Major League Chutzpah Of The Week

Mr. Ralph Nader — in a good position to speak on such issues, having earned 0% of the votes of African American women in 2000 while successfully achieving his goal of handing the election to George W. Bush and all — lectures Barack Obama for “talking white.” Uh-huh.

I can’t resist quoting Mike Tomasky:

Third, and most of all, I kept noticing in 2000 that most of the people who lectured me on how corrupt Gore was and how Nader was the courageous choice were people for whom the outcome of the election, on a personal level, didn’t really matter. Some were young people, whose idealism is to be admired but who were by and large demographically insulated from some of the harsher realities of American life. But most were older, white, left bourgeoisie, tenured and cocooned in the carapace of self-righteous satisfaction, whose own lives wouldn’t change much one way or the other no matter which party won. In fact, if anything, Bush’s elevation was good for them personally, because they wouldn’t suffer directly from federal budget cuts and were probably in a bracket that benefited from his tax cuts (as was I, but at least I had the sense to vote against my own interests). Among people who were directly affected by which candidate won, Nader was seen as the ornament of frippery that he was. I promise you, you could not have gone to the corner of Lenox Avenue and 145th Street in October of 2000 and found four Nader voters. And at that intersection and the many others in America like it, by my lights, the moral case for Nader crumbles to dust.