Ralph Nader is once again running for president. This time, it's without an entourage or campaign plane. At 70, he’s no longer the boy wonder leading his "Nader’s Raiders," but he’s definitely a player.
"The two parties are proxies for the corporate government here in Washington," says Nader.
Democrats are worried that he will pull votes from John Kerry. Kerry Democrats call Nader a "spoiler," and Howard Dean is about to debate him on public radio. "He may have the effect again of re-electing George Bush," said Dean recently on MSNBC's "Hardball."
Many of Nader's former allies blame him for what happened four years ago and fear it will happen again. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., says, "I told Mr. Nader that a vote for Ralph Nader is really a vote for George Bush."
They say if not for Nader's 97,000 votes in Florida alone, where Al Gore lost by only 537 votes, Gore would likely be president.
In fact, every recent poll shows him hurting Kerry more than Bush. "For every vote that he gets from President Bush he's taking two away from John Kerry," says Democratic pollster Peter Hart.
Nader himself disagrees: "We have to get away from this horse race concept because politics is too important to the American people to be trivialized in this way."
But Republicans clearly think he helps their candidate. Top Bush fund-raisers like billionaire Richard Egan are secretly bankrolling Nader. And in Oregon, Citizens for a Sound Economy, a conservative group, is asking members to help get Nader on the ballot, saying, "Nader could peel away a lot of Kerry support in Oregon."
Nader got knocked off the ballot in Arizona, but he only has to get on the ballot in a few states like Ohio to once again influence a tight race.
