ROGER SIMON COLUMN
MARCH 7, 2005
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - - During his long career, Ralph Nader not only became one of America's leading consumer advocates, but something of a cultural icon: He hosted "Saturday Night Live" and appeared on "Sesame Street."
Although some large corporations despised him, he was respected and even revered by many.
And then he ran for president.
Even though his third-party bid in 2000 did not do particularly well from an historical perspective (he got only 2.74 percent of the popular vote), it did, many believe, make George W. Bush president.
Nader received 97,488 votes in Florida or 180 times the difference between Bush and Al Gore. And Nader stated, both in his book "Crashing the Party," and also on his website: "In the year 2000, exit polls reported that 25% of my voters would have voted for Bush, 38% would have voted for Gore and the rest would not have voted at all."
Nader ran again in 2004, but was not a factor in any state and got only 0.4 percent of the vote.
He recently came to Harvard's Institute of Politics, where I am hiding out for a semester, and spoke to my weekly study group. He was frank, challenging and surprised me very much when he told a personal anecdote or two (he is an intensely private individual.)
He began by telling the students: "You will really not get anything out of your Harvard education, unless you develop a sense of social indignation."
Nader recalled how, as a student at Princeton in the early Fifties, he noticed dead and dying birds all over campus after the school had sprayed DDT on the grounds.
Nader took one of the dead birds to the school newspaper and told them what he had noticed. The newspaper was not interested.
Nader recalled how the editor he talked to had his feet up on his desk and languidly told Nader that Princeton "had the smartest people in the world" working there and obviously would not use DDT unless it was completely safe.
"This," Nader told the students, "proves you can be bright, but not have the curiosity to ask questions."
Nader, who was a good student, went on graduate from Harvard Law School, but he told the students, "When I got out of Princeton and Harvard, I felt cheated. What the hell did I learn? Don't you go through your four years of university without a passion to correct some social injustice."
When I asked Nader where he got his own sense of social injustice, he told a story from his childhood in Connecticut: He was a young boy and heard his father complain how a rabbit was eating the family garden "to shreds."
So young Ralph waited for that rabbit, spotted it, grabbed a rock and took off after it. The rabbit froze and Nader stood over it with the rock. "And then I walked away," Nader said. "To this day, I can't stand cruelty."
He spent most of the 90 minutes he spent with the students answering their questions and talking about serious issues.
So I made my final question this one: "What does Ralph Nader do for fun?"
"If you love what you do, it's fun," he said. But he did admit to some normal human activities like "talking with friends, going to dinner and the movies."
"I also like to walk in the woods," he said.
Ralph Nader? Who knew?