From Politico:
Ralph Nader is convinced that Barack Obama will win reelection in 2012, but that won’t stop him from trying to organize a slate of Democrats in the coming months to challenge the president in party primaries next year.
Nader told POLITICO on Wednesday that he is working on bringing together about half a dozen presidential candidates who could “dramatically expand a robust discussion within the Democratic Party and among progressive voters across the country.” Each would focus on a specific issue where the far left says Obama hasn’t done enough, including the environment, labor and health care…
So, the Nader theory is that Obama has a mortal lock on being re-elected, so Progressives had better launch a primary challenge in order to get Obama back on the left wing straight and narrow? This is either Nader being monumentally dumb, or incredibly slick. Dumb if Nader is thinking that a more leftist Obama will be electable in 2012; smart if its a way to get leftists thinking of a primary challenge as a means of derailing Obama’s re-election effort, lest an Obama loss crush liberalism for a generation.
Hard to tell what it is with Nader – he’s such a bizarre mixture of honest and dishonest; elitist and populist; screwball and level headed that it is hard to tell which is coming through at the moment. I’ll take it that Nader, like a lot of hard core leftists, is upset at Obama’s course and wants to find a way to express it in the 2012 election. Whatever odd ball reason Nader – or any other leftist – comes up with for doing this is immaterial…what is important, for us, is the evidence it gives of trouble over in liberal land.
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