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The left’s anger over the public option and the anti-Obama revolt is long overdue, says Ralph Nader. Benjamin Sarlin talks to the self-professed “pioneer” of the current progressive rage.

Democrats are steaming over the White House’s capitulation to liberal nemesis Joe Lieberman’s demands to remove a public option and Medicare buy-in from the Senate’s heath-care bill. Progressive figures including Howard Dean and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas have gone so far as to suggest scrapping the bill entirely and starting over, sparking rebukes from White House officials like David Axelrod, who called such a move “insane” in a Morning Joe interview on MSNBC on Thursday. With polls already showing many Democrats planning on sitting out 2010 midterms, the conflict has drawn comparisons to Ralph Nader’s third-party run in 2000, which many Democrats blame for tipping the election to George W. Bush—and for leaving Lieberman to wreak havoc in the Senate.

This is all good news to Nader, a vocal critic of the bill who considers the health-care debate a turning point in the left’s relationship to Obama.

“This is what I meant a year ago when I said the next year will determine whether Barack Obama will be an Uncle Tom groveling before the demands of the corporations.”

The four-time presidential candidate said he was particularly encouraged Thursday morning, when he read Dean’s op-ed in The Washington Post.

“Good for Howard Dean,” Nader said, adding that his only criticism was the former Democratic National Committee chairman didn’t go after the bill hard enough.

• Dana Goldstein: Howard Dean Splits the Left Nader favors a single-payer health-care system, but said he objected in particular to the Senate bill for many of the same reasons expressed by Dean. He reserved his harshest criticism for the individual mandate, which commentators like Ezra Klein say is necessary in some form to keep premiums at acceptable rates but which Nader says forces Americans to buy substandard insurance.

“It doesn’t have a drug-reimportation provision, it doesn’t have a public option, it doesn’t have a Medicare buy-in, and in the House they lost a number of provisions,” he said. “Basically it’s a massive new subsidy to the health-insurance industry to deliver millions of customers, including those who will be forced to buy junk insurance policies.”