I was listening to our local public radio earlier today, and the subject was Nader. Most people calling in were supportive of his candidacy, and angry at the people who criticize him for being an egomaniac. You'll find a similar sentiment expressed here at P.M.Carpenter's blog. One woman called in who voted for Nader in 2000, but said that she won't this year because everything has changed since 9/11, and while she agrees with him on domestic issues, she doesn't think that Nader would be tough enough on terror.
Huh? Is she actually thinking of her vote for Nader as if he were a real candidate? Do people really think about their vote so abstractly without any reference to the real-world context in which they are going to cast it? The idea that a vote for Nader is anything more than a protest vote is absurd. I voted for him in '96 for that reason–and also in 2000. I can say in my defense that I really didn't expect Gore to lose because I couldn't believe that the country could take someone like Bush seriously. I was clearly wrong about that nationwide, but right about it in Washington State–the only place my vote mattered.
I agree with Nader that a single-payer system to provide universal health care is the best solution. I'm guessing about 15% of Americans tops think so. Is Nader's running for president going to increase that percentage? Is it going to change anybody's mind? No because he is perceived as a politically impotent irrelevancy with no real base. It doesn't matter how right he is if he is incapable of building the kind of support that will enable him to actually do something instead of criticize. So he can criticize Obama all he wants about how he isn't taking a strong enough stand on this or that issue, but it is so much impotent posturing. And this is not a time for impotent posturing because we really have for the first time in a long time a real possibility to move forward. I'm not angry at Nader for entering the race; I'm just dismayed at his obtuseness.
The only people who are capable of taking him seriously now as a real candidate seem to relate to him as if the only thing that mattered was his positions on the issues. No, the most important thing that needs to happen now is realignment–to develop a new center-left majority. And that means progressives have to meet the sensible, but not necessarily sophisticated, people in the middle where they are, and to appeal to their basic decency. If you can do that effectively, the finger-to-the wind cowards in congress will follow. Most are not ideologues, most are shallow careerists trying to survive from election cycle to election cycle. They follow whatever seems to be the path of least resistance.
The Republicans with a few exceptions have been remarkable for their refusal to break ranks with their insane leadership. They have demonstrated that they are a cowardly pack of dogs which does whatever the Alpha Dog commands, no matter how transparently stupid the rationale. The Democrats haven't been much better; too many have failed to stand their ground in opposition because they don't really believe in anything except their own self-interest. So the only way to change things in Washington is to mobilize a majority of Americans to demand that their representatives there behave differently. There has to be bottom-up pressure. If the representatives don't believe in anything except their survival, they have to be made to understand that their survival depends on realigning center left. If that can be effected, then the hard right becomes once again a marginalized minority of cranks as politically irrelevant in the future as Ralph Nader and the Green Party is today.
Obama represents that kind of realignment, and this is what Nader supporters and Obama's critics to the left don't seem to get. It's not about being pure in one's positions; it's about crafting a real-world strategy for developing a broad based consensus that can move things forward to serve the flourishing of the broad American citizenry.
P.S. Interesting LA Times article here about Obamacans in Ohio. Without people like these becoming part of a broad consensus, no substantive move forward can happen.
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