An Unreasonable Man???

I watched a documentary on Ralph Nader this weekend, Unreasonable Man, and thought it was good. The first half is fairly fawning, seemingly for good reason. Besides seat belts and air bags, we can thank Nader for countless pro-consumer anti-corporation organizations, bills, and followers, who followed in Nader's path (Nader's Raiders). He actually got General Motors so mad that they had him followed and tried to ensnare him in controversy multiple ways, including sending women to hit on him in grocery stores (good luck there, Nader's never been married and none of his biographers have ever even unearthed a single girlfriend). He eventually won $425,000 from GM. Things got harder for him after Carter. In the name of shrinking government, Reagan got rid of many of Nader's programs and when the Democrats took back the White House, they had become too pro-business to listen to Nader much. He tried some other ways to make a difference, but the next major stop in his career would be his attempts at becoming president.

I've always been critical of Nader running for office in 2000, and even though the movie become balance at this point, it still helped me put his election runs more in perspective. They had a part where a guy studied whether Nader had been focusing on Florida and other spoiler states and found no pattern other than an attempt to maximize votes by spending a lot of time in sure winners like Cali and NY. Additionally, it is almost a statistical anomaly that he did have such an effect. He's not the first third candidate, and he really didn't get many votes (2.74%). Is it his fault he happened to be running in one of our closest elections with the closest state vote ever? Why aren't Republicans complaining more about Perot, who got 19% in 1992?

But the question still has remains, why did he run at all? What was he hoping to accomplish? And as the movie continued, I started to think he had no idea. I was astonished by this smart man's naivety. At one point he claims that if only Kerry had focused on corporate welfare, he would have for sure won. Does he seriously believe this? And how could he not be more aware that our terrible electoral system sentenced him to being meaningless. In a parliamentary system he could have accomplished something. But the best a third party candidate can hope for is here is to be a spoiler. It can be argued that in three consecutive elections the (1992, 1996, and 2000) the wrong party won.

No, in this country the way to accomplish agendas is through creating organizations, by staying in the media's eyes, and through relentlessly pushing your agenda. And Nader had been doing this. It's as if he grew more clueless as he aged. Maybe losing voice in the Reagan era did something to him. Or maybe he needed to get laid and stop working so much.

Overall, I felt like he really has had a great career and did feel intense admiration for him. And of course, I wish our election system could become more democratic and that 3% of the vote meant 3% of the influence. But I do wish he hadn't run in 2000. Besides the 8 years of Bush we've had to endure, I feel our country could have used his energy in other places where he could have made more changes. For instance, what if instead of running a fruitless election, he had tried to change our electoral system? Now that could've actually resulted in some lasting change.