Here We Go Again. Ralph Nader Announces an ‘08 Campaign

February 24, 2008

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The man who single handedly facilitated George W. Bush’s first Presidential election victory has announced that he plans on entering the 2008 presidential race. If you are still unclear as to whom I am talking about, it is none other than Ralph Nader. This will be the fifth time ( 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2004) running, with his most notorious bid coming in 2000 where Al Gore lost Florida by 537 votes, a state in which Nader received 97,421 votes, with the heavy majority of them coming from would-be Democratic voters. The seemingly oblivious, and increasingly annoying Nader announced his 2008 intentions on NBC’s Meet the Press” that he’ll run as a third-party, anti-corporate candidate for president this fall, which would be likely to drain votes from the Democratic nominee, thus increasing the chance of McCain winning. Which makes sense you know, an anti-corporate candidate like Nader obviously would still enter the race with the full understanding he would be indirectly supporting the most corporate friendly party in the industrialized world, the GOP.

On “Meet the Press“, Nader stumbled through a painfully scripted diatribe about Washington becoming the “corporate occupied territory,” and said none of the current presidential candidates is sufficiently addressing corporate crime, or government waste. “In that context I have decided to run for president,” he told host Tim Russert. Well at least it’s refreshing to see that Nader has chosen a new issue for this ‘monumental’ run at the White House, wait, that isn’t a new issue, a matter of fact it is his only issue. And as you may have guessed, Democrats and bloggers are already reacting with fury, fearing a rerun of 2000:

Loathe’ isn’t a strong enough word,” said a senior adviser to the Clinton campaign.

“Despise is a starting point. This is a man who fueled his last campaign against corporate interests with corporate Republican money. If this is truly a change election, let’s start by dropping this perennial egomaniac candidacy.”

The best hope Democrats have is that people that may have voted for Nader in either 2000, or even prior to that realize this time that the man really hasn’t a snowballs chance in hell of winning, and acting as nothing more then a vote siphon against the Democratic candidate. Personally I find Nader as nothing more then a far left version of Ron Paul in the sense that both are so impractical in their views, and fundamental beliefs that there is really no fathomable possibility their platform could garnish anything more then 3%-5% of the electorate. But we do live in America, and its their god given right to run for office, so I guess you gotta respect it, no matter how much you may disagree with the person or their ideas. That being said, I do hope that the Democrats do everything within legal ramifications, no matter how ruthless it may be, to successfully throw procedural obstacles in the way of his access to the ballot in key states.