Angry says... Ralph Nader, the erstwhile US consumer advocate and now full-time left-wing blowhard, has - again - entered the US presidential race, maybe giving us a reason to look at what's happening politically stateside.
I met Ralph Nader once, in 1983 when he came to Monash University to give a lecture. I mostly recall the arrogance of his entourage. Read more ...
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Ralph Nader, the erstwhile US consumer advocate and now full-time left-wing blowhard, has - again - entered the US presidential race, maybe giving us a reason to look at what's happening politically stateside.
I met Ralph Nader once, in 1983 when he came to Monash University to give a lecture. I mostly recall the arrogance of his entourage.
When someone in the audience put a question to Mr. Nader, one of his minders interrupted him a few words into his reply with 'Remember, Ralph, for these people you have an accent. Remember to speak slowly', upon which Ralph helpfully enuciated like we were 5 year old Klingon-language speakers - as if our TV shows and films were not already, by then, swamped with Hollywood fare.
Anyway, Ralph Nader has very profoundly changed the course of History: He is directly responsible for George W. Bush's winning against Al Gore in the 2000 race. The rest, as they say, is History.
In 2000, Ralph Nader was running for President for the Green party of America, and won something like 2.5% of the vote - a small fraction of which would have been more than enough to put a number of states that fell into the Bush camp by razor-thin margins firmly into the Gore column.
Under the fossil US electoral system - developed when horses were the main means of conveyance across the vast distances of America - the Electoral College tally, not the popular vote, holds sway. In 2000, Al Gore garnered more than 530,000 - five hundred and thirty thousand - more votes than Bush, but the apparent surplus of 540 votes in Florida in Bush's favor was 539 votes more than were needed to tip the Electoral College, and the Presidency, over to Bush. It is certain that the necessary fraction of the Green voters who voted for Nader would have cast their ballots for Gore had they not had a choice - indeed, Gore had by then already established his green credentials by publishing his landmark green manifesto, 'Earth in the Balance'.
Ralph Nader has incidentally never written anything on Green issues. His life's theme is evil US corporations. Be that as it may - whenever I hear of evil corporations, I am reminded of the good they can, and do, do. Pharmaceutical companies for instance always seem to be the cynosure of left-wing wrath. Reality is, it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop viable new medicines - who will, who can fund such efforts? In the Middle Ages, there were no corporations, no medicines, no pills, no corporate greed: give me a bit of corporate greed any day. Were it not for corporation-enabled modern medicine, I'd be dead, and just perhaps, so would you, Ralph Nader.
The world today, the US economy, the US deficit, the reputation of the US in the world, all would of course be profoundly different had Al Gore rather than W won.
Ralph Nader is not the only unsung wight (wight, for the sake of not using the word 'hero') who totally changed the course of world History and then was either forgotten or unknown to begin with. Let's look for a real unsung hero: he's Russian. He's military. I have forgotten his name - but not his existence.
In 1963, during the Cuba missile crisis, a lone USSR nuclear submarine is cruising the waters within nuclear striking distance of the US. Communications are cut off because communicating would bewray (yes, w) its position. The crew is becoming paranoid, convinced that war has already broken out.
Three people on board - the skipper, the political commissary, and a weapons officer - are needed to launch the nuclear warheads: the launch codes and keys simply will not work unless all three cooperate. Two of the three gang up on the third man to press him into launching. Steadfastly and bucking even physical threats, he refuses. A nuclear launch which would have triggered WW3 is thus avoided by the courageous sanity of one single man - all the more remarkable since this one man happens to be a fully endoctrinated communist military. If the world today is still habitable, it is thanks to this unsung and long forgotten officer.
Wasn't it Phil Collins who once sung 'We Fly So Close' ?
Anyway back to the current scene. It's Obama against McCain then.
But we're not yet there.
Huckabee is still in the running. Huckabee firmly believes that God created the Earth, the Sun and the Universe some 4400-odd years ago. Why it is legitimate to believe this, and how it validates his judgment and makes him fit for high public office, he does not credibly explain. American author Joe Bageant, in his book 'Deer Hunting with Jesus', quotes an Australian telling him "I'm glad we got the convicts and you got the puritans'. His reply to the digger? Be very thankful.
Hillary is running still, and is losing the nomination to Obama. I have met several people - such as the wife of a European ambassador to the US - who know Hillary quite well and have become not only fast friends but fanatical supporters of hers. Peggy Noonan's book against Hillary, "The Case Against Hillary", I found unconvincing. She tries to make a difference - but America won't let her. America is in need of fresh faces.
Both in French and US presidential politics, there is a recurrent phenomenon: the wildly popular, thoroughly incompetent outsider.
The electorate tires of the usual suspects, the usual coterie of politicoes, and hankers after a new fresh face that will take them out of all this misery, welcome stranger, you gold nugget, please sweep me off my wearied feet.
In France, it started many generations ago with a Mr. Boulanger. A few decades ago, it continued with a Mr. Poher who ran very high in the polls during the campaign, vastly out-polling Pompidou and the other pros, until a few days before the actual election he lead-zeppelined back down to Earth as the French finally saw him for what he was: a bit of an overweight ponderous bumbler who did not have a clue and whose only attraction was that he did not belong.
A few elections later pre-election polls gave the election to a man hight Coluche by a sizeable margin.
Coluche was an outrageously vulgar professional semi-literate stand-up comic, running in the election as a lark (until he was told to leave. Actually, he was told once. He chuckled and guffawed. He was told a second time: he chuckled and guffawed. Then on a Sunday evening, his impresario was found dead in a garbage skip on a Paris street with two bullets in his head. Coluche left the race on Tuesday. No culprit was ever found, and it was all put down to coincidence.)
In the US, rank outsiders who do not necessarily have a clue run and are popular, because they offer fresh faces. Sometimes they win - Jimmy Carter as a case in point, but since they are so inadequately prepared an objective case can be made that their administrations are at best amateurish, and at worst dangerous. The odd thing about the US though - sometimes the amateurs seem to come straight from the Establishment itself. Dan Quayle became a punch line as well as a Veep and a politician, with some justification.
McCain seems solid. Critics say that his book 'Faith of my Fathers' is outstanding. He paid a hefty price by being a POW in Vietnam for 5 years, and he knows how the world can work. He won't be tempted anytime soon to join the ranks of the kneejerk blame America first for all the ills of the world brigade - there are politicians in the US who believe that every time someone is stoned somewhere, it is somehow America's fault. Probably not a productive weltanschauung....
Obama is the Golden Boy. His message is change and hope, one might be perhaps excused for thinking at times that he hopes he won't have to change his message to anything more substantial. Would an Obama administration work, or would he just prove to be yet another naive amateur?
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