Ralph's Race Card

I had hoped to get through the entire campaign without writing about Ralph Nader.

I mean, if Nader wants to keep running for president until he keels over, that's his right. But I'm not sure why we in the media need to keep covering him at this point.

He was a tireless consumer advocate who essentially created the modern movement. He was a factor in 2000, as Democrats who believe he cost Al Gore the election are well aware. But he has become a vanity candidate, heeding the call of nothing so much as his own desire for the spotlight. And his rhetoric about there not being a dime's worth of difference between the two parties rings particularly hollow this year, when the choice between the R and D nominees is unusually stark.

It's a shame that he's ending his career being perceived as a cranky Harold Stassen, but it's most definitely his choice.

I can tell you from personal experience, though, that Nader is quite media savvy. He knows he's getting little attention, he knows why, and he knows how to remedy that: by throwing a stink bomb. One with a pungency that the MSM would find impossible to ignore.

He did just that yesterday, in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News:

"Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader accused Sen. Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic Party nominee, of downplaying poverty issues, trying to 'talk white' and appealing to 'white guilt' during his run for the White House.

"Nader, a thorn in the Democratic Party's side since the 2000 presidential election, has taken various shots at Obama in recent days while ramping up his latest independent run for president . . .

"There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American,' Nader said. 'Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We'll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards.' "

What can you say about that? If there's ever been an African-American candidate who went out of his way not to frame his message in racial terms, not to appeal to white guilt, it's Barack.

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs told MSNBC the comments were "reprehensible and basically delusional," but I wonder whether he should have just ignored them.

Later, a reporter asked Obama about Nader's blast at a news conference. "Ralph Nader is trying to get attention," the senator said. "He's become a perennial political candidate . . . There's no better way to get some traction than to make an inflammatory statement like he made."