Nader launches presidential campaign

Sunday 24 February 2008

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader joined the presidential race with a new independent campaign. Nader said that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans were addressing the problems facing America.

Special Report The race to the White House

Sunday 24 February 2008

By AFP

Consumer rights champion Ralph Nader, accused by many Democrats of handing the 2000 election to Republican George W. Bush, said Sunday he was running again in this year's White House race.

"I'm running for president," he said on the NBC program "Meet the Press," denying he was playing a spoiler role in the hard-fought campaign.

If the Democrats cannot win by a "landslide" this year, he said, "they should just close down."

But Nader, who turns 74 on Wednesday, said he still had a message to offer for the environment, workplace safety and against corporate interests by running as an independent candidate.

Democrat Barack Obama's "better instincts and his knowledge have been censored by himself," he said, citing the Illinois senator's support of the Israeli "destruction" of the Gaza Strip.

Republican heir apparent John 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."

Standing as a Green party candidate in 2000, Nader took some 97,000 votes in Florida, triggering outrage among Democrats who believed he had siphoned off enough support from former vice president Al Gore to deliver victory to Bush.

But he won just 0.3 percent of the national vote as an independent in 2004, when he also announced his presidential run on the long-running "Meet the Press." Then, he appeared on the presidential ballot in only 34 states.

Last month, Nader launched a presidential exploratory committee. Its website rails against "corporate greed, corporate power, corporate control."

Interviewed by AFP at the time, he accused the Democrats of scapegoating him for their agonizing loss to Bush in 2000.

"They are congenitally unable of avoiding the scapegoat tag. Instead they should look in the mirror and ask why they lost," he said.

Obama, who is bidding to knock rival Hillary Clinton out of the Democratic rate when Ohio and Texas vote on March 4, said 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 said at a press conference in Columbus, Ohio.

Obama said Nader had telephoned him on Friday and "reached out to my campaign."

"In many ways he is a heroic figure and I don't mean to diminish him," he said, while casting Nader as an ideological purist who believes that anyone who disagrees with him is "not substantive."

"He seems to have a pretty high opinion of his own work," Obama added.

Nader, who was born to Lebanese immigrants in Connecticut in 1934, rose to prominence in the 1960s, when he took on the auto industry with his book "Unsafe At Any Speed."

The book and Nader's investigations led to the nation's first car safety laws, and he is credited with making seatbelts mandatory in many US states.

Asked in 2004 if his presidential runs might tarnish his legacy, Nader said: "Who cares about my legacy? My legacy is established. They're not going to tear seatbelts out of cars.

"I look to the future. That's the important thing."