Photo courtesy of National Press Club
I got a call from Matt Gonzalez this morning and he wasn’t happy about my post yesterday on his decision to run for vice president, which wasn’t surprising. But I was surprised to hear him sound so wounded and to say that my tone “was almost like a personal animosity.”
Displaying such thin skin is an inauspicious way to begin a presidential campaign, particularly one in which they’re arguing for the right to compete on the same playing field as the heavily scrutinized Democratic and Republican nominees. Ralph Nader was going to run anyway, Gonzalez said, and “if I’m his running mate then we’ll be talking about electoral reform.”
Less than a half-hour after our conversation, Gonzalez and Nader appeared on KQED’s Forum, in which the host brought up my criticisms, to which Gonzalez answered, “That particular journalist needs a basic civics lesson.” Nader also used the “civics lesson” barb against other critics.
Nobody is questioning their right to run, and I don’t dispute the need for electoral reforms that would chip away at the two-party hold on power. But Civics 101 also teaches that in electoral politics, it’s not enough to be right. You still must find a way to coalesce majority support behind your ideas, and at this point in history, a Nader-Gonzalez campaign might just be counterproductive to that goal.