Yes but Nader is doing his best to make us forget (about his earlier good work).

The Chait TNR piece (which was also in the print edition) seems to be arguing that, with the exception of bringing auto safety issues into the limelight 40 years ago, Nader has consistently been more a hindrance than a help to liberal causes. I've suspected as much for quite awhile, but would be interested in what some of Nader's defenders might have to say in response.

here is a small list ( from counterpunch .org )
"...If Nader contributes little in the way of consumption of goods himself, he has almost single-handedly done more for the consumer...than any clutch of presidents, politicians, or corporation chiefs. Since 1966, he has been responsible...for the passage of...the Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act (1966), Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act (1968), Wholesale Meat Act (1967), Radiation Control Act (1968), Wholesale Poultry Products Act (1967), Coal Mine Health and Safety Act (1969), and the Occupational Health and Safety Act (1970)...
for once it should be proper to ask all these pundits / bloggers / opiners on the blogs and elsewhere trying to decide which circle of hell does ralph belong ' what concretely have you done say in last 5 / 10 / 20 years what ever applies .

Kudos to Nathan for inserting the caveat "helping" GWB win the Presidency, seems alot of lefty bloggers/commentators out there seem to think he's the only reason GWB won.

Nader is the best example of the worst for the perfect. I hope you, Nader, get run over by a big SUV with no airbags, in China where there are no consumer laws and the pollution levels kill trees.

Saying that Nader is not the "only" reason Bush won is a pretty silly excuse. Nobody every wins or loses for one reason. The reasons add up, and Nader's was enough to tip the balance to Bush, with disastrous results for progressive causes in this country.

Will he do the same this year?

As a recovering Naderite, I'm so very pissed at him for this recent decision to run in 2004. I've become convinced that, for whatever reason, he wasn't invited to a Democratic party (small p) years ago, and still hasn't forgiven those popular guys like Gore, Clinton, and Kerry. His books are excellent, and I will continue to check them out at the library, but he seems committed to reversing any good that he had done in the past by muddying the debate with his "I'm more liberal than you" playground politics.

I volunteered for Nader in 2004 -- my wife and I were co-coordinators of Nader's GOTV (such as it was) in Camden County, NJ. I have absolutely no regrets about this work. My view was and is that the DLC needs to be utterly destroyed, consigned to the dustbin of history, and a victory by Gore/Lieberman would have cemented the DLC's hold over the Dems. Even if you blame Nader for Bush "winning" in 2000, which I disagree with, imagine a Gore/Lieberman win: right-wing dems dealing with a Republican House and Senate (Rowland appoints a Repub to replace Lieberman, Jeffords doesn't defect) that spend every day blaming the Dems for the economic bubble bursting and calling for the President's head over 9-11. It would have been ugly, ugly, ugly, and I think a 2nd term would have been completely impossible.

That is, I think the defeat of DLC dems was basically unavoidable -- if not in 2000, then it would have been in 2004. I have no interest in supporting Nader in 2004, however. The DLC has been severely injured by their record over the past 4 years, and the dynamic of the primary campaign, combined with Lieberman's pathetic performance, has, I hope, finally driven a stake through their heart (though I know they'll try to rise from the crypt again). The painful but necessary purging, or at least one phase of it, has taken place. Nader won't really accomplish anything this year, but I think the Dems who are attacking him should just calm down because I doubt he'll have any more impact on this year's election than Lydon LaRouche.

I like Nader, although I am a libertarian and support Congressman Ron Paul. Nader's thinking has much evolved in the past last 4 years.

quotes:
CNN: SO ARE YOU GOING TO SPOIL THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY?
NADER: ONE CANNOT SPOIL SOMETHING THAT ALREADY IS!

Mor seriously:
Fist I'd like to point out that our global monetary system is CORRUPT and anyone not considering this fact, will be proven wrong, no matter of the (good) intentions.

Privatization does not work when the govts have privileges (lobbies) linked to the money printing press (central banking), hence the stock market manias, widspread corruption among corporations/lawmakers and much too rosy predictions, all of which generate bubbles, and of course we all know that bubbles end with a BUST... First we, we citizens of the world, must go back to an intrinsic monetary system to force men walk straigh(er)!!!
More on the topic, just go to:
http://www.moneyfiles.org/movement.html
MOREOVER:
Did you know that there is a global crash/deflation around the corner?
For daily updates, just go to:
http://www.moneyfiles.org/

Great, an unrepentant Naderite and a gold standard-ist. Kooks of different feathers who roost together.

