AMY GOODMAN: Yet the person who points that out, Ralph Nader, you and Howard Zinn, and others, to many people's surprise signed a letter and said “Don’t vote for him.�

NOAM CHOMSKY: We didn’t say that. Actually I’m a little surprised by the surprise. I took exactly the position I took in 2000, namely, the election is a marginal affair, it should not distract us from the serious work of changing the society, and the culture and the institutions, creating a democratic culture. That’s what you work on. You can’t ignore the election. It’s there. But it’s designed as a method of essentially marginalizing the population. There’s a huge propaganda campaign to get people to focus on these personalized extravaganzas, and make them think ‘That’s politics.� Well, it isn’t. That’s a marginal part of politics, and here, a very marginal part. So the main thing is keep on with your work. You can’t ignore it. You should spend five minutes, maybe, thinking about what you should do. In that five minute, you should recognize there is some difference between the two groups contending for power, and one of them happens to be really extremist, and very dangerous, and it's already caused plenty of trouble and could cause plenty more. The other is bad, but less extremist and less dangerous. So in that five minutes that you devote to the topic, you should come to the rational conclusion, if it's a swing state, keep the worst guys out. If it's another state, do what you feel like. It’s the same thing I said in 2000 during the five minutes of time I spent on it.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader said at least a demand should have been attached to this.

NOAM CHOMSKY: To what? To who? A demand to who? I mean, I don't address George Bush. I don't make demands of him. Donald Rumsfeld is not my audience. I don't talk to Sandy Berger.

AMY GOODMAN: To John Kerry, if you were throwing your support –

NOAM CHOMSKY: I don’t talk to John Kerry. I mean, he is not my audience, or your audience, or our audience. We can't make demands on them. Some people can, like Pat Robertson recently said that unless they take an even more extreme position supporting the Israeli expansion, he will set up a third party -- that's a real threat. He could draw tens of millions of evangelical Christians out of the Republican Party. Okay. He could make a demand. So, they’ll say thank you, throw him a little red meat, and then go on doing what they were doing. But we don't have that constituency. We can't make demands. I mean, the demands -- this is meaningless. It's a misunderstanding of the way politics works. We should create a situation in which popular organizations will be able to make demands. Not me, not you. But popular organizations. They’ll be able to make demands and press them. That's what we should be working on. Not pretending we're talking to John Kerry. We're not.