(This posting is dedicated to my friend Lee who gives me shit about Nader and the 2000 election whenever we go out drinking).
Greeting fellow freaks! The Patriot is traveling for work once again and finds himself in Santa Monica California at the Fairmont. Quite a nice hotel actually. On the plane ride out here I had occasion to watch the documentary about Ralph Nader that came out earlier this year, An Unreasonable Man, and I recommend it highly, especially to those who think that Nader cost “us” the 2000 election. Bashing Ralph Nader has become popular sport among the institutional democrats who can’t seem to get it through their heads that their arguments about why Gore lost (won) in 2000 have nothing to do with Nader and everything to do with their centrist strategy. Dare I say that the Democrats failing to put up a fight against the Republican agenda over the last six years proves Ralph’s point that the difference between the parties is minimal at best? Nah. For those of you who drank the Carvell cool-aid nothing I can say would change your minds. Nevertheless, I ask you to consider the following: Nader did not work for the Florida Secretary of State, the Palm Beach County Election Commission, the Al Gore campaign committee, or the United States Supreme Court. Yet, he has become a scapegoat among Democrats for Al Gore’s loss. These diehard Democrats are averse to looking at the failings of their candidate. If Gore had won Tennessee, he would have had the necessary Electoral College votes to have won the election and the Florida results would have been irrelevant. There’s no moral ground for claiming that Nader took any votes away from the stumbling, pandering Gore, who, like Kerry four years later, campaigned as though the only votes he had to “earn” were Republican votes. Gore in fact WON not only the national vote but the state of Florida as well, despite the bogus ex-felon purges, the hanging chads, the “Jews for Buchanan” and the Nader vote. According to a recount commissioned by a consortium of major newspapers, who of course buried the story, Gore would have won Florida, and thus the battle for electoral votes, if he had commissioned a statewide recount. Despite everything, he got the most votes. He just didn’t have a the balls to go to the mat against Bush. If he really thought so much was at stake for the Country, why didn’t he make use of every opportunity available to him to keep Bush out of office?
The fact of the matter is that Nader’s support overall brought voters to the polls who never would have gone there in the first place. Also, EVERY third-party on the ballot in Florida garnered enough votes to throw the election to Bush, but the Democrats, in typical fashion, decided that the left wing of the party was responsible and should be roundly punished. This is quite convenient because it draws attention away from that annoyingly loud sucking sound, recently identified as the DNC drawing on the tit of corporate money.
And then there’s this (excerpt):
“Sixty-two percent of Nader's voters were Republicans, independents, third-party voters and nonvoters.
Had Nader not run, Bush would have won by more in Florida. CNN's exit poll showed Bush at 49 percent and Gore at 47 percent, with 2 percent not voting in a hypothetical Nader-less Florida race.
Gore lost his home state of Tennessee, Bill Clinton's Arkansas and traditionally Democratic West Virginia; with any one of these, Gore would have won.
Nine million Democrats voted for Bush, and less than half of the 3 million Nader voters were Democrats.
Ninety thousand African Americans were illegally and intentionally stricken from the voter rolls in Florida under the guise of felon disenfranchisement.
The 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision stopped the vote counting that favored a Gore victory.”(editorial comment: Gore had other avenues to challenge the decision which he declined to take advantage of)
And let’s not forget 2004. Kerry cravenly conceded to Bush while the enormous irregularities in the Ohio vote were being contested by the Greens and Libertarians, and said not a word about the disenfranchisement of untold numbers of would-be (mostly Democratic) voters nationwide that probably cost him the election. Yet he managed to wage a vicious, resource-wasting campaign of harassment to keep Nader, and his message, off the ballot in as many states as possible. It’s the only fight Kerry won.
This will become relevant when the chicken littles go running to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2008, the most conservative Democrat in the history of the party. VOTE GREEN in 2008. What have the Democrats done for you lately?
3 comments:
This quote is from Great New York Green Howie Hawkins, in INDEPENDENT POLITICS: The Green Party Strategy Debate:
“The Democrats have not abandoned ‘progressive’ positions they once held, as some Democrats repeatedly claim, but have simply shifted further to the right as world globalization has advanced, leading to the lowering of democratic rights and the growth of wealth polarization within the United States.
If a massive opposition develops, if the Green s begin to win races and their following grows, the corporations will put more money behind the Democrats, the media will become more sympathetic to the Democrats, promote their more ‘Progressive’ voices. The media would also become more critical of the Republican lack of sensitivity, all in an effort to maintain the two-party system. That is, a shift toward the Democrats will occur if the Democrats cannot control the people.
The two-party system is a self-correcting mechanism that shifts back and forth between the two parties, and within different wings of those parties, to maintain corporate political control. Loyalty to the two-party system in inculcated in the educational system, and our electoral laws are rigged to discriminate against third parties.”
Long winded point being, we need electoral reform – a change in the ‘winner take all’ system. We need to unrig the machine; drag the Diebold machines into a dorm room and smash them, and institute Instant runoff elections at a minimum.
Ummm, as at least part of the motivation for this post, some comment is in order. My position then, as now, was not that Nader's placement on the ballot was a problem. Moreover, then, as now, his positions are closer to mine than Gore's are.
Having said that, however, the issue for me was that Nader's MO in 2000 was that Gore and Bush were indistinguishable (ie, slaves to their corporate overseers). And to that, I vehemently disagree.
Unfortunately, the last 7 years of Constitution shredding, war under false pretenses, and two fascists being placed on the Supreme Court bear me out. As a pragmatist in 2000, who feared exactly what we've gotten, I plugged my nose and voted for Gore.
And again, if Nader runs, and Hillary's got 56%+ of the vote, he'll get mine. Otherwise, i'll do whatever possible to keep Guiliani out of the WH.
Lee (Hey, welcome back from CA!)
The problem with your argument, as I see it, is that you are hung on Nader's statement that there isn't a difference between the two. Nader made that statement prior to 911. Who knows what he would have said had the election been after 911. It's kind of a false argument.
Of course had Nader been in office on 911, the attacks might not have happened. Nader had been arguing for years for locked, reinforced cockpit doors for commercial jets to thwart just the sort of attack that occurred on 911. Note that the Clinton administration failed to do anything to get this issue in front of the FAA during the 8 years he was president.
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