Turnabout is fair play. Ralph Nader’s parents were Arabs, Maronites from Lebanon, and taught him Arab as well as English. That’s the same heritage as Jerusalem-born Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated Robert Kennedy in 1968 for RFK’s support of Israel and who Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz recently described as giving the United States our first taste of Middle Eastern terrorism. So by Nader’s logic, Nader should stop talking about protecting American consumers and spend his campaign candidly talking about the plight of the downtrodden in the Middle East.
But if Ralph Nader is right, the Obama campaign might reconsider the limits of a strategy of appealing just to whites in the power class and liberal intelligentsia. That leaves out a large section of white middle America that doesn’t feel any personal guilt to the past sins of a power structure from which they are not descended, and who may be living in socio-economic circumstances that suggest no special racial advantage. That may well explain why Barack Obama has spent this past month clinging in the polls to a narrow lead and having the same sort of trouble breaking though to majority numbers that was predicted for Hillary Clinton.
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