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Resigned to his exclusion from participating, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader on Tuesday asked the Commission on Presidential Debates for a seat in the audience instead. “In a spirit of fairness, since you won’t allow us in the debates or release the secret polls that you rely on to figure out which candidates meet your threshold of 15 percent national support, I would like to ask that you allow me, and the three other third-party presidential candidates who are on the majority of state ballots, the common courtesy to at least have a seat at the debates among the audience,” Nader said in a letter to Janet Brown, the commission’s executive director. Nader, who was criticized by some Democrats in 2000 for taking votes that might have gone to Al Gore in the presidential election, lamented the commission’s use of polls to determine which candidates are allowed to participate in the debate. He argued that most polls at this point don’t mention his candidacy by name and that he does better when the name “Nader” is included in a survey. “It is an accepted rule of thumb in polling to go from the general to the specific, not the other way around. As evidence of this, in polls that mention me by name in the primary question, such as the Sept. 24 Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, I get 5 percent support nationally,” Nader wrote. “This is still far from the 15 percent threshold that your considerably inflated criteria requires, but it would be rather disingenuous bordering on fraudulent to base a criteria on a threshold in polls, which you don't even bother to admit may not even be polling the candidates other than those of the Republican and Democratic parties that created and control the [commission].” |
