Matt Gonzalez/Ralph Nader at UCSB
Gonzalez and Nader are putting in long hours, typically with three events per day, plus travel between sites. They will be in Santa Cruz at the Civic auditorium tomorrow Sept 29, and in San Francisco and Oakland on the 30th.
While receiving even less media coverage than his previous three runs for office (and he stated that the campaign wouldn't have happened this year if Edwards had received the nomination, due to his good positions on corporate power), Nader's volunteers got him on the ballot in 45 states. As Cynthia McKinney has the national green party nomination, Nader/Gonzalez are often on independent or other party tickets in the various states. For myself, I'm not sure if I'll vote for McKinney, Nader or Obama yet. I've voted Nader several times.
Matt Gonzalez gave a motivating introduction about the importance of being able to vote for the positions and government that you really want.
Nader is a great speaker, and was pretty much his typical self during this speech. It occurred to me that he has to give fresh-sounding speeches at perhaps 3 locations every day, and be ready to field a broad variety questions. So he looked remarkably energetic given this schedule. Their key issues for this campaign are getting both army and corporations out of Iraq, fighting corporate control (of course), single payer health insurance, blocking nuclear energy in favor of solar and other alternative energy forms, not bailing out banks, fairness in palestinian territories, and changing sentencing for nonviolent drug crimes. While everyone is very familiar with the argument that voting for a third party could put us at risk of getting a horrible candidate such as Palin, I think that the positions which Matt and Ralph put forth really evoke a stronger feeling of inspiration than the democratic vs. republican debates.
Below are a list of clips of Gonzalez and Nader speaking. There was a man with a 'fail' sign in the audience, but he was a liberal mumbling about how this isn't the right way to go. Nader said that many voters from McCain switch support to him. A heckler who was listening to an earpiece went on about socialism and christianity at length. He was saying that Nader's positions are all 'based on emotion', while he is rational, which is rather absurd. At one point, Ralph got a glazed expression during a question and said Obama, when he was responding about Osama bin Laden, but he was fast enough on the uptake to quickly make up a joke about it.
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