'08 Spoiler Alert

He wants to be the Ralph Nader of 2008, but the fact that Bob Barr has already filled the position is not deterring him.

The Spoiler of 2000, who originally said he would run because he hates the Clintons, is now accusing Barack Obama of trying to "talk white." From anyone but today's loony Nader, that might be seen as racist, but it's hard to take umbrage at someone who has talked himself into the shadows of history but refuses to go quietly.

In what amounts to a political obituary, the Washington Post limns the pathetic figure Ralph Nader has become, noting that a biographer "searched for evidence of Nader's personal life and came up with nothing. Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, called Nader 'a rebel without a life.'"

Meanwhile, Bob Barr has taken up Ron Paul's mantle as the Libertarian scourge and is threatening to cause serious damage to the Republicans, perhaps doing to McCain in Georgia this year what Nader did back then to Al Gore in Florida.

Barr, a former House member who disappeared without trace, was in the spotlight briefly as the relentless Inspector Javert of the Clinton impeachment, who later filed a $30 million lawsuit against the former President, James Carville and Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt for causing him "emotional distress" in retaliation.

But this year he is hounding Republicans by getting on the ballot in 30 states, with petition drives under way in 20 others. In close races, he could bring McCain down.

This year, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have shown that almost anyone can run for president. Nader and Barr are proving you don't even have to be certifiably sane to do it.

Bloomberg's Kibitzer Candidacy

After teasing us for a year, Mike Bloomberg is putting his billion dollars back in his wallet and leaving a few platitudes on the plate instead.

In a New York Times OpEd titled "I'm Not Running for President, but...," New York's Mayor delivers a ringing concession speech for a presidential campaign that never started.

As he leaves the arena he didn't enter, Bloomberg chides the future nominees for being "afraid to level" with voters about global trade, global warming, immigration, improving schools and gun control.

"More of the same won’t do, on the economy or any other issue," he says. "We need innovative ideas, bold action and courageous leadership. That’s not just empty rhetoric, and the idea that we have the ability to solve our toughest problems isn’t some pie-in-the-sky dream."

But he stands ready, Bloomberg tells us, to help McCain and Obama or Clinton, "to push them forward, by using the means at my disposal to promote a real and honest debate."

In the event the Mayor has forgotten his ethnic roots, what he is proposing to be is a kibitzer, defined as "someone who looks on and offers unwanted, usually meddlesome advice to others."

But not entirely, Bloomberg warns us: "If a candidate takes an independent, nonpartisan approach--and embraces practical solutions that challenge party orthodoxy--I’ll join others in helping that candidate win the White House."

Does he mean Ralph Nader?

3972 Reasons for Nader Not to Run

John Roberts, Samuel Alito and US fatalities in Iraq head the list of what might have been avoided if America's crusader had stayed off the ballot in 2000 and not provided George W. Bush with the margins he needed to win the White House.

Now here he is again, on Meet the Press, puffing away at the importance of third-party candidates in pushing Democrats and Republicans toward ideological purity, pooh-poohing the complaint that he gave us a President who has tilted the Supreme Court away from what Nader's admirers believe and into a war that he and they deplore.

In declaring his candidacy yet again, Nader, who will be 74 this week, is in a dead heat with Ann Coulter for becoming this year's foremost example of Reverse Attention Deficit Disorder, the compulsive need to preen for TV cameras at any cost.

What they have in common is Hillary Clinton. Coulter claims she would support her rather than John McCain, and Nader would do anything to keep another Clinton out of the White House.

Of the two, Coulter is a more benign case, providing only passing amusement in her quest for attention. Nader is a self-deluded disgrace who might pose an actual danger of electing Bush's anointed successor if it were not for the comforting fact that he drew less than half of one percent of the vote in 2004.

Nader, Bloomberg in "David and Goliath"

Now that his second favorite candidate, John Edwards, has dropped out, Ralph Nader is feeling an irresistible urge to pick up the fallen standard and hurl himself once again into the breach.

Ironically, Nader's inner struggle is reported by Bloomberg.com, part of the business news empire that made New York's mayor a billionaire who is, albeit silently, having the same crisis of conscience about saving the nation with an Independent run.

Inverting their physical attributes, Nader and Bloomberg would be playing David and Goliath in a sideshow of the '08 electoral circus to prove that (a) corporate America is crushing its people or (b) only a corporate genius can straighten out the mess Bush is leaving behind.

"Look at the major areas of injustice, deprivation and solutions that are not being addressed by the major candidates," Nader tells a Bloomberg reporter while denying that his 97,488 votes in Florida elected George W. Bush who won the state by just 537 votes over Al Gore in 2000.

Calling him a spoiler, Nader says, "is basically saying that small candidates are second-class citizens."

If Nader takes his pathological hatred of the Clintons into the arena this time, he won't be traveling in even that much style if Bloomberg comes in, too. Billionaires always go first-class and don't leave much space for anyone else.