The Naderite reveals typical acuity of thought by posting that Nader's 2000 run was "necessary" to defeat the DLC, yet admits in the next paragraph that the DLC's fall from power was "basically unavoidable" anyway: "if not in 2000, then it would have been in 2004". Gee, if that's the case, genius, maybe it would have been better not to spend four years letting Bush wreck the economy and kill hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq?

As for the gold standard:

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Politics/whynotthegoldstandard.html

Armature,

You misunderstood my point about the DLC. I think that the GOP was going to win in either 2000 or 2004 -- for the reasons I gave above, a Gore/Lieberman administration would have been torn to shreds in 2001-2004, and I think would have stood virtually no chance of reelection. So then we would have gotten a vicious right-wing presidency in 2004 rather than 2000. The real question is whether the DLC would cement their hold on the Party -- so the difference under the Gore/Lieberman winning scenario is that they declare total control over the Democratic Party after winning the White House again, and then bring the entire apparatus down with them in 2004, even worse than what really happened in the mid-terms in 2002. It's been very difficult to get the Dem Party to admit that they have to be more left and more aggressive -- with a victory in 2000 that fight would have been much, much harder.

Another way to put it is that someone had to put the brakes on the Dems becoming a smilier tool of the Wealthy -- that was bound to be an ugly, difficult, and bloody process, but given the extremely objectionable move rightward by Clinton/Gore and the DLC, I think there was no way around it. I guess another way to deal with it is the Gray Davis expample -- alienate all of your supporters and then get run out of town on a rail.

I'm not an "unrepentant Naderite" -- I never worked for the PIRGs, I don't have particular adulation for Nader or attribute all progressive policy post WWII to him. And as I stated before, I have no interest in his campaign this year, and I think it's going to end up being completely irrelevant (and yes, I realize that I misspelled LaRouche's first name -- sorry Lyndon). But that doesn't mean that I lie awake at night feeling guilty about talking to people in the summer and fall of 2000 about preventing the Democratic Party from becoming a second voice for corporate power and a group that would sell out virtually any issue they previously held to avoid being labelled "liberals." The longer we waited to have that fight, the worse and longer and more difficult it was going to be. If you need to blame me for the last four years, well, I can't help it if you feel that way. But I'm not going to try to avoid responsibility for working on the Nader 2000 campaign by whining a bunch of mea culpas about it now.

TNR is a right-wing publication and it is disappointing but typical that liberal grasp any "talking-point" critical of Nadar to make their point that we do not live in a democracy.

The criticalness of Nader run is way disproportionate to to the threat of either Kerry or Bush in the White House.

Kerry voted for the repeal of welfare, the war, tax cuts, the Patriot Act, etc. Thus the "choice" is between Republican vs. Republican-lite.

TNR is not a very trusted source. It used to be a "liberal" publication that drifted right-ward during the Reagan years supporting the Reagan economic plan and ideology, and is also a major support of the neo-con plan.

To use TNR to make one point regarding Nader is to strengthen Nader critique about the liberal intelligencia. Doesn't sound that much different from the old Soviet days.

WB

This isn't an argument for voting for Ralph Nader in 2004. It is simply a response to the kind of silliness perpetrated by "Aimie" and "wvmcl" in this thread. The vehemence of the Nader-haters is based on the idea that Nader's candidacy was the primary reason we are saddled with George Bush today. But this is not the case, and the really most important reason Al Gore was defeated is also a pretty good argument for having voted for Nader.

"Al Gore lost Florida’s presidential vote because electoral officials tossed into the trashcan as invalid more than one out of every ten ballots cast by African-Americans throughout the state. In some counties, nearly 25 percent of ballots cast by blacks were set aside as invalid. In contrast, officials rejected less than one out of every fifty ballots cast by whites statewide. If black ballots had been rejected at the same minimal rate as white ballots, more than 50,000 additional black votes would have been counted in Florida’s presidential election. Given that more than 90 percent of blacks favored Gore over Bush, Gore would have won Florida by at least 40,000 votes. "

This was posted by Allan Lichtman on his blog on February 26, 2004. Lichtman is the author of a statistical study commissioned for the United States Commission on Civil Rights and a subsequent analysis published in the Journal of Legal Studies (January 2003). The post I'm quoting from can be found at this address:
http://hnn.us/blogs/20.html .

