Shut up, Ralph Nader!

I used to respect Ralph Nader.

I didn’t read his 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, in which he criticized American automakers for their safety record and lambasted the Chevrolet Corvair, the only American-made passenger car with a rear-mounted, air-cooled engine. (My grandma loved her copper-colored Corvair and pooh-poohed Nader’s criticism. A subsequent National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study found the car was no less safe than any other.) But I admired the guy for standing up to an entire industry and carving out a niche as a fearless advocate for consumers and the environment.

I knew one of “Nader’s Raiders” – as the activists who came to Washington in the late 1960s to help Nader investigate government corruption and pursue his agenda were called – and worked for or with Clean Water Action, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, Public Citizen, and other Nader-inspired organizations.

Nader’s warnings about the growing "imperialism" of multinational corporations and the dangerous convergence of corporate and government power have proven prescient. He spoke out against the Iraq war when doing so was still “unMerkan.” Although the guy’s amassed millions in stocks and mutual funds, he reportedly lives on $25,000/year and donates most of his earnings to the many nonprofits he helped create. His commitment to making the world a better place always seemed genuine to me.

But the Princeton and Harvard Law School graduate has become somewhat of a caricature of himself, an object of ridicule, in recent years and that’s too bad. How can we take someone seriously who runs for president more than my kids fight over who gets the last piece of cheesecake? (Nader ran in 1972, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008; he’s widely thought to have stolen enough votes from Al Gore in 2000 to help the Supremes send Dubya to the Oval Office.) You know you’ve jumped the shark when Jay Leno, the unfunniest man on television, can joke about you and get a laugh.

I don’t know the exact point at which I stopped digging him and started wishing he’d go away, but his latest effort – to recruit a real progressive to challenge Barack Obama in the 2012 Democratic primary – sure isn’t changing my mind. I agree with him that Obama has turned his back on his liberal base and its progressive agenda. (Nader points to the president’s “decision to bail out Wall Street's most profitable firms while failing to push for effective prosecution of the criminal behavior that triggered the recession, escalating the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan while simultaneously engaging in a unilateral war in Libya, his decision to extend the Bush era tax cuts, and his acquiescence to Republican extortion during the recent debt ceiling negotiations" as justification for his anti-Obama campaign.) But my complaints don’t receive the national media attention that Nader’s do and will, and that threatens to help the GOP in next year’s elections more than anything a middle-aged blogger from mid-Michigan could write.

The solution isn’t to replace Barack Obama with someone from the left. That won’t win elections. The solution is for the left to unite, hold our noses, reelect Obama and then bring him back from the right where he’s securely ensconced alongside his golfing buddy, John Boehner. No need to throw out the baby with the bathwater after less than one term.

If you want to tarnish what’s left of your legacy, Mr. Nader, that’s fine – but not at the expense of those who’ll surely suffer more under GOP rule, okay? With due respect to you, I still believe there’s a difference between (D) and (R).