And?

So Ralph Nader has announced he's running for president again. (Big surprise: Did anyone expect him to go on Meet the Press to say he wasn't running?)

I really don't care: I've said before that for very personal reasons I won't vote for him even if he gets the Green Party nomination (which I hope will go to Cynthia McKinney). I'll vote for other Greens, but not him. In any event, I fully expect his impact on the 2008 election to be even less than he had on the 2004 election, which was none. For that reason I can predict with reasonable confidence that this will be the only post in which I will mention him as a candidate (unless it's to gripe if he gets the GP nomination).

Still, it was interesting to see the

Democrats foam at the mouth, shudder, twitch violently, and otherwise go bonkers in response

to the announcement, just like I expected they would. The usual suspects were there, including TalkingPointsMemo, where Josh Marshall called Nader "Bush's chief enabler" and comments on a snide post were filled with lots of "fuck you"s and repetitions of the long-discredited notion that George Bush is Nader's fault.

At TalkLeft, it was that "MTP had no business putting Ralph Nader on. He is not newsworthy." (Which would seem to be disproved by the number of people talking about it.) According to comments, he "needs a dunce cap." He is, we were told, "hideously selfish - morally obtuse" and "certain to help Republicans cling to power." (That last from someone obviously unaware of the realities involved.)

Of course the armies of drooling partisans at Daily Kos wasted little time in developing their own party line, dishing out the argument that Nader is Harold Stassen.

In comments at Crooks & Liars, he was an "asshat," "DESPICABLE," "delusional," a "joke" dealing in "blatant hypocrisy and lies," a "narcissistic buffoon" who has "the blood of tens of thousands on his hands."

And another mouth-breathing partisan, John Aravosis at AmericaBlog, calls him "fool" and "the herpes of presidential candidates" (which is at least original) while pulling out a quote from Mike Huckabee (who Aravosis otherwise considers a complete moron but in this case is apparently a political savant) saying that Nader takes votes from Dems so GOPpers like him.

At other sites, terms like "insect," "insane," a "crackpot" who is "trying to get Republicans elected" were frequent, along with, as always happens whenever Nader's name is mentioned in these circles, the insistence that everything bad that has happened over the last seven years, every blessed little thing right down to that annoying hangnail on your ring finger and the heartbreak of psoriasis, are Ralph Nader's fault. Nothing to do with Bush. Nothing to do with incompetent Democratic campaigns, nothing to do with the lapdog Democrats in Congress. Nothing to do with biased media. Nader's fault. All of it.

To be as fair as I can to this outpouring of paranoia, this hailstorm of hatred, there were dissenting voices, some who defended Nader against the 2000 canard and a few who dared to say something to the effect of "right on, Ralph." But they were few and far between in the chorus of condemnation, a pose maintained ever since 2000 for the specific purpose of giving the Democrats someone, anyone, to blame other than their own incompetent, invertebrate selves.

I will say I found one valid criticism of Nader, found at the C&L post linked above, where Nicole Belle asked:

Where have you been, Ralph? What have you done in the last eight years to help make third parties more viable and allow them a voice on the national stage? How is showing up more than a year into presidential politicking with just a few months left helpful to the validity of third parties?

Making independents more meaningful isn’t an eleventh hour appearance on a talking head show. It takes years of sustained effort and commitment....

I don't think the criticism is entirely justified in that Nader has not been idle the past seven years, although he has slowed down the past couple. (In fact in 2004, Democrats complained he had spent too much of the preceding four years criticizing Democrats - without, of course, mentioning that what he had been criticizing them for was not being aggressive enough in opposing the GOPpers.) Yet it remains true that Nader has not been contributing to building a party and actually seems more of the mind that an electoral opposition can be built without party-building, which strikes me as quite odd.

Finally, it is a fact that sometimes the best way a given someone can help build a movement - including a third party - is by being the figurehead, the public face that draws the attention. Any third party can use such a person. However, for the American left that person is no longer Ralph Nader.

One Footnote: One of the better responses to Nader's announcement came from Barack Obama, who

said today during a visit at the Ohio State University Medical Center that he wasn’t terribly concerned about the prospect of a Nader campaign. “I think the job of the Democratic Party is to be so compelling that a few percentage [points] of the vote going to another candidate is not going to make any difference.”

It was obviously a prepared answer since he immediately followed up with the classic political move of taking shots at an opponent while praising them, but he does make the central point that I have argued all along: It is the Democrats' job to win those votes, not Nader's job to hand them over; the burden is not on Nader to be silent but on the Democrats to speak more persuasively.

Another Footnote: DKos was not the only place Nader was equated with Harold Stassen as a candidate who had become a joke, so I wanted to say a few words in Stassen's defense.

He was elected three times to be governor of Minnesota, a position he resigned in 1943 to join the Navy as an officer - an action which undercut his political base, costing him dearly later on. He was a delegate to the founding convention of the United Nations, he served in the Eisenhower administration, and was president of the University of Pennsylvania for five years. As president of the American Baptist Convention in 1963, he joined the 1963 civil rights March on Washington.

He was one of those old-fashioned liberal Republicans, a moderate when the term actually meant something. When he ran for the GOP nomination in 1964 (after not having run since 1952) it was specifically to offer resistance to the emerging Goldwater wing of the party and his later runs were an increasingly futile effort to raise the banner of that old-style moderation in the increasingly-reactionary face of the GOP.

I also have a more personal attachment: I ran for Congress three times. During my third race, a reporter referred to me as "our district's Harold Stassen," which she defined as "the guy who keeps running, he makes these great speeches, everybody nods and applauds - and then votes for somebody else."