NEW YORK - It was, at first glimpse, your typical political fund-raiser in New York City. You had your celebrity guests, a famous venue, too many speeches, a confetti blizzard and even a sappy video biography of the party's nominee for the United States presidency. Supporters whooped and cheered and bravely dug into their pockets one more time.
Except that Saturday night at the Madison Square Garden was also not typical. The man of the hour was not called Al or George but Ralph.
He wore an ill-fitting suit and had the oratorical skills of your average history professor.
We are talking about that other candidate in the US presidential race, the one who was ejected from the audience of the first Gore-Bush encounter in Boston - because the powers that be, and therefore most of the media, deem him irrelevant.
But Ralph Nader, the head of the Green Party, begs to differ. And as he stood before a crowd of 16,000 in the Garden's main arena, he might for a heady moment have imagined that the White House was within his grasp.
It isn't, of course, because his remains a fringe campaign. But as such, it provides rare relief to the cautious and colourless tug-of-war staged every four years.
With his Old Labour style rhetoric about corporate greed and his grassroots activism, Nader attracts voters who want to be rebels.
Yet the temptation is there to take him more seriously. The neck-and-neck deadlock between Republicans and Democrats means Nader cannot be ignored.
Nader, whose name has been synonymous with consumer rights in America for three decades, has been getting up to 7 per cent in the polls. He could, in other words, make a difference.
Welcome to the politics of joy and justice, he told his disciples. We are building a historic, progressive, political movement in America; a movement for which November 7 is just one stopping place.
- INDEPENDENT
Ralph Nader whoops it up on the fringe of US elections
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.