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No Third-Party Candidate for You!

On Wednesday I was heading out of class with a packet of mid term exams to grade and in the hall I overhead one of my students telling another student that he should vote for Barack Obama because, well, because he was black. As a black voter, how could he not vote for Obama? They parted, but I happened to be beside the student, whom I didn't know, as we made our way down the hall together.

The student turned to me and said: "I'm not sure I want to vote at all in this election. I don't think I should have to vote for Obama."

"You don't," I responded. "Have you considered a third-party candidate? Ralph Nader is on the ballot in 45 states."

"Ralph Nader is running again?" He was surprised, even though it's less than a three weeks away from the presidential election. "I'll think about it. Thank you."

The student walked on as I went into my office. Later in the day I decided that I would attend one of student government's town hall meetings at 7 PM, so I stayed and graded papers and planned to watch Nader on a live video stream at 6 PM. Nader was speaking at Cooper Union in New York City before the presidential "debate" featuring McCain and Obama.

So 6 PM arrived and I watched a live scene of an empty stage with unattended podium. Sometime around 6:15, a man came up and said that they would be getting under way in about 5 minutes. There was some urgency to get things moving, he said, because Nader would be attending the debate (as a spectator, of course) and needed to be available for media commentary. It seemed like 10 minutes, but then there were two speakers and a musical performance by cabaret singer-songwriter Nellie McKay. When I had to leave the office for the meeting, McKay was bouncing around on the stage with a jaunty tune that made her seem like a well-dressed hippie singing a nonsense song and banging on a tambourine. I never did get to hear Nader speak that night.

No third-party candidate has a part of the media-intense presidential debates since 1988, when they were taken over by the Commission on Presidential Debates, itself headed by the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee. In 2000 Nader was prevented from attending the debate at the University of Massachusetts and was refused entry onto the property, even though he had both a ticket to the debate and a formal invitation by Fox News for an on-site interview. The video of Nader's encounter at UMASS is hair-raising. One wants to say, as Nader himself says in the video, "I can't believe I'm in America."

Well, I've seen many presentations by the remarkable Nader. He's brilliant and indefatigable, and definitely speaks to and for Americans' interests. He would be an outstanding and upstanding US president. But as I watch these presentations, I see a man surrounded by the wrong people, in the wrong places, and kept down by a media that itself follows the intense power of corporate ownership of what Americans see and hear. We could all witness this unfolding during this election cycle, from the rapid jettisoning of candidates from media attention to the rapid transformation of the field into a 3-way race between McCain, Obama, and Hillary Clinton—and then there were two. Still one has to hunt aggressively for information about any of the third-party candidates.

Iraq continues to drain us, and our intervention in Afghanistan is heading toward a bonafide dead end.¹ There were new revelations this week that the Bush administration explicitly endorsed CIA torture.² Even outrage over the $700 billion emergency financial measures, which seem not to be working, does not move the American public to change direction. So, um, what's on TV tonight?

1.  See Nir Rosen's astonishing piece of journalism in Rolling Stone, October 30, 2008. Rosen was embedded with the Taliban in Afghanistan for his article "How We Lost the War We Won." He concludes that we should be preparing an exit strategy—really soon.
2.  "CIA Tactics Endorsed in Secret Memos," Washington Post, October 15, 2008.