It felt like meeting someone from history
For my Newsnight film on the American election (see below), I flew up to Connecticut and drove through the beautiful golds, crimson and browns of New England in the autumn, to meet a historic figure - Ralph Nader, who is standing for the presidency for a third time.
He met us in his home town of Winstead, which still looks like an old-style American town, with a main street full of good old-fashioned private shops, and not wrecked by a soulless shopping mall. We caught up with him at the local high school, and then he took us into the local fix-it shop, the health food store, and his barber's, where even a famous presidential candidate has to wait in line to get his hair cut. Nader's aides told us that it was the first time he had ever allowed a TV team to film him on his home patch.
Ralph Nader, who is now 74, is known to many people these days as they man who ruined things for Al Gore (and won it for George W Bush) by standing in 2000, when he gained almost three million votes, and 2.74% of the national vote. In Florida, he won more than 97,000 votes, many times Al Gore's losing margin of 537. Nader insists this argument is "rubbish", and claims that his candidature in 2000 actually helped Gore, by pushing him to take up more popular, radical positions.
Nader is quick to point out that Time magazine has twice included him in their list of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century, not for his role in 2000, of course, but his work as a citizens' rights advocate, pushing through laws in the 1960s and 1970s on consumer issues, environmental protection and workers' rights. In 2006 a panel of historians recruited by Atlantic Monthly ranked Nader at number 96 in their 100 most influential Americans in history, just one ahead of Richard Nixon. Neither of the president Bushes, nor Clinton, made it into the historians' top hundred.
I'm Michael Crick, and I'm Newsnight's political editor. My guiding rule is that in any story there's usually something the politicians would prefer the world not to know. My job is to find that out.
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