The president is 'averse to conflict with corporate power,' Nader wrote in a recent op-ed. Nader: Pressure Obama with primary

Ralph Nader is convinced that Barack Obama will win reelection in 2012, but that won’t stop him from trying to organize a slate of Democrats in the coming months to challenge the president in party primaries next year.

Nader told POLITICO on Wednesday that he is working on bringing together about half a dozen presidential candidates who could “dramatically expand a robust discussion within the Democratic Party and among progressive voters across the country.” Each would focus on a specific issue where the far left says Obama hasn’t done enough, including the environment, labor and health care.


Nader, who has run for president five times as an independent or third party candidate — including his 2000 run on the Green ticket, which some Democrats say cost Al Gore the election — said that for next year, he believes an ideologically based, multi-candidate primary challenge would be the best way to pull Obama to the left ahead of the second term he believes Republicans will not be able to stop.

In an op-ed published Wednesday morning by Bloomberg News, Nader laid out the argument that Obama will be reelected due to weakness and confusion in the Republican field and because he’s kowtowed to corporations and others who can help him win a second term. “Obama is averse to conflict with corporate power and disarmingly expedient in compromising with Republicans, leaving the latter to argue largely among themselves,” he wrote.

Obama is “really in a very, very powerful position” to win reelection, Nader told POLITICO, and the slate of candidates wouldn’t be meant to give Obama a serious challenge for the Democratic nomination, but instead to “structurally pull him in the opposite direction” than he’s taken since his 2008 campaign.

If there was a group of people from the president’s own party geared up to debate him in Iowa and New Hampshire, “it is harder for him to say no,” Nader said. “His strategists can say, ‘Don’t fight it, Barack; use it, revel in it; you’re good on your feet.”

Nader suggested that Jim Hightower, a liberal commentator and a co-chairman of his 2000 presidential campaign, could be one candidate but didn’t offer other names. The ideal candidates, he said, would be people who have a history of progressive positions and who have specific knowledge or credibility in a certain policy area.

But Nader, a registered independent, wouldn’t be one of them, he said, since all the candidates would be dedicated Democrats who could benefit from party infrastructure. “This isn’t like a third-party or independent candidacy,” he said. “This is different; it’s simple: They’re inside the party, they can certainly raise enough money for legal assistance filling out forms, they support Obama, but want him to keep his 2008 promises.”

Just because he won’t be running doesn’t mean Nader’s planning to vote for the president himself.

“I’d never vote for him,” he said. “I will never vote for anybody who has a terrible record like that, who’s done what he’s done for Wall Street and turned his back on the people who need him.”

So, who will Nader vote for? A candidate from the Green Party or another progressive group. But that’s as far as he would go. “I never indicate who I vote for,” he said. “Unless I’m running.”