We would all like to accentuate the positive, especially when you consider our presidential candidates. It would appear that we will end up with either Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney running.

We will also need to learn how to deal with the negatives. One of those is the perception that a Nader candidacy will be less effefctive this year than before. I heard that from George Stephanopoulos this morning on GMA where he said that the announcement would be the highpoint of the campaign. You find the same sentiment around the blogs, like this comment from Bob Morris at Politics in the Zeros.

Nader got 0.3% of the vote in 2004, just three-tenths of one percent.He will almost certainly do even more dismally this year.

Now Morris was a Green from S. California, but he has moved away. Still, he claims to have supported Nader in the past.

Even Tom Tommorrow at This Modern World is less than enthused, and he too was a previous Naderite.

But if the point of these third-party runs is to inject that critique into mainstream discourse — well, we’re way past the point of diminishing returns, and actually deep into some sort of anti-matter universe, in which information is literally sucked out of people’s brains at the first mention of his name. In the way that Dan Rather’s report on George Bush going AWOL turned into a discussion about Dan Rather, the only debate another Nader candidacy is going to inspire is a debate about Nader himself, and I just don’t see the point.

The emphasis here is that the world has changed but Nader has not. Tom actually found Nader's crtique of current politics to be "spot on" but that no one is listening on that channel.

That is pretty much the point that I made with two posts at California Greening concerning Nader's run. In one, I said that a purely anti-corporate message would not play well in this country in this particular year. When he announced his exploratory commitee, I went on to explain that he had a broader set of issue, but that all the media gave him credit for was the anti-corporate or anti-duopoly messages. They just are not hearing the rest of it.

The most devastating critique comes from anonymous at 23/6. A video, it is very obviously going to have impact just because it was done with humor.

If Tom is right, and it appears that he probably is, then to be successful the Nader campaign is going to have to find a way to make this into a positive statement about what the future will be. It can not be done in anger. It must talk of possibilities that will accrue to this society if we get it right.  If it is only just about how bad the current situation is, then the prognostications of Bob Morris and George Stephanopoulos are going to be "spot on."

That would be a shame because Nader and the Green Agenda need to be heard.

Technorati Tags: Ralph Nader Cynthia McKinney Expectations