The New Willard

Ralph Nader is very excited to have garnered roughly 10% of the Michigan vote, in a recent poll. But, behind Nader’s self-destructive, egotistic enthusiasm, is another story:

The statewide poll of 600, with an error margin of plus or minus 4 percent, apparently concluded that if Sen. Hillary Clinton got the Democratic nomination, Sen. John McCain would earn 46 percent of the state’s vote and she would get 37 percent, with Nader earning 10 percent.

If it’s Sen. Barack Obama as the Democratic candidate, it’s Obama at 43, McCain at 41 and Nader at 8 percent.

What does this poll tell us, if anything? That Nader would have less of a detremintal effect on Obama than he would on Clinton. Even though the numbers are pretty close, it still offers itself as more reason to have an Obama candidacy.

But what about Nader? Honestly, he has really gotten to me. I defended his run in 2000 and even in 2004, but as his popularity shrinks the possibility of having a viable Green Party does the same; this means that Nader isn’t even trying to help create a third voice, he’s just diminishing the power of a more friendly voice. I’ve even fallen into the “Nader is a crazy egotist” camp. Why not give someone else a try? Do the Greens, etc. have no one else to offer? Nader is a failed icon, which is, in turn, helping the third party movement to fail.

I am So tired of this “Democrats and Republicans are the same” nonsense, which comes, primarily, from the pro-Nader, etc. camps. First, as Ron Paul illustrated this year, the two party system gives a more than adequate voice to marginal political perspectives; Ron Paul, running as a Republican, has received massive amounts of public attention and this year many of my peers (liberal college students), who once placed Nader signs in their yards, now sport Ron Paul “Revolution” yard signs. This would lead one to believe that people vote for a candidate because of what he or she is saying and not because of the party he or she belongs to (obviously, this is not universal). So, then, the two party systems serves as a more than adequate avenue for dissent and discussion.

(Are third party members just really image conscience voters who want a cooler name for the cliques they belong to?)

Second, I’m just going to quote a segment of the documentary: The Party’s Over, which follows Philip Seymour Hoffman during the 2000 presidential election. In this segment, Hoffman is asking Rev. Jackson about whether or not he buys the Republican rhetoric about inclusiveness,

Rev. Jesse Jackson: … you have one image on the stage of blacks and browns – the delegates are 90% white, one fifth are millionaires; behind them are the… ultra right wingers… in the sky box, you have those that invest in and control the process. The over layer is multicultural, but inside that structure it is a very white, male infrastructure.

Hoffman: Do you think the Democrat Party is any better?

Rev. Jesse Jackson: It’s much better.

Hoffman: How is it better?

Rev. Jesse Jackson: You look at the makeup of the congress people, state legislators, mayors… there will be a thousand black delegates in L.A.; there will be two thousand delegates of color in L.A.; there will be a thousand labor delegates in L.A. That’s a very different party.

I guess the point of this writing lies here: vote for the person, not the party; and what we’ve got isn’t as bad as you may think.