Dr. Paul Wants to Amputate

If you consulted Ron Paul as a doctor, you would be lucky to leave with all your limbs. The man is not an incrementalist. Cut out the income tax, he told Tim Russert on Meet the Press today, bring home our troops from everywhere and, with only a few caveats, Dr. Paul doesn't see much more value in the FBI, CIA, public schools and Social Security than tonsils or the appendix.

But the man who raised $19 million in two months is no crackpot. He has clearly tapped into a vein of voter discontent, and his opposition to US military and fiscal over-involvement all over the world deserves serious consideration.

Yet Paul's arguments come wrapped in a dogmatic personality with impatience about detail and with anyone who questions contradictions in his record. He insisted Russert was "confused" when asked about the apparent contradiction between Paul's theories and all the pork he collects for his district. "I vote against it," he said, "but that's the system."

Paul seems to find Mike Huckabee's sudden ascent galling and, while hedging his "fascism" response to the new front runner's commercial with the cross, complained about a general "softer fascism: loss of civil liberties, corporations running the show, big government in bed with big business. So you have the military industrial complex, you have the medical industrial complex, you have the financial industry, you have the communications industry. They go to Washington and spend hundreds of millions of dollars. That's where the control is. I call that a soft form of fascism, something that is very dangerous."

Ron Paul sounds like a right-leaning Ralph Nader, and it remains to be seen if, in the Republican primaries or as an independent candidate, he exerts as much influence on the outcome of next year's elections as Nader did in taking votes from Al Gore and electing Bush in 2000.

Ron Paul Money Bombs

In 2004, Howard Dean was an Internet meteor flashing briefly across the political sky. Ron Paul is beginning to look like a new planet.

Yesterday his supporters broke their own record by raising $6 million to celebrate the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Last month, on Guy Fawkes Day, they collected $4.3 million in 24 hours.

What's going on here? Howard Dean was a spontaneous expression of Americans turning against the war in Iraq. Ron Paul is an uprising against everything government does, prompting an explosion of money on the anniversaries of dumping ships' cargoes and trying to blow up legislative bodies.

Chief fundraiser for the Paul insurrection is a college dropout who subsists on junk food and has never voted but was so distressed by the Democratic Congress' failure to get US troops out of Iraq that he has put his digital know-how into backing the only Republican who wants to do it.

"I know my tax dollars are being used to kill people," Trevor Lyman says. "It makes me feel horrible."

As Ron Paul goes his eccentric libertarian way, there is no knowing what he will do with the money, aside from running commercials that may lift his Presidential candidacy into low double digits in some primaries.

What's clear is that the intensity of anger with the status quo this season is rising above Nader and Perot levels. Throwing money at Ron Paul is a more benign expression than heaving casks of tea or bombs, but where do the 21st century revolutionaries go from there?

Making Do With Mukasey

An old saying, "The perfect is the worst enemy of the good enough," comes to mind in the Senate struggle over the nomination of Michael Mukasey to replace Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General.

As the best choice we are likely to get from the Bush thugs who trashed the Justice Department, his confirmation would make more sense than holding it up with a prolonged debate over the legality of torture. That question can be settled by a Congressional vote to ban it.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, in a New York Times Op Ed today, points out, "There is virtually universal agreement, even from those who oppose Judge Mukasey, that he would do a good job in turning the department around."

Schumer adds: "Judge Mukasey’s refusal to state that waterboarding is illegal was unsatisfactory to me and many other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Congress is now considering--and I hope we will soon pass-- a law that would explicitly ban the use of waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques. And I am confident that Judge Mukasey would enforce that law."

As compromises go, this is far from the worst in recent memory. At the risk of re-opening old wounds, we might recall the purists who voted for Ralph Nader over Al Gore in 2000 and gave us George Bush and this mess, among so many others.

All at Sea in D.C. and Alaska

At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, Karl Rove’s aide, J. Scott Jennings, used a maritime metaphor in declining to answer questions:

"I hope that you can appreciate the difficulty of my situation," he said. "It makes Odysseus' voyage between Scylla and Charybdis seem like a pleasure cruise."

Very literary, but Sen. Pat Leahy, the Committee Chairman, was not charmed. "Mr. Jennings, I am not here to play games," he warned.

Jennings’ reference to a “pleasure cruise” may have been the final straw for Leahy’s frustration over not getting answers from the White House about the firing of the U.S. Attorneys.

But, while he and others in the political mainstream are sweltering in Washington, denizens of the Far Left and Hard Right are on actual pleasure cruises, enjoying temperate weather off the coast of Alaska.

Devotees of the Nation and the National Review are out there this week on separate but equal Holland America luxury ships, attending seminars and demonizing one another in first-class style at a cost topping out at $9489 for NR and $8657 for the Nation’s plebians.

Their schedules have been cunningly arranged to avert a possible Monitor-Merrimac kind of naval engagement, missing each other by a day in ports of calls such as Sitka, Juneau and Ketchikan.

Stars for the left-leaning sailors are Ralph Nader, actor-activist Richard Dreyfuss and former CBS news producer Mary Mapes, who was terminated after a to-do over a segment about George Bush’s National Guard service in 2004. Regaling the right are such charmers as John Bolton, Robert Bork and Dick Morris.

