Presidential Election News

Nader: I'll Qualify for All States

By SCOTT SONNER .c The Associated Press

RENO, Nev. (AP)

Consumer advocate and Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader predicted Monday that he will qualify for the November ballot in all 50 states.

Nader said that while the Reform Party is somewhat fractured, his party is ``growing quite readily'' as an alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties - ``which is really one party with two heads wearing make-up.

``We're going to be on every state's ballot,'' he told about 100 people who turned out at the University of Nevada, Reno. ``This is going to be a four-party race in November.''

The progressive Green Party, founded in 1996, shares Thomas Jefferson's and James Madison's view of government as ``a public check against the excesses of monied interests,'' Nader said.

The abolitionist, trade union, environmental and consumer movements all have targeted the same evil - ``excessive concentration of power and wealth,'' he said.

Nader said too many working Americans have been left behind in the booming economy.

Nader, who received less than 1 percent of the vote as the Green Party candidate for president in 1996, said he plans to visit all 50 states. Nevada is the eighth state he has visited so far.

Meanwhile, Nader said Republican George W. Bush should welcome him as a participant in presidential debates with Vice President Al Gore, not only as a strategy to divide liberal votes but also to help mask what he said were Bush's poor debating skills.

``If you aspire to the presidency, you should be able to speak without a TelePrompTer and without cue cards for more than 15 seconds,'' Nader said.



Subject: Philadelphia Inquirer Nader Article 3/19/00

How about 'President Nader'?


By Murray Dubin INQUIRER STAFF WRITER


He has been called David battling Goliath. He has been called St. Ralph. He's also called "Uncle Ralph" by his nephew and two nieces and by some of his friends' children.

"I love children. They have incredible imaginations. One of my friends has a 10-year-old, and he once asked me, 'Uncle Ralph, why is Coca-Cola more expensive than gasoline?' "

His eyes light as he tells the story. Yes, that's certainly a question Ralph Nader would love.

Nader, the father of the modern consumer movement. The squeaky-clean censurer of corporate America. The ascetic muckraker who's made the auto safer, the water purer, and the air cleaner. The author and citizen activist who has eschewed political office for so long.

But now he says the political landscape is so bereft of light, so dimmed by corporate dominance, that he must do more. The laws he helped pass 20 and 30 years ago wouldn't have a chance today, he says.

And so, he has tossed his typewriter - he still uses one - into the ring and declared himself a presidential candidate of the Green Party.

Nader, 66, was in Trenton on a Wednesday, on the Penn campus in Philadelphia on Thursday, and in Wilmington that night in time for dinner, the lion in March, roaring to collect enough signatures to be on the ballot in every state he can.

What, you say he did this once before? In 1996?

Well, he was the Green Party candidate, but he did not run for office that year so much as amble.

He says that even that suggests too much activity. "I stood for office" is his description.

This year he is campaigning.

"We invest in stadiums and arenas, but we don't invest in public transportation, in schools or drinking water. . . . The military budget is twisted into gross excess without the threat of a Soviet Union. . . . The $2 billion we spend on each B-2 bomber is more than what we spend combined on the Public Broadcasting Service, legal services for the poor, and federal meat and poultry inspections.

"Our society is a corporate state. There is such a thing now as civic demoralization, a feeling of whatever will be, will be.

"The Roman orator Cicero said that freedom is participation in power. . . . It's time for another Progressive-Populist movement."

And that's some of what he said to a largely student audience in a Wharton business school classroom in an appearance sponsored by Penn Students Against Sweatshops.

He understood the irony of a corporate critic speaking in a Wharton classroom. "Do they have a corporate crime course here?" he asked.

Invariably described as rumpled, he's as clean and shiny as a new car and, with tie tied tight and a distinguishing ring of gray hair, he could pass, dare we say, for a Philip Morris or Boeing CEO.

More from the man catapulted into the public eye in 1965 with his first book, Unsafe at Any Speed:

"Beware of politicians who wear religion on their sleeves and wrap the flag around their shoulders. They tend to disgrace both."

"We should be taxing the bad things, like pollution, and not the good things, like people's labor."

"Why isn't there at Penn an annual 'Meet your Board of Trustees,' you know, a Meet Your Rulers Day?"

"Why aren't all the university's corporate contracts and corporate gifts on Penn's Web site?"

He's been around so long.

Before there was a Woodstock, there was a Ralph Nader. Before there were Charlie's Angels, there were Nader's Raiders.

He's not married. Never lived with anyone. Has a television, but it's black-and-white. Owns not one credit card and can't understand why he doesn't get a discount for paying cash. Hewed to his principles for four decades now, a patriot without a military uniform, fighting not just for citizen participation, but for citizen initiation as well.

He won't win the presidency, but he expects to start a citizen movement that will alter the landscape. "Young people face an unstable future," he says, "unless they get involved and take away the power of the government and corporations."

He urges those young people to be "serious volunteers," to join him, to contact www.votenader.com

Will running for office, the hurly-burly of a campaign, the promises made, the deals struck, rub the sheen from his image?

He laughs. He'll be fine, "as long as I don't talk like a politician, wave my hands like a politician, flatter like a politician, dissemble like a politician."

The image is that of a humorless, driven do-gooder, a man who reads savings-and-loan reports for fun. No, he says, he likes to have a good time, likes to "banter and josh."

But he remains a traditionalist, a man who will not write on a computer. In his Washington office, he says, he has six typewriters.

Six?

Pause. "For the parts."

Murray Dubin's e-mail address is mdubin@phillynews.com