Andrew Golis

Suprise suprise, ladies and gentlemen, Ralph Nader’s candidacy is being propped up by republican activists! That’s right, they’ve decided that since no one new will vote for their candidate, they’ll simply get a lot of people to not vote for their opponent. Now wonder my generation is cynical about politics. According to the DailyKos, a bias but fairly trustworthy source, over 90% of the signatures that he recieved to get on to the Arizona ballot were from registered Republicans. My guess would be that those people won’t end up voting for him:

The petition collectors were working for a GOP outfit, and were collecting signatures for two high-profile ballot initiatives. One is the “Protect Arizona Now” initiative, which is an anti-immigrant effort. The other is an attempt to repeal Arizona’s landmark Clean Elections Bill which provides for public financing of political campaigns.

The actual Nader petition did its best to fudge its purpose. The petitioners only said they were collecting signatures for an “independent candidate”. The words “RALPH NADER” were buried in the petition page in 9pt font.

So to make this perfectly clear — Nader’s petition effort piggybacked on both a xenophobic anti-immigrant effort, and an effort to roll back the state’s public financing of elections. This is how low Nader has sunk. Is it any wonder his negatives are in the 70s and 80s?

This says two things to me: the Republicans continue to be brilliantly strategic and absolutely without scrupples. The question is: how do you beat someone like that and stay within the rules? Can you? It’s like how Dean described his reasoning for opting out of public finance (this is the quote to the best of my memory):

How can you walk into a boxing ring ready to fit if the other guys got a machine gun?

How indeed.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2004 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.