Nader's Senate prospects hit snag with Dodd's retirement
By MARIA RECIO
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- What's up with Ralph Nader?
The three-time presidential candidate and consumer crusader, mostly under the political radar while hustling a new book of fiction, also has been quietly thinking about doing something completely different: running for the U.S. Senate.
The intriguing prospect of running against embattled Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., in his home state this year has hit a snag, however. Dodd made the surprise announcement Wednesday that he'll be retiring, leaving the race open to a strong Democrat, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.
That has Nader, 75, known for his "spoiler" role in the 2000 presidential election, re-thinking his chances.
"The attraction is a three-way race," Nader said in a telephone interview. His voice raspy from a cold, Nader - "I never get sick" - spoke from his home in Washington. "It's less likely to have a three-way race with such a strong candidate."
Blumenthal, who's held the attorney general position since he was first elected in 1990, has a reputation for pursuing consumer and environmental causes.
Dodd was a more inviting target for Nader, who's among the critics of the chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee for his handling of the financial crisis and for benefiting from a favorable mortgage from scandal-ridden Countrywide Financial Corp.
Nader was looking at a contest as the third option between a weakened Dodd and a Republican opponent; among the candidates is Linda McMahon, former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.
And what, pray tell, would St Ralph running against Chris Dodd accomplish besides getting an asshole Republican elected?
And getting another asshole Republican elected to the US Senate would get the peasants to rise up how, St. Ralph?
Well, gee, St. Ralph, how'd you like the Bush years? And the Clinton years post-1994, those were great weren't they, St. Ralph?
In some ways I can understand the concept of making things worse before they get better. I've even said myself that these white, suburban fucks making $70,000 a year and less who vote Republican, because Republicans cut the social safety net out from under niggers, spics and all other lazy Democratic welfare dependents, deserve to get a taste of their own medicine when the economy goes tits up. But would that really make these guys more amiable to a more socialist agenda or merely drive them into even more virulent fascism? Well from what I've seen in the past thirty years or so the lower income white collar classes of Suburbia USA are growing increasing fascist, witness the teabagger movement.
My biggest complain with St. Ralph and his ilk of the IPL is that while their criticism of the system is correct they only offer mealymouthed solutions like, people got to get organized, fight the system, buy local, act global and so on, and nothing changes.
But what really sticks in my craw about the leading lights of the American IPL like St. Ralph is that most are members in good standing of the coordinator class with the financial wherewithal to withstand only the most severe of economic downturns. And like their opposites on the reactionary right, leaders of the IPL are for the most part products of the nation's leading institutions of higher learning. Quoting from "Can We Rescue the Republic Before the Dark Politics Take Over?" by Kirk Nielson, posted at Alternet.org, December 25, 2009,"...Harvard, Yale, Princeton and most elite schools "do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question and think." Elite universities are in the business of producing "hordes of competent systems managers" not critical thinkers. And there is the crux of the dilemma of what ails the United States.
Politics is firmly in the hands of one, and only one, socio-economic class, the coordinator, or system manager, class. My short hand for the difference between establishment Democrats and Republicans is simple: Democrats are lawyers, Republicans are insurance salesmen. That may seem overly simplistic but all one need do to verify it is scan the biographies of US Congressman and Senators.
The great genius of the coordinator class since the end of World War II was to create the illusion that the United States was a truly classless society, as opposed to the faux classless societies of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, where all its citizens had a chance to move up the economic ladder.It wasn't true fifty years ago and it is even less true now.
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