Transcript: Nader's Concession Speech

Nov. 7 -- GREEN PARTY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE RALPH NADER: Thank you very much. Thank you very much, all of you. We really did go. Our last campaign appearance was in Portland, Maine, at 1:30 this morning.

(APPLAUSE)

And the place was rocking. They were really moving up there,having gone from New York to Boston to Durham, University of NewHampshire, and Maine.

Well, first let me thank all the people who worked on thiscampaign. I mean, what we know for sure is that we’re coming out ofthis Election Day with the third-largest party in America, replacingthe Reform Party, and going on …

(APPLAUSE)

… and building a long-term, progressive, reform movement.That’s really quite an achievement. It took lots of people all overthe country to do that. It took great staff working day and nighthere in Washington.

And above all, it took a commitment by people to no longer settlefor the least of the worst or the lesser of two evils, where at theend of the day you’re stuck with worse and evil.

(APPLAUSE)

Climbing …

AUDIENCE MEMBER: We love you, Ralph!

(LAUGHTER)

NADER: Trying to challenge the entrenched two-party system, thisis really a lot what the campaign was about.

The two parties rigged the statutory barriers to get onthe ballot for starters. And they command most of the money, byraising corrupt soft money and corporate money and PAC money, all ofwhich we rejected. All of which we rejected because we want to set anexample of what is necessary for real reform of our corrupt campaignfinance system.

(APPLAUSE)

And then, of course — and of course you’re up against — most of the media coverage is on the horse race between the two horses …

(LAUGHTER)

… that are tired and hollow and have forgotten even to eattheir oats in order to reinvigorate themselves.

And then, the two parties control the debate commission, which isreally a private company control. And they exclude third-partycandidates.

So, really, it’s quite an amazing and varied system of riggingthe election for the two major parties against fresh political starts,which is why the two political parties can’t regenerate themselves,because they’re excluding all kinds of competition and insteadimitating themselves — protective imitation.

As the Republican and Democratic parties take more money from thesame sources, they morph into one corporate party with two heads, andpresume that it really matters for the State Department or DefenseDepartment or Treasury Department or Departments of Commerce, Labor,Agriculture or the health and safety regulatory agencies — whether itreally matters whether Gore or Bush are in the White House, becausethey don’t make the decisions. The decisions are made by the peoplewe trip over Washington, D.C., every day: 22,000 corporate lobbyistsand 9,000 political action committees pumping money into bothRepublican and Democratic coffers.

This is what we expected was going to happen, and we tookthem on. And the important thing here is that we have reached a take-off stage in the Green Party and that this is the last time that thetwo parties in a national election will have the monopoly power toexclude significant third party competitors from the debates, becausewe are going to break the monopoly of the debate commission.