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It was hard to picture [Ralph Nader] shaking hands with a holiday crowd at Coney Island, or riding a white horse around the ring of a Montana rodeo, but I could imagine him handing out copies of the Constitution to automobile workers in Detroit, and as the plane to new York climbed into a steep turn over the Potomac, the sight of the Lincoln Memorial in the lovely evening light reminded me that a democratic republic knows no higher rank or title than that of citizen. The media prefer celebrities, who come and go like soup cans or summer moths, unthreatening and ephemeral. Cheaply produced and easily replaced, made to the measure of our own everyday weakness, celebrities ask nothing of us except a round of applause. Like President Clinton, they let us off the hook. Nader sets the hook on the sharp points of obligation to a higher regard for our own intelligence and self-worth. Less interested in the counting of votes than in the lesson of freedom, he mounts his campaign on the proposition that the party of things-as-they-are depends for its continued survival on the party of things-as-they-might-become.
-- Lewis Lapham
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