Even if Kerry wins, he's still a loser

I'm voting for Ralph Nader in a swing state come November, and it has nothing to do with disliking the two-party (a.k.a. "lesser-of-two-evils") system. Before I heard Nader speak this summer, I wasn't going to vote at all, despite my mother's threats that she would throw me out of the house if I didn't exercise the single civic responsibility expected of me in return for living in this great empire – I mean, nation. Now at least there's a candidate I believe in.

I had an eighth-grade history teacher who claimed that people who don't vote have no right to complain about their government. While I don't maintain that people should be called to account for every bad decision their elected candidate makes, I do think they should be vocally dismayed if said politician makes a piss-poor decision clearly not in anyone's best interest other than his own. When you elect someone to serve in public office, you should believe he's going to try to do a good job, and what's more – that he's going to try to do the right thing. You should even expect him to be relatively honest, and I mean relative to your mom, not relative to the other candidates. Does anyone actually believe John Kerry genuinely wants to do some good?

Many Kerry supporters get angry at me when I tell them I'm voting for Nader and then ask why. I tell them I think he's honest. He's a good deal smarter and more articulate than Kerry or Bush. Finally, Nader's platform resonates with me on a level beyond political pragmatism. Some day I'll be proud to tell my children I voted for Ralph in '04, even if they're born in nuclear fallout shelters after the axis of evil launches an attack following Bush's (second fraudulent) election.

If you don't know why I'm such a big Nader fan, maybe you didn't hear him speak in McCosh last week. I don't think on-campus coverage of the event nearly did Nader's message justice, and it (unfairly) typed him as an unsuccessful third-party candidate running solely to make a point about the two-party system instead of corporate corruption or political bigotry. There's much more to Nader than this incidental candidacy; he's one of the few public figures we have left who dares to spout any of idealism.

When he came to Princeton, Nader didn't shy away from criticisms that apply to us as much as to the rest of the country. He asked why 3,000 deaths in a war we started gets all the press when 50,000 people die each year in work-related accidents. He asked why 50 percent of government expenditures are for the military. He asked why so much of the presidential debates, from which he was unfairly excluded, were really just to be an opportunity for Kerry and Bush to find similarities.

Many of us at Princeton ask ourselves what we should do with our lives and how to find meaning. Nader didn't only advise us to develop a public philosophy or demand something more than flashy media coverage from politics. He pointed out that we are already the luckiest people in the world, though in great danger of never falling out of the ruling class and into the real world. He spoke about the danger of trivialization, something that goes on so often at Princeton that we barely recognize it. Sure we laugh at "Verbatim" in the 'Nass,' but really, we've all heard and earnestly participated in conversations that aren't all that different. When you start discussing how difficult your Tuesdays are because you don't have time for lunch before your seminar on social justice in the developing world, perhaps your priorities are a little messed up. Perhaps you've trivialized yourself.

The point of my headline is that in the unlikely event that John Kerry wins (and it is unlikely, if New Jersey is even remotely in danger of being a swing state, as I hear it is), he's still a loser because he's completely trivial. He's done nothing but sell himself as the anti-Bush, and he's done a piss-poor job of even that. How about something better? Aileen Nielsen is an anthropology major from Las Vegas, Nev. She can be reached at anielsen@princeton.edu.