Reality Check in the Race for President

Two Monday nights ago, Ralph Nader spoke at the Institute of Politics (IOP). The environment was contentious. The audience was asking tough questions, Nader was issuing sharp responses, and interruptions back and forth were common.

I’ve been on both sides of the debate. During the last election, I worked on the Nader campaign in New Jersey, planning strategy, organizing support and mobilizing voters. After eight years of Clinton and moderate Democratic policies, it really did seem like Al Gore and George W. Bush were similar, and that the two political parties were colliding together ideologically at an ever more rapid rate. The fact that there was a presidential candidate with views I shared, namely Ralph Nader, only made the deal sweeter.

This time around, however, I was at the IOP in attendance with the Harvard College Democrats, because I have come to believe that Bush would be a disaster for the country. Many of the structural inadequacies in the American party system that enable third party influence have not been remedied since the last election. These include the lack of run-off voting, the lack of proportional representation and the lack of fusion (which allows the use of different party electoral votes for the same candidate). As a whole, these structural inadequacies make any vote for a leftist third party candidate one that takes away from much-needed votes for the Democrats. This was a point underscored by Professor Sunshine Hillygus, who introduced Nader at the IOP, when she commented that her empirical research illustrated that most of the voters who voted for Nader would have otherwise voted for Gore in 2000.

This election is different from the last because of the dire consequences we face if the Republicans win again. The Bush presidency has been terrible in every respect, from an unjustified preemptive invasion of Iraq that has alienated the world, to the erosion of our civil liberties under the Patriot Act, to a widening gap between rich and poor accelerated by tax cuts. As beneficial as Nader could be for this country, it’s not worth chancing another Bush win just to elect a third-party candidate.

Another factor that has kept Nader from remaining a viable candidate for me is the way he has failed to show loyalty to his own party, the Greens, who have nominated another candidate in this election. Nader is now running as both an independent and as a Reform Party member, a party that has nominated such notorious anti-government conservatives as Jessie Ventura and Ross Perot. Nader effectively abandoned his own party after 2000.

And I cannot help but find unreasonable some of Nader’s policies that I was once able to support. Nader’s advocacy of an immediate pull out from Iraq would throw the country into chaos; it also does not makes sense to have a policy that opposes globalization, a political reality that cannot be stopped.

It’s not that the discussion promoted by Nader is not a good one to have; one especially keen topic is whether Harvard Law students are indeed, as one third year student and Nader himself put it, “third-year tools.” But as a former Nader supporter, I can think of no better use of my vote than to support a realistic chance for the presidency: supporting John Kerry. I hope that other former Nader supporters like myself come around as well, and realize that third party politics are untenable due to the way the American system is built, that the Bush presidency has been a disaster worth defeating the second time around, that Nader himself has been inconsistent in his loyalties and that John Kerry is a better choice this time around.

Noah Hertz-Bunzl ’08 lives in Holworthy. He is an active Harvard College Democrat.