Spoiler Alert

Whatever Ralph Nader's goal is this election, it doesn't seem to be going very well. The Democratic convention is revealing the Democrats intend to position themselves farther to the right on a number of issues than they were when Nader complained about them, not that that's a bad thing. Ralph isn't doing too well on his quest to get on the ballot. And there doesn't seem to be any emerging movement to support Nader's candidacy on the philosophical grounds that he represents a third party. Meanwhile, the media is becoming more bold with its anti-Nader pronouncements. Take this news article from CBS, titled "Nader to Dems: Look in Mirror." It opens unassumingly with these two paragraphs:

Ralph Nader insists he is in the presidential race for keeps. If President Bush wins again, so be it, he says. Though Nader thinks he'll hurt Mr. Bush more than help him.

Democrats call Nader delusional. He thinks they’re hypocrites. For the independent candidate, his long-term goals trump any short-term repercussions.

That's the kind of reporting I expect from a trusted news source. Notice how the first two paragraphs clearly, objectively outline the nature of the conflict: Nader wants to run for president and doesn't care if it hurts the Democrats chances at office because he thinks they're doing a poor job, although he expects his campaign will hurt Bush more. The Democrats think he's delusional. Both perspectives are given coverage. The reporting is objective, impersonal, without value judgment. But move on in the article...

“If they want to pick up some of these issues, if they catch on,” Nader continues, he will accept the loss of his liberal supporters. “That’s fair play,” he adds.

Ralph Nader is mad. He wants Democrats to earn his liberal backers. He refuses to give them away. And although he appreciates a willingness by Sen. John Kerry to reach out to him, the party itself has betrayed its political left for too long, in Nader’s view.

Whoa! So Nader's running for president this year and he is mad? I double-checked the top of the page to make sure I wasn't reading an editorial, but this was in fact a news article.

If Nader had not been on the ballot in New Hampshire or Florida, both states would have gone to Democrat Al Gore. Instead George W. Bush won by the narrowest of margins: 537 votes in Florida alone.

Whoa, where are they getting that crazy idea from!? But actually, this is the first time I've seen the accusation that Nader lost the election stated definitively by a "responsible" member of the press. Before, it had always been "Democrats blame Nader for losing them the race in 2000." The simple reason for this is that the exit polls, which try show who a voter would have voted for as a second choice, don't all agree. Some show Nader's votes drawing very heavily from potential Gore voters, some show them drawing roughly equally from both campaigns. Nader's own nifty campaign site says:

A Democratic exit poll showed that Ralph’s votes came 25% from Republicans, 38% from Democrats...

CBS cites a different poll with different data:

In 2000, Voter News Service exit polling showed that 47 percent of Nader's Florida supporters would have voted for Gore, and 21 percent for Mr. Bush, easily covering the margin of Gore's loss.

Apparently, CBS has determined its poll is authoritative.

The other variable is, how many voters for an independent candidate would simply have stayed home? It seems plausible that many would, since an independent candidate's platform differs much more from the two major parties' than their platforms differ from each other.

The funny thing is that, despite all the negative attention and non-attention, Nader seems emboldened.

"It is more likely I will ask John Kerry and George W. Bush to withdraw before I'd withdraw," Nader said. “They are focusing on one-tenth of the vote they think they may lose and ignoring the nine-tenths of the party they must get."

Perhaps this doesn't bode well for my earlier prediction that Nader was planning all along to drop out of the race.

On the other hand, I have to admit that some aspects of this conflict make for good entertainment. From this CBS article on the convention entitled"Nader to Crash Dems' Party," Nader is quoted saying:"I would like to see the bazaar. I'd like to see the alcoholic-musical-political payoff bazaar of accounts receivable," Nader said. "I would like to be there at the convention to watch. I will try to get credentials… I may try as a syndicated columnist, which I've been for 35 years. Let's see if they are against reporters." That's just funny.