By JITENDRA JOSHI
WASHINGTON: Consumer champion Ralph Nader announced yesterday a fresh tilt at the White House, eight years after earning the acid hatred of Democrats for dividing the anti-Republican camp in a razor-thin vote.
Denying that he was running as a “spoiler” who could hand the presidency to Republican John McCain, Nader accused both the main parties of shutting out the US public and handing the nation over to corporate interests.
“Dissent is the mother of assent, and in that context I have decided to run for president,” Nader, who turns 74 on Wednesday, said on the NBC program Meet the Press.
As Nader railed against the “political bigotry” of Democrats still smarting from their 2000 loss, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton girded for a four-state battle March 4 that could decide the former first lady’s political fate.
Pundits had detected a hint of farewell in Clinton’s closing remarks at a debate with Obama last week. But the New York senator came out firing Saturday, declaring “shame” on her rival for attacking her healthcare and trade policies.
Amid the Democratic infighting, Nader declared: “If the Democrats can’t landslide the election this year, they ought to just wrap up, close down.”
But Nader, who rose to prominence by campaigning for auto safety in the 1960s, said he still had a message to offer for those “locked out” by the perennial Republican-Democratic duel.
Whether it was the war in Iraq, the Palestinian issue, environmental threats or the power of Wall Street, “you have to ask yourself as a citizen, should we elaborate the issues the two are not talking about”?
Standing as a Green party candidate in 2000, Nader took more than 97,000 votes in Florida, outraging Democrats who said he had siphoned off enough support from former vice president Al Gore to hand victory to George W. Bush.
But he won just 0.3% of the national vote as an independent in 2004, when he appeared on the presidential ballot in only 34 states.
Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, an Obama supporter, was derisory about Nader’s latest intervention.
“I mean, when you get into running for your third or fourth time, I don’t think people will pay that much attention to it, and I wouldn't see it having any effect on the race,” he said on Fox News.
Pundits said the billionaire mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, would pose a greater threat to the main parties. Bloomberg has denied he is planning a White House run but his protests have done little to silence the media buzz.
Obama, who is bidding to knock Clinton out of the race when Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont vote on March 4, said on Saturday anybody had the right to run for president if they qualified.
“And I think the job of the Democratic Party is to be so compelling that a few percentage of the vote going to another candidate is not going to make any difference,” he told reporters.
Obama said Nader had telephoned him on Friday and “reached out to my campaign”, and cast his opponent as a “heroic figure” for blazing a trail for environmental protection and consumer rights.
But the Illinois senator, who is riding high after 11 nominating wins in a row over Clinton, added of Nader: “He seems to have a pretty high opinion of his own work.”
Nader described Obama as a “person of substance” but said the senator had allowed his own “better instincts” to be compromised in the White House battle.
McCain was meanwhile “the candidate for perpetual war”, Nader said, calling for the impeachment of the “criminal recidivist regime of George Bush and (Vice President) Dick Cheney”.
McCain has enjoyed a bounce in support from hardline conservatives after The New York Times last week insinuated an improper relationship between the maverick Republican front-runner and a female lobbyist eight years ago.
Obama campaigned yesterday in Ohio while Clinton headed to Rhode Island. The pair were to meet for a final televised debate on Tuesday in Cleveland, Ohio.
A spate of reports said Clinton’s advisors were eyeing the potential end of her White House campaign.
Her spokesman dismissed as “nonsense” one such report in The Washington Post. – AFP