So will we have Ralph Nader to kick around some more after all? Maybe, but some of us were hoping that we could forget, so allow me the conceit.
Can I say, "Thanks, but no thanks"?
The great American Scold has managed to get the biggest publicity bump of his 2008 presidential campaign by attacking Barack Obama for "talking white." I suspect that, now that Nader has figured out how to get this level of media attention, we will see and hear more of the same from him in the coming months.
But what Nader showed with his comments is that he, like many political operatives, activists, pundits, and journalists, fundamentally misunderstands the times that have produced Barack Obama. In the words of the great American philosopher Marvin Gaye, "things ain't what they used to be."
Nader, in a single stroke, managed to reveal his own irrelevance and that of a whole generation of people who are arguing about issues that, this election campaign has shown, are not especially important to the vast majority of Americans. "Talking white" is one of them. "White guilt" is another. "The ghetto" is a third.
Nader, in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News, offered this assessment of Obama:
There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American. Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We'll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards.
Half African-American? Who talks like that?
Nader is afflicted with that special kind of '60s myopia that allows him to see only his most deeply held beliefs as they developed in 1968. It's as if the last 40 years didn't happen. Does Barack Obama, as "half African-American," have a special responsibility to fix "economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead"? No!
Does the Democratic nominee have some special responsibility to address those issues? Yes!
Democrats care about these issues and want them fixed for themselves, their relatives, and the country.
But are they more important than Iraq? No. Are they more important than the state of the overall economy? No. More important than expanding health care for everybody? No. More important than $5-a-gallon gas? No.
Policy merits aside, it seems likely that Obama can't win if he chooses to focus only on the economic exploitation in the ghetto (ask John Edwards). That may seem to play right into Nader's argument that Obama is severely compromised because he wants to win, but the truth is that presidential elections are about talking to a very big country about a lot of issues, not simply to those niche voters who feel you most passionately.
Nader cannot accept that fact. He is incapable of moving beyond his own resentments about the imperfections in the system. This is why he saw Al Gore and George Bush as political equivalents and trashed them equally in 2000. The ensuing eight years have proven that moral high ground to be very shaky indeed.
So much has changed in the last eight years, but Nader hasn't. Nader describes an old, and admittedly lingering, problem, but he is resistant to all the evidence of progress.
Poverty in America is real, but the racial prism through which it has always been viewed is radically different today. The emergence of a black middle class has changed both the "ghetto" and the way America thinks about the "ghetto."
Likewise, Obama's problem with the "white working class" is supposed to be caused by lingering racism in America. But, while American racism is not in danger of extinction, we know that its most virulent strains are far less prevalent than they once were. Obama's chances of winning will not depend as much on race as is commonly believed. Obama's success thus far is evidence of how much the country has already changed.
There are people on both ends of the political spectrum, who will see some truth in what Nader says. I was on a panel last week with Shelby Steele, the conservative African American writer, who said that while he thought Nader had not been artful in expressing himself, "his point was well taken." Steele said he believed that Obama was indeed avoiding talking about black issues as a form of appeasement of white voters, on whose guilt his success has so far been based.
But I think that Nader sounds like a man whose time has passed him by and who fundamentally does not understand that Obama's success is a function of a generation of young people who have claimed him and this election as their own, and it has nothing to do with their guilt. It is just their time.
"Talking white," is a relic of a lost time. What we need is someone who can talk sense; it has timeless appeal.
For Nader, silence is an option
