Ralph Nader -- the outsider who could swing votes away from Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore -- vowed Sunday to stay in the running despite pleas from Democrats that he abandon the election race.
At a campaign rally in Washington Sunday, Nader refused to bow to abort his presidential run in toss-up states where his candidacy could cause US Vice President Gore to lose to Republican candidate Texas Governor George W. Bush.
Nader spoke for more than an hour Sunday to nearly 12,000 people in Washington's MCI Center stadium, who paid 10 dollars each to hear the consumer advocate's message that American liberals want an alternative to the centrist Gore.
"The Democratic Party tells labor and minorities 'you have nowhere else to go,'" Nader told an enthusiastic crowd of mostly young people.
"What a choice - between the bad and the worse. This country deserves the best," he said.
Nader is trying to garner the required five percent of the popular vote that would entitle the Green Party to claim millions of dollars in federal election subsidies for the 2004 campaign.
Polls show Nader's candidacy could tip more than half a dozen states into Bush's win-column on election day Tuesday.
"He's bringing the vote back to the progressive side," said Radhika Sainath, 22, a political science student at the University of California at San Diego, who attended the rally in Washington. "A vote for Nader is a vote for democracy in the long run."
Margot Braswell of Bethesda, Maryland brought her 13-year-old daughter and a friend to the Washington rally.
"A vote for Nader is a vote for the future," she said.
Signs urging the crowd to "Vote Your Conscience" filled the arena, as celebrity guest speakers including singer Patti Smith and filmmaker Michael Moore urged supporters not to waver in their support for Nader.
Actor Danny Glover told the crowd that "a vote for Nader means that we are not willing to play the game of the lesser of two evils."
The Gore campaign admitted Sunday that the threat from Nader was real in key battleground states, particularly in the western United States.
"There's no question, if you have a candidate who doesn't have a chance of winning getting four or five or six percent, that may make the difference in some states," Daley said -- WASHINGTON (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
