Nader is a wrecker, but he's right about public malaise

[T_i_B]

Comment from UK Guardian. Make of this what you will.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1155404,00.html

The Ralph Don't Run campaign did no good. Ralph Nader, the 70-year-old hero-turned-wrecker, is running. When he announced it, the gnashing of Democratic teeth echoed across the internet, along with angry wishes that some "unsafe at any speed" car might run him down before election day. The dismal spectacle of another US election hoves into view. How do all those citizens who flock to Washington to gaze in awe upon the stirring sentiments enshrined in the constitution and the bill of rights tolerate those noble words reduced to the squalid display of election time?

This week Bush, flush with corporate bribes of $140m to spend on mind-drilling 10-second soundbites, opened his campaign with a ritual assault on the lack of patriotism of his opponents. In Iraq the US is decreeing the type of democracy it thinks fit. Meanwhile the world watches US democracy bought and sold by corporate cash and fixed by a politically gerrymandered supreme court in a deeply unjust first-past-the-post system. American elections make the case against Iranian-style "Islamic democracy" a little harder. Which is more democratic: rule by moolah or mullah?

Nader, the ascetic voice in the wilderness, seems to relish his martyrdom by excoriation, content with speaking out for universal healthcare, campaign finance reform, fighting poverty and saving the environment. He is right that there should be more choices - but mendaciously cavalier in dismissing the difference between the main parties as too small to matter.

Last time 100 million Americans did not vote, he says: "We've got to give them more voices, choices, more exciting involvement ... so they're not just spectators." But anyone with experience of trying to buck a first-past-the-post system from within knows that being right is not enough. A vain wrecker he remains, and an exemplar of the left's self-defeating refusal to hold its nose and unite against the right.