like a spineless dweeb next to an encyclopedia of bungled aphorisms. What's worse is that the Democrats sold out both Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean, two qualified candidates with a better chance of beating W. You heard me right. Dennis Kucinich had a better shot at the 2004 election than did John Kerry, and although Howard Dean has taken a turn for the worst as chairman of the DNC (he is unrepentantly snide now), he offered a drastically different enthusiasm than the plodding Kerry, who might have been the one sitting Senator with lower college grades than his Republican opponent.
I cast a ballot for Kerry that year with little joy in my heart as part of the "Anyone but Bush" contingent, and I've carried a certain bitterness for my actions since doing so. The defeated sighs that filled the bar where we coalesced to watch the results on Election Night was enough to kill any sense I had that we live in a decent and functional political culture. The Bush-Kerry showdown felt like a cruel joke, made crueler still when Ohio turned red toward the end of the night. Four more years of a GOP ramrod and Dick Cheney's corpulent mug scowling at the cameras in defiance of all that is good and true in the world. Somehow, I doubt things would've been significantly under a Kerry administration.
Like I said, that's all ancient history now. We haven't learned from our mistakes; we've simply gotten angry and vindictive. The past debacles have done little more than to propel some momentum on the other side of the see-saw where Barack Obama is finally winning an election for the Democrats, but he's winning it by only six points as of this writing. That's all. Granted, that relatively slim national lead might translate into a landslide of electoral votes depending on how constituents are apportioned on November 4. It seems, however, to affirm the notion that if a candidate who managed to galvanize a movement based on Hope in the ultra-modern and palpably cynical twenty-first century can only expect to win a plurality of votes in a two-party race, something is dreadfully awry with the political system.
Something is.
So now, with one day left before Election Day, I sit here and think of the 2006 midterm elections and the merciless routing enacted by the Democrats that resulted in their gaining control of the national legislature. Make no mistake. When the American People forced that influx of Democrats, it was a call to action, a demand that Bush's foreign policy initiatives be revoked, and the Democrats responded by passing almost every single piece of Bush-sponsored legislation put in front of them. Pelosi's machine proved a massive failure, and for such a duping of respective constituencies, she deserves a harsh rebuke along with the rest of her party. If there were a recall process, I would vote to have her removed from office in a heartbeat.
Which finally brings us to Nader.
I would have voted for Ralph Nader in 2004 if I were not ruled by Fear in that election. It clouded my sensibilities despite my agreement with him on almost all the major issues facing the country. I still agree with him, and if we are to look at the roster of candidates dating back to the primaries, I can think of no other candidate with such a dogged, consistent record of fighting to empower the public at large. Kucinich might make the list, and my early support for Mike Gravel, I think, was well-placed in light of his involvement in reading the Pentagon Papers into the record during the Nixon era as well as his support for the National Initiative, a movement to place legislative power in the hands of everyday people by instituting referendum-based lawmaking.
And hell, let's throw Obama's former incarnation as a community organizer in there just for argument's sake. What gaffes he has made as a politician can be at least partially overshadowed by what seems to me a more or less genuine desire to do good in the world. His judgment since becoming a major player in national politics, however, has left me underwhelmed and perhaps even bitter that a man with such promise (and who made such promises) floundered once the presidency seemed within grasp. The past two months of heartless and brutal electioneering has felt woefully familiar despite Obama's mutterings about Change and New Politics. I refrain from mentioning the McCain/Palin ticket only because their transgressions and those of their party are too obvious to spend much time in rumination. There is, quite simply, no good reason to vote for John McCain, so do not let my relative silence be confused with indifference or forgiveness. A McCain administration would be a nightmare.
Politics is largely about making concessions. It involves sacrificing personal morals and views in order to appease segments of the voting bloc that would otherwise turn away. Obama has adopted his centrist views in response to attacks from the right that his policies are tantamount to socialism. (We'll forego my rant about turning words like "socialist" and "liberal" into American curse words.) McCain, on the other hand, has attempted to re-adopt his reputation as a maverick after downplaying the term throughout the primaries. Without consistency, this election is a circus of contradictions and a joke only marginally less cruel than 2004.
Nader is the only candidate I've heard who does not shy away from questions. Even while being bullied by Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room," Nader responded to each and every question promptly and without waffling or inserting transitions like "That's a good question" in an attempt to buy time. He is resolute and has been since he took on the auto industry in the 1960s. His politics are sensible and humanitarian, focused on building an economy from the bottom up and making it sustainable through meaningful pushes for alternative fuels. Obama's plan to cut emissions in ten years is ambitious, but his concession to Big Oil, which came in the form of his support for short-term offshore drilling, invalidates his energy policy in my mind.
Furthermore, for a constitutional lawyer, Obama seems to have a curious view of civil rights in this country and is either unable to see the connection between denial of gay marriage rights and Jim Crow racism or has decided that support of gay marriage in those terms would mean electoral suicide. On the latter issue, he might be right, but what our country needs right now is not another appeaser. We don't need copouts like "civil unions." If we are to continue the proposition of being a free country in which all citizens are created equal, we must recognize the injustices where they lie. Gay marriage should be legal and the constitution amended to strike a Christian-influenced definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman. If Obama was serious about Change, an adherence to his own principles would have come before winning the election. They didn't.
I understand the argument that it would be better for a politician to make himself a whore on the campaign if he meant to do the job with honor, but the fundamental flaw of the political culture in the United States is not that the two major parties are controlled by corporations or that it is possible for a President to approach something akin to monarchy in the right climate. Those are important issues and should be considered, surely, but everything starts at the Vote, and if we continue voting for Democrats and Republicans, we can expect nothing to change. If we continue appointing lifelong incumbents and buying into anti-intellectual candidates with platforms based on colloquialisms, we can expect nothing from our political leaders. We must demand to be treated with respect and not be taken for dumb, buck-toothed sub-humans able to be swayed by disingenuous appeals.
Nader has his follies, too, but they pale in comparison to the pandering undertaken by the major ticket candidates. He's lashed out at times, and as a third-party candidate in a system that favors complicity and shallow investigation of the issues, I don't necessarily blame him. The fact remains that Nader's outspoken positions on environmental preservation, workers' rights, civil rights, taxation, and most importantly, the concentration of media represent my views almost to the letter.
That's how American politics needs to work. I shouldn't have to settle for a Barack Obama or a John McCain, and if every voter in this country took their values to the polls instead of their Fear and adherence to the traditional power structure, we would have a drastically different system of government.
I might be rooting for Obama over McCain. I'd be a fool not to, but we are in need of a gut check, something to stem our swelling hubris, and most of all, we need candidates that understand America has been given no special providence over the state of this world. Not by God or anyone else. I don't see that lack of hubris in either Obama or McCain, and I haven't heard many politicians with the gumption to chastise it or posit the thought that We the People ought to control our own destiny as a nation.
This land is our land. We should act like it.
VoteNader.org.
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