Until a couple weeks ago, I knew how I’d be voting in the presidential election. The choice seemed clear, and I wasn’t planning on changing my mind.
<br/>That's when Ralph Nader came unexpectedly back on my radar.&#160;That's when Ralph Nader came unexpectedly back on my radar.
That’s when Ralph Nader came unexpectedly back on my radar.
If you didn’t know that Nader – also a presidential candidate in 1996, 2000 and 2004 – was running again, I’m not surprised. No one talks about it. Network news has been covering this election story on a nightly basis for a year now, and somehow they’ve managed to completely ignore the fact that there are any other candidates involved besides the two major ones. You’d think they’d jump on something like that, if for no other reason than to jazz up their coverage a little.
And even if the media is not interested in following Nader as a serious candidate, he at least deserves a mention because of his role in social and political history. The guy is responsible (at least partially) for seatbelts in automobiles, for clean air and clean water acts, for the EPA, is on the presidential ballot in 45 states and no one even acknowledges it. It’s sad. Sad and kinda screwed up.
I got to hear Nader speak in Lawrence the week before last, if you’re wondering at the sudden interest in embracing my inner Independent. I have long been a fan of Nader – at least since 2000, when I cast the lone third-party vote in my history class’s mock presidential election. If you knew me my freshman year, you may also have known my goldfish, Ralph, whose namesake you can probably guess. In the time between 2004 and this election, however, my Nader fervor had cooled a little. Four years older, I was a little less idealistic, a little more focused on results. In yet another close election, I didn’t want to take the chance at being a “spoiler.”
I didn’t, that is, until I heard Nader speak. He talked for an hour on politics, on America, on military spending and Wall Street bailouts. On the environment, prison reform, drug use, minimum wage and war. Health care and people and businesses and government. Voting: the Electoral College. It was amazing. I remembered why I was so enthusiastic about him before and got excited all over again.
One thing I love about Ralph Nader is his unconventionality. You see it in everything from his ideas to the campaign to the man himself. He mentioned several times during his speech how caught up we are in the two-party system and how entrenched corporations are in government and our way of thinking. People are trained to categorize themselves as either Republicans or Democrats. We are lulled into acceptance of gigantic companies, the gigantic role they have in government and the gigantic contributions they make to candidates’ campaign funds.
We need to think differently, Nader says. And he certainly does. Take the bailout, for example. Nader was very critical of the way people in both parties dealt with the situation. They passed it through quickly with no public hearings, without making demands on Wall Street, without considering alternative options. Nader’s alternative option is to make the players pay for it. By putting a tax on Wall Street transactions, Nader says, the stock market could finance its own bailout. Genius, right? Why didn’t anyone else think of that?
Drug use is another example. Although the only drug legalization Nader supports (at least officially) is medicinal marijuana, he believes that all nonviolent drug offenders should be pardoned. It would free up a lot of jail space and a lot of taxpayer money, he maintains. The argument has been made before, but it’s an idea that I cannot imagine either of the two major candidates ever seriously considering.
The lesson, it seems, is that to be a mainstream candidate you have to think mainstream. There’s a list on Nader’s Web site of a dozen or so issues he believes are significant that neither Obama nor McCain addresses. Some are admittedly kind of obscure, but his point is that the two major candidates, who we so often imagine as polar opposites – representatives of the two sides to an issue – are really not that different. To stay in the mainstream they have to more or less go with the flow. We shouldn’t accept this. There are alternative solutions. There are a variety of ways to look at an issue, and there are certainly more types of people than just two.
Unfortunately, however, there will be just two (practically speaking) on Nov 4. I don’t yet know how to deal with this. I need to decide if I am able to justify idealism or if I’m all right with being pragmatic.