Word: naderism
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...Nader's working habits are admittedly unorthodox, but most of the bizarre components of the Ralph Nader Lone Crusader myth are obviously the offspring of bureaucratic imaginations gone beserk. One element that is genuine, however, is Nader's reputation for putting on a good show. His victims have learned that Nader has an astounding knack of attracting publicity and using the press. He consistently loads his public statements to contain the right mixture of documentation and verbal flamboyance (in the McGovern testimony, for instance, hot dogs with a high fat content became "fatfurters-American's deadliest missiles"). In his increasingly...
...WHEN NADER came to Harvard one week ago, he didn't come to put on one of his shock shows. He did throw in a few pungent illustrations-"specialists say they wouldn't be surprised at all if 12,000 people are electrocuted every year because of unsafe hospital wiring"-but the thrust of the speech was different. What Nader has realized is that his effective life span as a reformer is limited. Someday he will get tired or wear out, suffer public embarrassment or simply not be able to get into the newspapers any longer...
...that happened now-as Nader must know very well-most of his projects would probably flounder. Although he has recently set up a fledgling institute in Washington to carry on his kind of work, the effort is still uncertain enough that most of its life depends on Ralph Nader's personal force. The shift from one individual crusader to wider, institutionalized reform isn't easy, but Nader knows that there's only so much one famous crusader can do. And so his Washington institute-with the lumbering title "Center for the Study of Responsive Law"-and his summer student projects...
...specific proposals Nader suggested were not really startling. To spread the kind of public-interest work he has done on a few industries. Nader urged the students to start in on immediately available targets, like local governments and corporations. To keep the work going, he said that groups of professional students should promise to give some portion of their future earnings to support their classmates doing public interest projects...
What was more fascinating in Nader's appearance was the elaborate appeal he developed to entice students into "reform" efforts. For the theory that has given Nader the most troubling attack in the last year has not been the General Motors charge that he is out to destroy capitalist America. Rather, it has been the needling plaint of college students that Nader is too concerned with patching up the minor flaws of corporate, capitalist, bureaucratic America. Why not get out there and change the whole system...