Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader doesn't have the biggest problem of most third- and fourth-party candidates: name recognition. Since the mid-1960s, when he burst on the national scene with his book on dangerous automobiles, "Unsafe At Any Speed," Nader has been one of the nation's best known consumer advocates. The founder of Public Citizen, Nader is running a shoestring campaign. He is not accepting campaign contributions and deliberately has distanced himself from organizers of the Green Party, to avoid violating campaign finance restrictions on coordinated expenditures. Nader, in effect, has lent his famous name to the Greens in hopes party organizers can build their party faster because of it. Nader's key issue is corporate power over the nation's political institutions and the economy, and he is equally disgusted with the Republicans and Democrats. Nader calls them "the Rep-Dem Party, which is essentially a corporate party with two heads wearing different makeup." Neither of the major party candidates, he says, are talking about issues like the concentration of power in the health and telecommunications industries, or the corrupting influence of big money in politics. Nader said his goal is to strengthen democracy, "from serious campaign reform to the tools of democracy that workers, consumers, taxpayers, and voter citizens and shareholders need to have. They've lost control over their own country." Nader doesn't expect to be president. The purpose of his campaign, he said, "is to build a progressive movement and broaden the agenda, not any numerical vote count."

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