This morning Ralph Nader entered the 2008 Presidential Election contest in the United States.

What are the implications for this? It's difficult to say. A lot of it depends on public reaction.

There's a significant part of the public that blames Ralph for Al Gore's loss in 2000. This part of the population usually ignores that 250,000 registered Democrats voted for George Bush in Florida that same year, or that tens of thousands of African Americans were illegally thrown off voting rolls that year, or that Gore failed to pick up his own state or Clinton's state, or that Supreme Court decision thing. No, Ralph becomes the culprit.

I think one reason why Nader is blamed so much for 2000 when actual illegal acts committed by Katherine Harris and her cohort Jeb Bush don't get nearly as much condemnation is because Ralph and the Greens are easy to blame. They aren't corporate-backed boardroom executives floating Presidential runs (which is essentialy what Gore, Kerry, Bush, Obama, McCain, and Clinton are). They're just some folks who thought they'd hold the mainstream to account by running themselves -- you know, anyone's allowed to run for President. That's called democracy.

So if the American people can actually open their minds enough to have an actual democratic race, with multiple competitive candidates -- not just the candidates who bend to the will of corporate power or who can amass half a billion dollar campaigns -- then maybe Nader will have a signficant impact.

He'll be able to be a majoritarian voice on single-payer healthcare, on ending Taft-Hartley, on securing full gay rights, on a balanced solution to Israel-Palestine, on pushing full public funding of all elections, to real solutions about corporate control of our democracy.

It's true there's a difference between McCain and Obama. But if you look at, say, Political Compass, they're still quite close in ideology. And there's certain things - like the War on Drugs - that they won't even touch. If this is a decent democracy, if all the people who have fought and died for this country mean anything at all, then those things should be allowed to be on the table in this election (and debated). Ralph has always been a powerful voice for justice and citizen-led democracy. Let's see to it at progressives that he is allowed to speak in this election, even if his primary purpose is to push the major candidates towards issues that all of us care about but which never seem to appear in our corporate contes- I mean, elections.