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Without turning to a biography or sitting at an elder’s knee, readers of a certain age will know what the name Ralph Nader used to mean.

It meant trouble for corporate avarice, corporate chicanery and corporate irresponsibility. When Nader got on the case, the board rooms of America’s major manufacturers and peddlers had a headache on their hands. He not only knew how to raise hell and hang on; he was wildly effective. Nader and his network of young idealists called Nader’s Raiders made a positive difference for the common good.

But, as is often the case, praise for the man did not take in account the mood of the times as a factor in the hero’s effectiveness. Riding the wave of the 1960s, the most sweeping social revolution of the modern era -- women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, the popularization of anti-militarism, the environmental movement, the anti-poverty movement, the diminution of religion in civic affairs -- Naderism was helped by the winds of change as much as it helped change the winds.

But the 2000 presidential campaign reminded us of that old adage, “all good things must come to an end.” It was then that Nader -- once a man ahead of his time -- had fallen far behind the times, lost his touch and misread the public temperature. There would be no appreciable difference between a George W. Bush presidency and an Al Gore presidency, he cautioned then.

Even before we had accumulated the woeful proof to the contrary that these past eight years have yielded, we knew the “brilliant” Ralph Nader was off his rocker on that one. As if to underscore the severity of his delusion, Nader not only refused to take responsibility for damaging Gore’s presidential chances and for having been patently, pathetically and demonstrably wrong in his comparison of Bush and Gore, but he ran again, as if answering some popular pleading, which, of course, no one else discerned.

Now, this career anti-establishmentarian is at it again. Ralph Nader, once the defender of the little man, has become the Don Quixote of American presidential politics. Only, this time, he won’t be able to measure up even as a spoiler.

Yet, he can still make news and, it must be said, can still give pause.

Why, just the other day, he stirred the pot with a swing at Barack Obama that seemed odd even in the context of Nader’s history.

Obama, he said, is trying to “talk white” -- a term that has a particular meaning in the black community, though apparently not what Nader had in mind.

According to Nader, the presumptive Democratic nominee is “coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it’s corporate or whether it’s simply oligarchic.”

“I haven’t heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos,” Nader said of Obama in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News. “Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What’s keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white?”

Source : http://www.progress-index.com/