Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Ralph Nader has a need ... or rather, he has two needs. The first is a need for attention. Specifically, he needs the kind of attention that you can only get from running for president. After receiving that kind of gaze, it's hard to go back to being a mere columnist. The second need that Ralph Nader appears to have, is for there to be the kind of president in office in Washington -- since he, of course, cannot win the presidency, he can only prevent some other candidate from winning -- whom he can rail against and blame for the ills he will one day run for president to reverse.

Given that, it is highly likely that Ralph Nader will attempt to feed his twin needs again in 2008 -- running for president in order to rev up his ego, and in order to prevent a Democrat from assuming office, if he can, the better to maintain his relevancy. That's because if a Republican wins, Ralph Nader can continue to rail against -- and to raise money on -- the evils of war, pollution and corporate greed. Those have become the hallmarks of the Republican Party, and at the end of the day, the best friend the Republican Party has, is Ralph Nader.

And then there are Nader's more prurient interests. Back in 2000, Salon.com described Nader's financial holdings this way:

Lefties like to bash Gore for being a tool of corporate America. More specifically, Gore incurs their wrath because the trust of his mother, Pauline, owns stock in Occidental Petroleum which, according to Nader running mate Winona LaDuke, "is working to exploit oil reserves under U'wa land in Colombia." The U'wa are an indigenous tribe in Colombia, and became the champions of an anti-Gore rally at the Democratic National Convention.

"As I listen to the vice president espouse his views on campaign finance reform, I look at his investment portfolio and have to ask how that might influence public policy," LaDuke has said, slamming Gore erroneously for "own[ing] substantial stock in Occidental Oil Co."

If LaDuke is looking for Occidental stockholders to criticize, she might want to look a little closer to home. In the financial disclosure form Nader filed on June 14, the Green Party presidential candidate revealed that he owns between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of shares in the Fidelity Magellan Fund. The fund controls 4,321,400 shares of Occidental Petroleum stock.
The Rainforest Action Network -- whose members no doubt include myriad Nader Raiders -- has slammed Fidelity for "investing in genocide," and called for the fund to divest its Occidental holdings.

"The Occidental projects are so beyond the pale about what's reasonable and moral in this modern era," says Patrick Reinsborough, grass-roots coordinator for the Rainforest Action Network. Reinsborough says that his group has been primarily targeting Gore and Fidelity Investments in general, Fidelity Magellan being part of the Fidelity Investments mutual funds network, as well as the one with the largest quantity of Occidental stock. "We have called upon Ralph Nader -- as we would call upon any citizen -- to either divest from Fidelity or to participate in shareholder activism," Reinsborough says. "Gore has much more long-standing links to Occidental Petroleum."

But even if Fidelity were to divest its holdings in Occidental, it holds shares in so many companies Nader has crusaded against, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Nader's participation in the fund is supremely hypocritical. The fund, for example, owns stock in the Halliburton Company, where George W. Bush's running mate, Dick Cheney, recently worked as president and COO. The fund has investments in supremely un-p.c. clothiers the Gap and the Limited, both of which have been the target of rocks by World Trade Organization protesters, as well as Wal-Mart, the slayer of mom-and-pop stores from coast to coast.

Nader spokeswoman Laura Jones says that only the candidate himself can answer questions about his personal investments. Nader could not be reached for comment.

In a June interview with the Washington Post about his millionaire earnings -- much of which he has donated to his public interest groups -- Nader said the stocks he chose were "the most neutral-type companies ... No. 1, they're not monopolists and No. 2, they don't produce land mines, napalm, weapons."

But this is not true. The Fidelity Magellan fund owns 777,080 shares of Raytheon, a major missile manufacturer. And this isn't the only example of his rhetoric not matching up with his financial investments.

"I'm quite aware of how the arms race is driven by corporate demands for contracts, whether it's General Dynamics or Lockheed Martin," Nader told the Progressive in April. "They drive it through Congress. They drive it by hiring Pentagon officials in the Washington military industrial complex, as Eisenhower phrased it." The Fidelity Magellan fund owns 2,041,800 shares of General Dynamics.

Nader's holdings also include "2,908,600 shares of Boeing, 24,753,870 shares of British Petroleum-Amoco and 28,751,268 shares of Exxon-Mobil [through the Magellan fund]. The fund also owns stock in Shell, Sunoco, Texaco and Chevron -- on whose board Bush advisor Condoleezza Rice serves" as well as "15,266,900 shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb," which Nader has slammed for charging 20 times the manufacturing costs for its drugs. Nice portfolio if you can get it.

So if -- or when -- Nader runs, from whom can he expect support? Only the farthest extreme of the left, which detests Hillary Clinton and considers her to be just another corporate sycophant who refuses to apologize for her vote to authorize force against Iraq. But I suspect that even on the left, the pragmatists will far out-number the Nader nihilists, especially if a particularly authoritarian Republican candidate makes the finals (Rudy Giuliani comes to mind, but then again, these days, so does Fred Thompson...)

Nader can have very little impact nationally, and he will likely continue to decline in terms of electoral support, from his 2.7% in 2000 to the 1 percent or so he pulled four years later. But even if he gets a few tenths of a percent, the question isn't how much he gets, it's where he gets it. If it's in key swing states like Pennsylvania or Florida (though the latter is less relevant this year, in my opinion, given the primacy of the Western states) he could do just enough damage to give himself a fresh Republican president to rail against, and a few million more pennies in his stock portfolio.