Reply #18: John Anderson, the Nader of 1980

[autorank]

Good for Obama. He can't control who endorses him so this is not a comment on Obama.

1980 Presidential Results

Reagan (R) 43,903,230
Carter (D) 35,480,115
Anderson (I) 5,719,850

Carter had little chance with Anderson's candidacy plus the Iran's illegal and vile behavior of
holding US hostages. Iran holding the hostages through election day was an obvious manipulation of
public opinion against Carter. There was no groundswell for Reagan.

Now here's all you need to know about Mr. John Anderson. After he got nearly 6.0 million votes,
independents/liberal Republicans, he needed a job. Guess who hired him:

The Hoover Institution of Stanford University, nice fat contract.

They've been a right wing apologist front for decades. Most recently:

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1479

Hoover became an ideas factory for George W. Bush before he was elected president. In the summer of
1999, Bush, then the governor of Texas and in the early stages of his presidential campaign, paid his
first visit to California as a candidate. At the time, Bush's campaign was at pains to portray him as
a moderate, "compassionate" conservative who would soften the hard edges of Republican economic and
social policy. But a few analysts looked beyond the rhetoric to take a closer look at the advisers who
provided the intellectual foundation of his campaign, and in the process saw signs that Bush was not
the post-ideological moderate he appeared to be. The Christian Science Monitor noted that one of the
biggest tipoffs was Bush's close association with the Hoover Institution, which had already "emerged
as the early core of Mr. Bush's brain trust."