{news} Please respond with letters- "What Nader Might have Accomplished"

[Green Party-CT]

        The Following was printed in the Manchester Journal- Inquierer and New London Day..
   
  if you would like to respond to either newpapers (as I will be doing please do so! email address at the bottom of this article
   
  Tim McKee
   
   
    What Nader Might Have Accomplished     By Chris Powell                 Published on 4/8/2007 in Home »Editorial »Perspective     Has Connecticut's own Ralph Nader discredited his legacy to the country because of his quixotic presidential campaigns, particularly his campaign in 2000, which is blamed for throwing Florida and the Electoral College to George W. Bush and the Republicans over Al Gore and the Democrats?   That is the question raised by a wonderful and stirring new documentary about the four-decade career of America's best known “consumer advocate” and political agitator. The documentary is “An Unreasonable Man,” a title meant to be ironic, being drawn from a comment by George Bernard Shaw that the world can be changed only by unreasonable men, men who refuse to adapt to it.   The documentary, which opened last week at the Real Art Ways theater in Hartford with Nader in attendance, is full of criticism, some bitter and vituperative, but Nader wins the legacy
 argument with a wisecrack: What are they going to do — rip the seat belts out of the cars?   The controversy over the 2000 election has obscured the many advances in government protection of the public that Nader, 73, a Winsted native, prompted or hastened by his own work or that of his many watchdog organizations, advances now taken for granted, not just auto safety but also food and water purity, environmental protection, medical practice and medicine labeling, the Freedom of Information Act, and so on.   The foreign and domestic catastrophes of the Bush administration contradict Nader's sneer of seven years ago that there was not enough difference between the two major political parties to care about.   But Nader's share of the blame for Gore's defeat is a tiny fraction of Gore's own, since Gore couldn't carry his own state, Tennessee, nor Arkansas, the state of his patron, Bill Clinton, nor even the Democratic bastion of West Virginia. If he had won any of those states
 Gore would have been president.   No, if Nader can be faulted in politics, it is not for costing Gore the presidency but rather for having scorned the Democratic Party without first giving it a chance to nominate him. For Nader almost surely could have gotten to the House or Senate from Connecticut or been elected governor. Indeed, he well might have won the Democratic presidential nomination if he had ever sought it.   Eschewed a more useful role   With Gore's defeat in 2000 Nader may have enjoyed revenge for the Democratic Party's having joined the Republican Party as a tool of financial interests and for having kept him out of the presidential debates that year. But then if Nader had tried to make himself a power within the Democratic Party, the party's submission to Wall Street might have been prevented.   Even a challenge by Nader in Connecticut to the party's renomination of Sens. Christopher J. Dodd and Joseph I. Lieberman, Wall Street's biggest Democratic agents,
 might have had profound effects nationally.   Some doubt that Nader has the personality to be a political officeholder and thus to suffer fools at least occasionally. And yet over four decades he has motivated thousands of young people to devote themselves to public service, even if some eventually turned against him on strategy. His audience in Hartford the other night saw that he is not entirely the humorless scold depicted on television news.   Indeed, while Nader is not an orator, at times he has been the most erudite and inspiring political figure in the country, since, unlike most orators, he has something to say. This goes far beyond his political prescriptions; it is a matter of Nader's knowledge of American history and his core principle of democracy, that one person can make all the difference in the world — which is, of course, only the story of his own life. “The No. 1 obstacle to change,” he remarked in Hartford the other night, “is people who don't believe
 they have any power.” He can cite many examples of serious change around the country that originated in some seemingly ordinary person's simply deciding to be a citizen.   With income inequality reaching Gilded Age levels and with the financial markets being manipulated by big money with government's approval, Nader and Naderites are needed more than ever in the financial regulatory agencies. It's really too bad that Nader did not run for the House or Senate from Connecticut 20 or so years ago, for now he might be chairman of a congressional committee able to do something about the plutocracy.   It may not be too bad that Nader and his followers are not in charge of social policy now, since then the plutocratic predatory state might be replaced with the parasitic nanny state. But for fending off the former, the country still can't do better than Nader.   Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester. 













      
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