CONSUMER advocate Ralph Nader has every right to run for the presidency again, and to ask voters to weigh his independent candidacy against the merits and faults of the major-party nominees. But does he have any good reason? When he launched his latest presidential bid during an appearance on "Meet the Press" Sunday, the rationale he offered for it was both familiar and unpersuasive: that the two major parties are two heads of the same corporate beast, and that there is little meaningful difference between them.
In 2000, when Nader ran under the Green Party banner, about 2.9 million voters bought that argument. His views haven't much changed. In his rambling comments on the NBC show this weekend, Nader lumped the two remaining Democratic presidential candidates in with Republican John McCain and criticized the lot of them for supporting excessive defense spending and failing to push for a single-payer health plan. Nader railed against "political bigotry," and suggested that people who "think that the country needs an infusion of freedom, democracy, choice, dissent" shouldn't have to "watch the two parties own all the voters and turn the government over to big business."
In truth, the eventual Democratic nominee is sure to disagree with McCain on a wide variety of issues - just as, on matters ranging from climate change to healthcare to Iraq, a President Al Gore would have pursued policies far different from those of George W. Bush. Most of Nader's former supporters seem to recognize this, which helps explain why his vote count dropped to less than 500,000 in 2004.
Nader's desire to see more than two major presidential candidates would make more sense if the United States had a parliamentary system, in which parties are represented in government roughly according to their percentage of the vote. But the president and the 535 members of Congress are chosen in winner-take-all races. This process leads almost inexorably to the emergence of two well-organized parties. In such races, third-party candidates are far more likely to play the spoiler - that is, to sink the candidate closest to them ideologically - than to be elected themselves.
After Bush prevailed in 2000, his administration honored the wishes of industry and weakened such agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. This should bother Nader, since the gutting and gelding of these regulators is a repudiation of his life's work.
But having been toasted a generation ago as one of the most trusted people in America, Nader has come to believe in his own indispensability. Sadly, he now seems to derive less joy from protecting his own legacy of consumer protection than from sending Democratic presidential candidates into fits.
