Once More, With Feeling

Everybody's favorite "spoiler" third party candidate, Ralph Nader, may be gearing up for yet another encore in the forthcoming 2008 presidential election. According to a recent article in USA Today, Ralph Nader "told the Green Party's national convention that he is considering a 2008 presidential run."

Apparently not yet satisfied with having already helped cost two prior Democratic nominees the presidency, Nader is primed and ready for another go if he deems it sufficiently necessary that "there needs to be more competition from outside the two parties." This despite the fact that he readily concedes that he doesn't expect to win the election. His primary motivation for jumping into the fray, as it was for the previous elections, seems to be his visible disdain for both major parties. As he puts it, he is afraid the 2008 election will be another rerun of the "Tweedledum-Tweedledee" elections he foresaw in 2000 and 2004.

Praising the dark horse candidacies of Republican Ron Paul and Democrat Mike Gravel (both equally kooky hopefuls with no real hopes of winning), he assailed the presumed Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton, for being "a political coward" who "doesn't even have the minimal political fortitude of her husband" in a recent piece in The Politico. While it may be true that Hillary has sometimes shown herself to be a less than ideal candidate (as have all the other perceived front-runners under different circumstances), the fact remains that she has a much more likely chance of winning the election than, say, a Mike Gravel.

This pseudo-announcement is made all the more baffling by the fact that, as TPM's Steve Benen notes, Nader "doesn’t expect to win a presidential race, he doesn’t expect to change the Democratic agenda, he doesn’t expect to appear in the debates, and he doesn’t even expect to make the ballot in every state." In other words, besides for his evident disdain for both parties, he really has no reason or stated goal for wanting to participate in the race.