I've seen Nader speak in large and medium venues around 2000, and recently on Democracy Now!
Doug nails him as he appears now. He starts out very cold and slow. Once he laughs at a few of his own jokes, and gets into his favorite area, which is anti-corporatism (which he doesn't connect generally to capitalism) he can really get rolling. But even at best now, he's not a very good speaker by professional standards. He was much better back in 2000, but still far from polished by political standards. The often criticized as stiff Gore was far better, in a different league really, even in 2000, and now Gore is better still.
Nader appears not just borderline bizarre, cold, etc., but far out there now. He seems to have deteriorated about as much as Bush.
I spent more than an hour recently right next to Dennis Kucinich at a fundraiser. He has a great deal of warmth and charm, even charisma. That's mostly missing from his television persona, which gets a bit defensive sometimes. Of course, you never quite get the feeling of connection you get for real from friends or in fake form from polished politicians. Yeah, he seems somewhat odd in that context, and looks that way too, and he's short, but did Bush ever look that much better, really, even at his best in 2000? Kucinich is far ahead of Nader on style, nowadays anyway. I support Kucinich because he's the only candidate who says the right things in a lot of areas, like war and health care. For that reason, I don't like to speculate about his chances. And I wonder if that sort of talk isn't capitulation to the money-media system. (I have also wondered, on the other hand, if I shouldn't be supporting Ohbombem also, as a fall back position, and protection against Clintonuke, but I haven't fallen back. I still feel a bit guilty for falling back to Dean in 2004.)
Nader's run in 2000 was clearly a star run, which couldn't have done much good for organization building. And it burned me that his message then was mostly whining about two partly dominance, which I think is unfortunately part of the basic structure of non-parliamentary democracy, especially with many built-in winner-take-all biases. It's not going to be easy to change that much. It's not just because of a few bad actors, it's very structural. Nader didn't seem to use the platform much to advance other ideas as I imagine Eugene Debs did. So I think Nader didn't really use the opportunity very well, but simply acted as a spoiler, especially with his "not a dime's worth of difference" rhetoric, which may play well to anarchists, but also feeds the general learned helplessness (the "I can't make a difference anyway" feeling) which is deliberately fostered by the system, and I think explains most non-voting. Actually, I think there were at least a few trillion dollars worth of difference, just in terms of that which can be measured, the real difference is not enumerable. Not anything close to what I'd like, but even a tiny difference means a lot when so much power is involved, as Chomsky says.
Charles San Antonio, TX
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