Ralph Nader Announces Bid for Presidency

February 25, 2008

(Long Island, N.Y.) Political activist Ralph Nader who will turn 74 years old this Wednesday announced his bid for the Oval Office, his fifth try since he first attempted to run for the Presidency in 1992 as an Independent candidate.

His announcement drew jeers from democrats who blamed him for Al Gore’s defeat in the 2000 elections against Bush and dismissed his candidacy as “delusional”. NY Sen. Hilary Rodham Clinton said “Obviously, it’s not helpful to whomever our Democratic nominee is. But it’s a free country, it’s just his passing fancy being his fifth time.”

Nader appeared in NBC’s meet the press to announce his candidacy this year and relegated most of his jabs to the Democrats in saying, “You take that framework of people feeling locked out, shut out, marginalized, disrespected,” he said. “You go from Iraq, to Palestine/Israel, from Enron to Wall Street, from Katrina to the bungling of the Bush administration, to the complicity of the Democrats in not stopping him on the war, stopping him on the tax cuts.”

Ralph Nader was born on February 27, 1934 in Connecticut; both of his parents were Lebanese immigrants into the US. He graduated from Princeton University in the year 1955 and finished Law School at Harvard in 1958. Nader created the NGO group Public Citizen which currently has over 140,000 members nationwide in 1971 to police government activities. He first ran for US presidency in 1992 and followed that defeat in 1996 and 2000 as the candidate for the reform party. In 2004, he ran as an independent and received only 0.2% of the total votes in the country.

Leading Democratic Party candidate Barrack Obama said of Nader’s latest show, “He thought that there was no difference between Al Gore and George Bush and eight years later I think people realize that Ralph did not know what he was talking about,” While Republican candidate former Arkansas Gov. John McCain welcomed Nader’s candidacy in saying, “I think it would probably pull votes away from the Democrats, not the Republicans.”

Posted by News LI Editor · Edited by Brianna - Filed Under Politics