Ralph Nader will be conspicuously absent from the first Presidential debate in Boston next week. The debate commissars say a guy who's polling well under 5 percent doesn't belong in the center ring. It doesn't help that Nader's people can show you 60 percent of America wants him on that podium. It matters even less that they claim he's contributed 85 percent of the substance of a campaign that's been Oprah- ized and degraded by kisses and earth tones and late night TV jokes.
On Tuesday night Ralph Nader will be another guy in the TV debate audience: This hour, though, is our chance to hear what he would have said to Al Gore and George W. Bush: about workers rights and environmental protection in a world economy, about preventive diplomacy, health care, corporate welfare, drug wars, the death penalty, and dirty movies, too. What he'd tell them. What you'd ask him. We're talking with the Green Party Candidate Ralph Nader, this hour on the Connection. (Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