The study demonstrates that even in Florida Nader's votes were an insignificant contribution to Bush's election in comparison to to the wholesale racism and corruption of the Florida electoral system. That's why it seems so strange to me that Democrats to this day keep focusing on Ralph Nader.

As Lichtman asks, why didn't Al Gore and the the Democrats rise up and condemn an election that was a hundred times more "irregular" than, to take a recent foreign election that both Democrats and Republicans alike appear to think justifies a coup de etat, anything that went on in Haiti? Why didn't the (at the time) half-Democratic Congress demand an investigation, bring civil rights charges against the state of Florida and call for immediate impeachment of GW's brother?

Beats me. This is the reason I don't call myself a Democrat, though I pretend to be one on primary day. However, a number of plausible explanations come to mind: laziness, cowardice, stupidity and a passive form of racism common among liberal Democrats--as in "I don't hate black people, but do I actually have to act like what happens to them is actually important?" People who insist that it was obviously the right thing to do to vote for Gore really have to ask themselves how much ethical weight can be born by the decision to vote for someone as lazy, stupid, chickenshit or passively racist--take your pick, or mix and match--as Al Gore and the party that nominated him appeared to be before the election and for quite a long time after.

Nevertheless, had I lived in Florida or New Hampshire I probably would have voted for Gore anyway. As it happens, I live in NJ, where Gore was a shoo-in, and so a vote for Nader did not in the least endanger Gore's position under our state-by-state, winner-take-all system.

So now you say, I can understand why you were lukewarm about Gore. And you weren't worried that voting for Nader in NJ would help to elect Bush. But still, why vote for Nader? Everyone knew he was going to lose. What good did that do? Here's my answer:

Ralph Nader didn't expect to become President when he ran in 2000. What he had hoped in 2000, and what I had hoped when I voted for him then, is that his candidacy would help to catalyze a grassroots progressive movement around certain key econonomic and policy issues, and that the fear of losing our votes would have the effect of pushing the Democrats to stop taking progressives for granted. And it's astounding to me that the Nader-haters don't perceive that that he was at least partially successful.

Howard Dean's run for the Democratic nomination would have been inconceivable before Nader demonstrated that there were large numbers of progressive voters willing to rebel against Republicanism-lite as reperesented by the Clintons, Gore and Leiberman. And without Howard Dean it is possible that John Kerry would still be supporting the invasion of Iraq. And, who knows?, the candidate might not even have been Kerry by this point. (Make sure the way is clear to the bathroom if you have to barf.) Imagine having to choose between George Bush and Dick Cheney on the one hand and Joe Leiberman and Hillary Clinton on the other. We owe it to Ralph Nader that we don't have to make that choice.

There is no doubt in my mind that a Gore presidency would have been a big improvement over the present regime. But tell me, if Gore had been President would he have said to the unions, "Go forth and organize, and if your bosses try to fire you for doing what you are legally entitled to do you'll have an army of government lawyers ready to insure that the bargaining table is not tilted in their direction"? Would he have said, "Bill Clinton and I were hasty and destructive in the way we implemented welfare reform. Now we are going to have to figure out how all these people are actually going to get jobs that pay enough to live on and provide the childcare and healthcare protections we hinted at but never really promised, but which to be honest (and I admit we were not entirely honest at the start) are absolutely necessary if this thing is going to work"? Would he have said to the IMF and World Bank, "Cut it out. These people don't have the money to pay you, and your theories about privatising public services, lowering taxes and tarrifs and giving corporations a free hand leading to prosperity are a bunch of crap anyhow. We didn't develop that way, and neither did Japan or England. No country did, and no country could. So stop pretending, or I'll cut your funding and you'll all be out of jobs. And no one ever feels sorry for an unemployed banker"? Would he have done anything to reduce U.S. support for the growth of apartheid in Greater Israel? Would he have lifted a finger to support constitutional government in Haiti? Somehow I doubt it.

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