As they bloviate in cool comfort, no wonder that those like Leahy who are laboring in steamy Washington are getting a little testy. Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales and the whole Bush crew are still sailing along, untouched.

Bloomberg's Best Bet: Run as a Democrat

This weekend’s TV talkathon has been about New York’s Mayor leaving the Republican Party to run for President as an Independent. But as this politically dissonant year goes on, it may make more sense for Mike Bloomberg to go for the Democratic nomination.

Anyone willing to spend half a billion dollars on a campaign, as Bloomberg is, should not be eager to put a sizable portion of it into creating an organization and getting on the ballot in every state.

A lifelong Democrat, Bloomberg became a Republican for tactical reasons in 2001 to run for Mayor. Now he has changed his registration to “unaffiliated.”

For the past six years, the Mayor has been a Republican in name only. A leading Democratic political consultant said about him this week: “If you closed your eyes and you were told that someone was pro-public education, pro-choice, pro-immigration rights, pro-gun control, pro-civil rights, pro-gay rights and pro-women’s rights--you would be pretty happy if you were a Democrat.”

When that candidate has been called America’s “leading centrist” by George Will and potentially “the most efficient President” by media baron and fellow billionaire Rupert Murdoch, visions of a political realignment began to seem possible: the Democratic center freed from the stigma of “special interests” coupled with traditional pre-Bush Republicans who want to take back their party from the radical right allied with voters so disgusted with both parties that they call themselves Independent.

Two big but not insurmountable obstacles to the Democratic nomination are Hillary Clinton and the war in Iraq, and it may be their nexus that could open the door for Bloomberg.

She is still struggling to overcome her 2002 vote, seen by anti-war Democrats as a huge albatross. As Mayor of the nation’s most vulnerable city, Bloomberg has been less than ardent in supporting our involvement in Iraq and has begun to back away from it.

Two weeks ago, he told Google employees that America “is really in trouble.” “There’s the war, there is our relationships around the world,” Bloomberg said. “Our reputation has been hurt very badly in the last few years” and he criticized a “go-it-alone mentality” in an increasingly interconnected world.

Despite all the money and organization behind her, Hillary Clinton’s negatives will not disappear and, from here to November ’08, Democrats will be worrying about the Republicans’ glee at the prospect of running against her, no matter who they nominate.

Bloomberg’s lack of passion and charisma may be less than fatal to his chances for the Democratic nomination. Bill Clinton almost put the 1988 convention to sleep with his boring oratory before remaking himself as the anti-Bush four years later.

Hillary may be too late, Obama too early and John Edwards too insubstantial for ’08. Al Gore, who seems to have lost his taste for elective politics, might find Bloomberg more palatable than any of them in both substance and temperament to stand in for what he stands for.

Behind the scenes, the Mayor has kept his ties to the Democratic Leadership Council and other power centers of the party. If he doesn’t wait too long, he could get into that game and rake in all the chips.

If he can create something that passes for unity in his once-and-future party, Bloomberg would be in good shape for a head-to-head confrontation with Giuliani’s volatility, Romney’s emptiness (his Mormon faith might be more of an issue than the Mayor’s Jewish background) or Fred Thompson’s lack of experience in managing a corner grocery store, let alone the largest bureaucracy in the world.

To run as an Independent, Bloomberg would have to depend on support from the likes of Unity08, which is planning online voting to pick their candidate, not too promising for someone who wants to win not to run a feel-good campaign like Ralph Nader or Ross Perot.

There is precedent for party-switching by New York Mayors. John Lindsay was elected as a Republican in 1965, turned Democrat in 1971 and ran for President in his new party’s primaries a year later. He failed, but Bloomberg has much more going for him.

Last month, while being honored as one of Time’s 100 most influential people, the Mayor paid warm tribute to Red Auerbach, the legendary coach of the Boston Celtics, for knowing how to win with honest effort and without “trash talk.”

He was obviously thinking about more than basketball.

Ralph Nader's Finishing School

The phrase “Independent candidate” evokes a Pavlovian response from America’s perennial Presidential also-ran.

Ralph Nader pops up today to tell us Mike Bloomberg is interesting but unpredictable: "I really like the stand he took against smoking, but he goes along with corporate welfare in New York and tax-funded stadiums. So he is unfinished in that way."

In 2000, Nader finished Al Gore and gave us George Bush. Now he hints that, if Bloomberg is not up to the job, he may make himself available to finish off a Democratic candidate in ‘08, particularly one named Clinton.

"She is a political coward," Nader says. "She goes around pandering to powerful interest groups on the one hand and flattering general audiences on the other. She doesn't even have the minimal political fortitude of her husband."

The response from the Clinton camp: "His entry into the race, even to those who voted for him in 2000, would be just another vainglorious effort to promote himself at the expense of the best interests of the public. Ralph Nader is unsafe in any election."

That may be a bit harsh. Try “irrelevant.”