Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader (born February 27, 1934) is an United States consumer rights activist, and two-time US presidential candidate of the Green Party. In both runs Winona LaDuke was his vice-presidential running mate.
He was born in Winsted, Connecticut to Lebanese immigrant parents, Nathra and Rose Nader. He graduated from Princeton in 1955 and Harvard Law School in 1958. In 1965 he released Unsafe at Any Speed, a study showing many American automobiles, especially those of General Motors, to be structurally flawed.
GM tried to find information with which to discredit Nader; Nader then sued the company for invasion of privacy and used the winnings to expand his consumer rights efforts. In 1971 he started Public Citizen, a consumer-rights organization dependent largely (and, some argue, unfairly) on volunteer and low-wage labor.
Thirty-year gap, in which Nader founded some dozens of organizations, wrote many books, etc.
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Nader ran for president on the Green Party ticket in the U.S. presidential election, 1996, qualifying for ballot status in relatively few states, and garnering less than 1% of the vote (he refused to raise or spend more than $5,000 on his campaign), but making major organizational gains for the party. He ran again in 2000, this time receiving almost 3% of the popular vote. (Many had hoped he would achieve the 5% necessary to qualify the Green Party for federal matching funds in the next election.)
Some of Nader's main emphases were the legalization of commercial hemp, the need for campaign finance reform, universal healthcare, affordable housing, free education through college, workers' rights, and a shift in taxes to place the burden more heavily on corporations than on the middle and lower classes. He opposed pollution credits that make it more profitable to pollute than conserve, and giveaways of the public's assets.
The extremely close race between the two major presidential candidates, Al Gore and George W. Bush, helped to create some additional controversy around the Nader campaign. Before the election, a number of those who supported Gore claimed that since Nader had "no chance" of winning, those who supported the Nader platform should nevertheless vote for Gore, the theory being that a victory for a more moderate candidate was preferable to a victory for a conservative candidate. Late in the campaign, the Gore campaign actually dispatched prominent liberal celebrities to present this argument to Nader voters in swing states. Nader, and many of his supporters, however, claimed that while Gore was preferable to Bush, the differences between the two were not great enough to merit support of Gore. As it turned out, the number of Nader votes were far more than the margin of Bush over Gore in many states, meaning that Gore would have won the election if the Nader voters had all shown up (unlikely without Nader) and voted for Gore (less unlikely), a fact which made many new enemies for Nader and the Green Party. For their part, Nader supporters countered that the Democrats could handily have won the election with a better and more competent candidate than Gore, who failed to carry his own home state. And, of course, the U.S. presidential election, 2000 was hounded by the Florida situation.
Some voters had attempted to minimise this problem by engaging in Nader trading, in which Nader-inclined voters in swing states agreed to vote for Gore in exchange for Gore-incled voters in safe Bush states to vote for Nader.
The "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush!" phenomenon is the so-called spoiler effect where candidates split the vote, and it is common to most third-party or independent candidacies, whenever such candidates draw most of their support from constituencies who would otherwise support one or the other candidate. The problem is endemic to the First Past the Post electoral system; according to Duverger's Law, such a voting method naturally results in a two-party system. Some, such as Democrat Dennis Kucinich, advocate approval voting or instant runoff voting to address the spoiler-effect - Nader has made strong statements supporting Kucinich, suggesting that he is seeking these reforms.
But since, in the long run, both the Democratic and Republican parties appear to be net beneficiaries of this state of affairs, many commentators conclude that electoral reform addressing the matter is improbable - unless of course one party consistently loses because of it. Many Greens hope to force the reforms by causing Democrats to lose until the situation becomes intolerable. Nader has not stated such a goal publicly, nor is he a member of the Party.
Nader-founded organizations include not only Public Citizen (and Congress Watch and Global Trade Watch divisions), but also the Public Interest Research Groups, Essential Information, Commercial Alert, Consumer Project on Technology, The Center for the Study of Responsive Law, Congressional Accountability Project, the publication Multinational Monitor, and most recently, Citizen Works.
Presidential runs
Organizations
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