A question for Ralph Nader

This week’s

Village Voice, a New York based liberal-left journal, features the following advertisement by the Committee for New Political Options about the state of the independent political movement. I helped put this ad together and thought WorldNetDaily readers would find it of interest.

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Q: If tens of millions of Americans have voted independent since 1992, why is Ralph Nader polling only 5 percent?

A: Because the American left won’t let him reach out to those ordinary independents.

In 1992, 20 million people voted for Ross Perot and put independent politics on the map. A new populist movement was born, but the establishment left wouldn’t go anywhere near it. It wasn’t politically correct. It wasn’t pure.

That movement continued to grow. Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota. Polls showed that 30-40 percent of the American people despised the corruption of the two-party system and considered themselves independents. It wasn’t about Ross Perot. It was about the American people shaking up the system.

Still, the left was aloof from these independents. It supported the Democrats. Meanwhile, right-winger Pat Buchanan came in to take over the Reform Party and try to destroy the movement. Then the left decided it was finally time to get into independent politics. But for the left, going independent meant rejecting what the American people had built and instead, setting up their own “clean” version of it.

Sadly, Nader — who is outspoken against two-party corporate corruption — has bought into the left’s own brand of corruption: political correctness and elitism.

Nader turned down overtures from independent progressives with a strong connection to the ordinary independents, including the black independent Lenora B. Fulani and the gay independent Jim Mangia. Nader’s elitism was why the Independence Party of New York, the state’s largest minor party with 200,000 members, gave its presidential line to the active coalition builder, Dr. John Hagelin and his vice presidential running mate Nat Goldhaber. And Nader’s bigshot attitude didn’t stop there. While properly deploring his exclusion from the presidential debates, Nader refused to participate in one with the other independents sponsored by Gov. Ventura.

Nader may, nonetheless, succeed in getting 5 percent and thereby creating a new minor party eligible for funding in 2004. We hope he does. But it doesn’t take Albert Einstein to figure out that the Perot movement’s 20 percent and the Nader movement’s 5 percent together equal 25 percent, the number required to create a new major party, on par with the Republicans and Democrats.

Hey Ralph! You didn’t invent independent politics! Now you and the left are trying to grab it for yourselves, rather than including those who created it in the first place — the American people!

Ralph, 30 million American independents can’t be ignored!