Thank you, Ralph

Just saw An Unreasonable Man the day before Thanksgiving.  It's a terrific documentary, and not just because the subject is engaging; it's well-organized and edited very tightly, and though it's a little over two hours it never drags.  Definitely worth the time.

In the discussion a few days ago of Frances Townsend's paean to George Bush, the question came up of who might actually deserve that level of praise ("there are some men who lift the age they inhabit...").  Though I still think it's too overstated to apply to anyone as it stands, I felt then and feel even more so now that in this country Ralph Nader comes the closest.  Hundreds of thousands of people would be dead today if not for Nader, millions more injured and maimed.  And our lives are better in myriad other ways as well because of Nader's tireless pursuit of justice (which sounds like wide-eyed gushing, but really is just a literal statement of the truth).  So over this Thanksgiving holiday I've been thinking about that, and about the huge debt we all owe this man.  Thank you, Ralph.

I happened across two reviews of the film with observations I thought were worth sharing.  First,  from Stylus Magazine:

[Peevish whining democracy-hating Eric] Alterman envisions an election-eve speech where the Green candidate could have magnanimously released his supporters to vote for Gore, which another interviewee immediately nails as being utterly without precedent in the history of third-party politics. To expect Nader to reverse his slogan, “Vote your conscience, not your fears,” at the eleventh hour merely because the Dems felt entitled to progressive votes they did nothing to earn seems more baldly arrogant than anything The Spoiler is accused of.

Yes, yes, yes.  It's so obvious, yet it's so unusual to hear anyone say it in the (more or less) mainstream media.  Then there's this wonderful statement from a reviewer in the Chicago Reader:

In retrospect I regret voting for Kerry in 2004 more than voting for Nader in 2000, because all my strategic vote did was endorse the party's middle-of-the-road routine. Now we can all look forward to another doomed centrist Democrat being crowned in the money primary [...].

It's very heartening to see someone realizing and admitting publicly that their vote for Kerry was a mistake.  There aren't many things these days that make me more hopeful for the future, but this is one of them.

There's more to say about the film, but I'll save it for another posting.

Comments

[Save the Oocytes]

This is as public a forum as I have, but if it will bring you comfort, I too believe I was wrong to vote for Kerry.

[John Caruso]

I hope I haven't tweaked you too badly with some of what I've written. I'm glad to hear you've had a change of heart on it, though, and thanks for mentioning.

[Save the Oocytes]

Nope, you haven't. I've been drifting left for a while, and constructive criticism only accelerates the process.

[Duncan]

I regret my vote for Kerry too, and in retrospect I don't know why I did it. Nader wasn't on the ballot in my state (Indiana), or I probably would have voted for him. As I recall, when I stepped into the voting booth I felt a creeping horror that Bush would get a landslide, and decided that I would give my vote to Kerry just as a vote against Bush. I had no illusions about Kerry, certainly none about Bush, and none that Indiana's electoral votes wouldn't go to Dubya no matter how I voted. There was no really no alternative save refusing to cast a presidential vote at all, but I should have done that.

I voted for Nader in 1996 and 2000, and have no regrets about that. At the time I wrote this for the student newspaper:

http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=2008&comview=1

and I still stand by it. The hysteria of liberals since has kept me unrepentant.

[John Caruso]

Duncan: We've all pulled that "D" lever at one time or another. I voted for Clinton twice, I'm sad to say. There were literally millions of stories like yours in the 2000 election. Nader's poll numbers were running at around 5% just prior to the election, but he only received 2.7% of the vote--which means that nearly half of the people who intended to vote for him, over 2 million of them, got into the voting booth and just couldn't bring themselves to do it. I had progressive friends who did it right here in California, and when I asked why they'd switched--given that Gore had an absolute lock on the state, and that because of the Electoral College their vote couldn't possibly make a difference (all of which they knew full well)--they just said that the fear took over and they felt like they couldn't risk it.

I'm starting to wonder if there aren't a lot more people than we realize out there who regret their 2004 Democratic vote. I wish some of the prominent progressives who threw their support to Kerry in 2004 would recant just as publicly, to help open up the conversation and let people know that they're not alone in feeling that way.

Thanks for the article pointer, BTW; it was a very good read.

[Dan Coyle]

I like Alterman, really I do, but that statement is flat out insane.

[SteveB]

When I saw the film I thought about how fortunate Nader is in his critics. Really, you couldn't choose a less convincing and more repulsive pair than Alterman and Gitlin. At the time, I thought the filmmakers had stacked the deck, by finding the two most off-putting Nader critics possible, but now I'm not so sure. Who could they have put in place of Alterman/Gitlin that could have done a better job?

And I've had this argument about Nader so many times now that I don't even bother anymore. Fine, I now say, the war's my fault, Alito and Roberts are my fault, the Patriot Act and Guantanamo are my fault. But you know what? The damn Democrats still aren't getting my vote.

[John Caruso]

Actually they didn't stack the deck--they just couldn't get anyone else to go on record. Here's Amy Goodman interviewing one of the filmmakers:

AMY GOODMAN: And the different reactions you got from people you were interviewing?

HENRIETTE MANTEL: Well, we would have loved to get more reactions of people that were, you know, adamantly spreading rumors about Ralph and everything else, but Eric Alterman and Todd Gitlin, my hat’s off to them, because they would go on camera and voice their opinion opposing Ralph. A lot of people would not go on camera. They just wouldn't. Like, they would talk, you know, to us, but then when we turned on the camera, "Oh, I’m not going to be on camera."

Even so, they gave Alterman more screen time than anyone but Ralph himself. And I think you're right that nobody could have done a better job--because there really are no substantive critiques of Nader that I'm aware of, once you set aside the standard anti-democratic tantrums.