Ralph Nader to run as independent in US presidential race
Ralph Nader to run as independent in US presidential race
By Patrick Martin
23 February 2004
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who ran for president in 2000 as the candidate of the Green Party, declared Sunday that he would join the 2004 presidential campaign as an independent candidate. He made the announcement in an interview on the NBC News program “Meet the Press,” following several weeks of public discussion of a possible candidacy on his own web site and in the media.
Nader’s decision to run has been denounced by a wide array of his former supporters in the liberal and middle-class “left” milieu. Most prominently, the Nation magazine published an editorial appeal last month urging him not to run, on the grounds that this would take away votes from the prospective Democratic nominee and help reelect President Bush. A group of Greens, liberal Democrats and former Nader 2000 campaign activists established a web site devoted to opposing the launching of a Nader 2004 campaign.
In response to a question from “Meet the Press” interviewer Tim Russert, Nader rejected the label of “spoiler,” the preferred term of abuse of his Democratic Party critics. “A spoiler is a contemptuous term,” he said, “as if anybody who dares to challenge the two-party system and corrupt politics and broken politics and corporate power is a spoiler.” He went on the denounce the “antiquated Electoral College winner-take-all system” that “excludes candidates from the debates” and “blocks any kind of competition.”
Attacks on Nader for deciding to enter the presidential race are intrinsically anti-democratic. They take as their starting point the preservation of the existing two-party system, which is itself a mechanism for curtailing democratic rights. As Nader pointed out Sunday, without any response from Russert, “You’d never find that type of thing in Canada or Western democracies in Europe. It is an offense to deny millions of people who might want to vote for our candidacy an opportunity to vote for our candidacy. Instead, they want to say, ‘No, we’re not going to let you have an opportunity to vote,’ for our candidacy.”
Towards the end of his television appearance, Nader made reference to the anti-democratic restrictions on third-party and independent candidates under US election laws. “There’s a tremendous bias in state laws,” he said, “against third parties and independent candidates bred by the two major parties, who passed these laws. They don’t like competition. So it’s like climbing a cliff with a slippery rope. And anybody who doubts it can look at a list of all these signature barriers and all the obstacles a number of states ... put before third-party candidates.”
Link to rest of story<---
By Patrick Martin
23 February 2004
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who ran for president in 2000 as the candidate of the Green Party, declared Sunday that he would join the 2004 presidential campaign as an independent candidate. He made the announcement in an interview on the NBC News program “Meet the Press,” following several weeks of public discussion of a possible candidacy on his own web site and in the media.
Nader’s decision to run has been denounced by a wide array of his former supporters in the liberal and middle-class “left” milieu. Most prominently, the Nation magazine published an editorial appeal last month urging him not to run, on the grounds that this would take away votes from the prospective Democratic nominee and help reelect President Bush. A group of Greens, liberal Democrats and former Nader 2000 campaign activists established a web site devoted to opposing the launching of a Nader 2004 campaign.
In response to a question from “Meet the Press” interviewer Tim Russert, Nader rejected the label of “spoiler,” the preferred term of abuse of his Democratic Party critics. “A spoiler is a contemptuous term,” he said, “as if anybody who dares to challenge the two-party system and corrupt politics and broken politics and corporate power is a spoiler.” He went on the denounce the “antiquated Electoral College winner-take-all system” that “excludes candidates from the debates” and “blocks any kind of competition.”
Attacks on Nader for deciding to enter the presidential race are intrinsically anti-democratic. They take as their starting point the preservation of the existing two-party system, which is itself a mechanism for curtailing democratic rights. As Nader pointed out Sunday, without any response from Russert, “You’d never find that type of thing in Canada or Western democracies in Europe. It is an offense to deny millions of people who might want to vote for our candidacy an opportunity to vote for our candidacy. Instead, they want to say, ‘No, we’re not going to let you have an opportunity to vote,’ for our candidacy.”
Towards the end of his television appearance, Nader made reference to the anti-democratic restrictions on third-party and independent candidates under US election laws. “There’s a tremendous bias in state laws,” he said, “against third parties and independent candidates bred by the two major parties, who passed these laws. They don’t like competition. So it’s like climbing a cliff with a slippery rope. And anybody who doubts it can look at a list of all these signature barriers and all the obstacles a number of states ... put before third-party candidates.”
Link to rest of story<---
posted by A. J. Franklin @ 12:34
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