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From the NewsMax.com Staff
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For the story behind the story...
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Thursday, June 10, 2004 5:10 p.m. EDT
Nader Seeking Support of
Conservatives?
Independent presidential contender Ralph Nader is looking to bag a whole new constituency come November: conservatives.
He's not kidding. The leftist-greenie-consumer envirocrat tells Pat Buchanan in the June 21 issue of Buchanan's "American Conservative" magazine he thinks conservatives who are being "taken for granted by corporate Republicans" could find comfort in a Nader ticket.
He admits conservatives won't "change their minds on
certain issues that we disagree on." But, he says, there are "issues where we have common positions" so much so that conservatives could punch a ballot for Nader this fall.
"Here are the issues. One, conservatives are furious with the Bush regime because of the fantastic deficits as far as the eye can see. That was a betrayal of Bush's positions, and it was a reversal of what Bush found when he came to Washington," Nader says.
He adds that conservatives are also upset because:
They don't want "their tax dollars going to corporate
welfare kings because that undermines market competition and is a wasted use of their taxes."
They "are upset about the sovereignty-shredding WTO and NAFTA. I wish they had helped us more when we tried to stop them in Congress because, with a modest conservative push, we would have defeated NAFTA. If there was no NAFTA, there wouldn't have been a WTO."
Conservatives are also disillusioned by "a self-styled conservative president who is encouraging the shipment of whole industries and jobs to a despotic Communist regime in China."
He says conservatives are for "law and order against corporate crime, fraud and abuse, and they are not satisfied that the Bush administration has done enough."
They dislike "the Patriot Act, which they view as big government, privacy-invading, snooping, and excessive surveillance. They are not inaccurate in that respect."
There are two other things conservatives don't like about the Bush administration, Nader added.
One is the "No Child Left Behind" education legislation, which he called a "stupidly conceived" piece of federal regulation.
Two, conservatives are upset that Bush, a "born-again Christian," hasn't done anything about "corporate pornography and violence directed at children," as well as "separating children from their parents," which undermines parental authority.
"If you add all of those up, you should have a conservative rebellion against the giant corporation in the White House masquerading as a human being named George W. Bush," Nader said, comparing the administration's Republican values to an abandonment of true progressive principles by "corporate Democrats."
"I noticed this a long time ago," Nader told Buchanan. "I once said to Bill Bennett, 'Would you agree that corporatism is on a collision course with conservative values?' and he said, Yes."
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