Ralph Nader Calls for a Primary Challenge to Obama

Five-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader thinks that President Obama needs to experience a primary challenge in 2012 to revert him back to the change Americans voted for in 2008.

In an interview with Politico, the former Green Party presidential candidate said that he is working to recruit approximately six prospective presidential candidates who could “dramatically expand a robust discussion within the Democratic Party and among progressive voters across the country.” He is calling for each of them to target one issue in which liberals believe the president hasn’t delivered based on campaign promises, such as the environment, labor and health care. They won’t be people who could pose a serious threat to a second Obama term, he told the publication, but their candidacies would serve to “structurally pull him in the opposite direction,” that he’s taken since winning office in 2008.

But in a Bloomberg News op-ed published on Wednesday, Nader, who last ran for president in 2008, outlined several reasons why he believes that Obama will win a second term. In it he wrote that the field of potential Republican candidates is going to promote policies considered by voters to be so harsh that “they might as well be on the Democratic National Committee’s payroll.” He also said that swing voters and conservative Democrats will be turned off by Republican governors’ attacks on unions and that the Republicans’ failure to create jobs will work in the president’s favor.

“Obama can look forward to four more years in 2012,” Nader predicts, but that doesn’t mean the president will get his vote.

“I’d never vote for him,” he told Politico. “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.”