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Ralph Nader wrote Bush, Obama hundreds of letters, they never wrote back
Consumer advocate and former presidential hopeful Ralph Nader has collected more than 100 letters he sent to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama over 15 years for a new book titled Return to Sender. In the book, Nader writes that he had hoped the lost art of letter-writing might have helped in “inaugurating a new tradition of presidential replies [to] enrich deliberative democracy.”
Unfortunately, as the title suggests, the correspondence was almost entirely one-sided. “With very few exceptions,” he writes, “I received no response from anyone on staff, nor even an acknowledgement of receipt.”
The Washington Post highlighted many excerpts from the book, which range from incredibly perceptive and pointed analysis of policy issues, to bizarre role-playing exercises and downright rude characterizations of the very people he is messaging. The whole thing seems so perfectly Nader — or at least the public’s perception of Nader. It’s easy to imagine him alone, hunched over a desk or cup of coffee at a diner, writing out hundreds of pieces of correspondence that basically amount to one long conversation with himself, silently uttering under his breath “ooh, you got him good with that one, Ralph,” whenever he crafts a real choice zinger. Maybe a little bewildered and chagrined but never dejected by the fact that, no matter how intelligent or increasingly weird his soliloquies become, nobody seems to be paying attention.
Here are some of the more brusque examples.
Dear President Bush,
You have been a weak president, despite your strutting and barking, when it comes to doing the right things for the American people within the Constitution and its rule of law. This trait is now in bold relief over the Israeli government’s escalating war crimes pulverizing the defenseless people and country of Lebanon.
— July 17, 2006
Dear President Obama,
Little did your school boy chums in Hawaii know, watching you race up and down the basketball court, how prescient they were when they nicknamed you “Barry O’Bomber.”
Little did your fellow Harvard Law Review editors, who elected you to lead that venerable journal, ever imagine that you could be a president who chronically violates the Constitution, federal statutes, international treaties and the separation of powers at depths equal to or beyond the George W. Bush regime.
— Sept. 6, 2013
Frustrated with Bush’s handling of FEMA trailers in Hope, Arkansas, after Hurricane Katrina, Nader imagines a dialogue between former President Clinton and G.W. in a letter addressed to the latter:
GWB: Hey Bill, how about you and me hopping on Air Force One pronto and heading down to your old stomping grounds around Hope. Let’s show we can break up that bureaucratic logjam and leave Hope with 10,000 fewer trailers. I’m the president, you were the president. You were the Governor of Arkansas. Hometown boy comes home to do good. What a great photo opportunity for bipartisanship?
WJC: Not a bad idea, George. But the bureaucracy starts in Washington, D.C., so there will have to be some bureaucracy-busting advance work done to make the visit a success. Then there is the matter of getting floodplain rules waived and all the other state and local rules which Washington has not confronted for months.
GWB: Hmm, Bill, you’ve been doing your homework.
WJC: Not really, George, just reading the newspapers.
GWB: OK, OK, I get the snide remark. But I’ve been running a war for freedom. . . . ”
— March 3, 2006
In a decidedly weirder bit of role-playing, Nader writes from the perspective of E. coli bacteria, concluding with a great bit of rhyming (who knew bacteria were poetic?):
Dear President Obama,
My name is E.coli O104:H4. I am being detained in a German laboratory in Bavaria, charged with being “a highly virulent strain of bacteria.” . . . I cannot help but harm innocent humans, and I am very sad about this. I want to redeem myself, so I am sending this life-saving message straight from my Petri dish to you. . . .
Your associates are obsessed with possible bacteriological warfare by your human enemies. Yet you are hardly doing anything on the ongoing silent violence of my indiscriminate brethren.
You and your predecessor George W. Bush made many speeches about fighting terrorism by humans. Have you made a major speech about us? . . .
You may wonder how tiny bacterial me, probably not even harboring a virus, can send you such a letter. . . . Whatever the how does it really matter to the need to act now?
E-cologically yours,
E.coli O104:H4 (for now)
— June 3, 2011
And finally, growing increasingly salty that his letters have received no response, he begins to sound like, well, like one of those guys who writes letters:
In previous correspondence I have taken note of the remarkably consistent practice by the White House of neither responding (whether by you or your staff) to substantive letters on pending or proposed public policies nor even providing the courtesy of acknowledging receipt. in 2009, I had a phone conversation with Mr. Mike Kelleher, who was in charge of handling letters to the president. He recognized that you did not have any policy about when and if you or the White House staff would respond or even acknowledge the receipt of substantive letters. He said that he would get back to me were such a policy established. He never did.
Source: www.deathandtaxesmag.com