Ralph Nader is owed thanks for seat belts and air bags and cars that hold the road, that don’t flip or crumple up or catch fire as easily. He has successfully waged war against tainted meat, air and water pollution and dangerous food additives. He was a major driving force behind the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environment Protection Agency and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The Freedom of Information Act, food labeling that’s clear and informative, compensation for passengers bumped when airlines overbook.
He founded an astonishing array of public-spirited organizations and citizens groups–PIRGs. He’s waged battles against corporate and government corruption and unchecked power.
You could go on for longer than Most Replies and still not cite all his contributions. Let’s do it!!
he bled the democratic votes that could have gone to gore. he may not have been “in on it” but i really doubt he didn’t see that he had no real chance of getting elected, and that in running he would only split the democratic votes. sure it would be cool if we had a third party, but 2000 really wasn’t a good year to try for it
are you serious man? there’s no way nadar could have won. The republican and democratic voters are a clean split, with maybe a bit more on the republican side. had gore dropped out, the borderline democratic voters would have gone for bush and nadar would still have lost badly.
Okay okay. I guess Nader wouldn’t call it “help” either.
I think the short answer to that is that front wheel drive is generally better. Especially in snow. Secondarily to that, having the powerplant up front makes it a lot easier to build a car where the passenger compartment can sustain major impacts (at least in the front).
And, not to correct you again, but where do you think the engine is in a Porsche (not the Cayenne)? Not sure what other major cars still have rear engines, but Porsche doesn’t appear to be about to change soon. But those cars are all about performance and much less about snow. Not sure how they stack up on safety though.
When Gore was running vs Bush he did a very poor job of differentiating himself. The two candidates were just two heads of one lousy candidate. It truly was a republicrat vs democan race. I, for one, voted Nader because I saw no real difference between Gore and Bush. (They both had money in big oil, for example)
Now, it turns out that Bush was WAY worse than we ever thought he could have been - so a mistake was made there. But the real reason Gore lost the election was because he didn’t show Nader supporters any real choice and differentiate himself enough from Bush to get my vote. Kerry, on the other hand, did, and he got my vote over Nader in 2004. (And Nader won’t get my vote in 2008 either, for the same reason.)
Gore lost his own damn election. I wasn’t going to vote for either of those two identical bastards in 2000. Sure they are WAY different now, but they sure as hell weren’t back then. The democrats learned their lesson in 2000 and moved back left to where the majority of their party is.
Except Gore won.
Without Nader in the 2000 election with the 2.7% of the vote he took it would have been more clear that Gore had won the election.
In 2004 the democratic national committee kept him off the ballot in a majority of the states so he did not pull as many votes.
Nader is running solely to piss off the DNC because they tried to keep him off the ballots in 2004.
