We agree on so many pieces of what you have to say here that it's hard for me to understand the point where we diverge. Yes, our leaders are stupid, vicious and crazy. No, I don't feel the slightest urge to deny it. Yes, we will spend the rest of our lives explaining to each other how we got here, unless His Idiocy gets us blown to pieces first.

But those explanaions will take longer, hurt more, and work less well if we spend our energy blaming each other for principled stances with unexpected effects.

I'm not going to engage here in all the "why it wasn't wrong to vote for Nader" arguments, or even all the "look, Gore was elected anyway" arguments.

I'm just going to say that I voted for Nader. It was a thoughtful principled stance which felt right to me at the time; I'm still not sure it was wrong; If I and my ilk are the best people you can find to blame for the vile and despicable leadership in this country, I personally think you're looking in the wrong direction.

There are people whom I very much would like to see choke on their own vomit because of the state of this country--but most of them voted for Bush ... and some of them didn't vote. And, just to make myself clear, there are people who voted for Bush _and_ people who didn't vote, who did so for thoughtful and principled reasons, and I respect that as well.

Blaming each other in lieu of the enemy has been the downfall of so many progressive movements in this country; I hate to see it happening again.

"We are led by knaves, criminals and morons. Bullies, sadists, and fools. Even by the standards of everyday politics, this Administration is made up of notably ghastly and hapless human beings."

Wow, Patrick, tell us what you __really__ think. I agree completely, of course, but very few put it so succinctly.

Now, why do the latest polls show an increasing percentage of Americans willing to kiss off the UN and the rest of the world and attack Irag all by our lonesome? Among all the people I know, the opinions seem to be changing the other way. What's going on?

I'm just going to say that I voted for Nader. It was a thoughtful principled stance which felt right to me at the time; I'm still not sure it was wrong; If I and my ilk are the best people you can find to blame for the vile and despicable leadership in this country, I personally think you're looking in the wrong direction.

I keep wondering. It's not hard to see the real situation. Now, I certainly don't think it's ideal, but the cold hard facts of this country's elections are simple, and there are two of them.

1) With the exception of the Electoral College, we run "most votes wins, period" elections. Never mind that you could win with 10% of the votes -- if there are 11 candidates, and you get 10% of the vote, and the rest split evenly, you win. The Electoral College puts a small twist on the end, making smaller states considerably more important, but that's an exception, and, in the long run, it usually doesn't matter. It wouldn't have mattered. But you had principles.

Note that, in the last *three* presidential elections, more people voted against the winner than for him. The last case, where more people voted for one of them over the winner, was even more egregious. But that's the way the system works.

2) There are *two*, count them, *two*, not three, not four, not 100, parties that run for Federal Office and consistenty win. Occasionally, someone squeaks into the Congress, or scores a governership. But, to a percentage that starts with a couple of nines and adds more nines after the decimal, and completely in the case of the Presidency, the winner will have a (D) or (R) after his name. Period. End of Statement.

Given these two facts, the result of your vote is simple.

If you vote for one of the two major candidates, you are supporting them over the other candidate.

If you vote for a third party, you are supporting the candidate you hate most. You can rant about how you didn't want to hold your nose and choose the lesser of two evils. By not doing so, by voting for a canidate that *will not win*, no matter what happens, that cannot gain the office, you are taking votes away from the lesser evil. In our system, this is exactly the same as voting for the greater evil. Period.

So, when you voted for Nader over Gore, you, in effect, voted for Bush. Congratulations. You got the presidency you voted for. Just as those who voted for Perot over Bush and Dole got the president they voted for.

Is this right? No. Is this the way that it is? Yes. Campaign for better voting systems (BTW --there is no perfect voting system that allows more than three people to vote -- this has been proven mathematically, so don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.) I'm all for either Multi-Votes or Single Transferable Voting, but that's neither here nor there.

In this country, you get two choices. If you chose neither, you are supporting the worst of the two. And, by voting for Nader, you've *helped destroy my country.*

Pardon me while I feel upset. Gore wasn't perfect, by any means. I'm desperately upset at having two conservative parties to choose from. But, for fuck's sake, look at what you have brought upon us. You couldn't see a goddamned difference between Bush and Gore? This isn't the difference betwen blue-green and teal we are talking about here. This is the difference between a man who only lukewarmly supports what you believe in, and a man totally opposed to you and everything you beleive in.

And you voted for him. And he's destroying everthing that's good about this country. He's destroying every relationship we've created in the world in the last century. And you voted for him.

Choke on it.

Nader voters can moan all they like about how their choice still seems right, though I hope they choke to death on any assertions that there's no difference between Gore and Bush. Their misguided choice is one that just keeps getting worse and worse and I trust they have the intellectual honesty to admit that.

Urm, folks -
It doesn't matter who voted for Nader; they didn't count the votes.

Y'all are still thinking that what you've got is a problem of polictical process, of getting out the vote, of the due process of the mechanisms of the republic.

Those went out a very high window indeed when Mr. Ashcroft began to imprison American citizens without charge, when uncheckable electronic voting schemes were adopted, when it became clear beyond question that your present administration derives its own construction of its legitimacy from things entirely distinct from the Constitution of the Republic.

There is a sense in which such a situation remains a political problem, but that sense is not one in which the primary concern should be the use of the political institutions of the Republic, but rather their reinstatement

I feel chagrin in contemplating the number of my friends who voted for Nader -- but if I have to blame someone for the ascendency of Bush & Co., I'm afraid that, for me, it still comes down to Al Gore for not running a better campaign.

Gore didn't run a _terrible_ campaign (as, say, George McGovern did). And he was partly scuttled by disingenuous, petty-minded members of the U.S. Press. But in hindsight, I put a lot of the blame on Gore and his team underestimating the capacity of the Republicans to play dirty tricks -- and on Gore's reluctance to challenge more directly all that Bush said and did.

I suppose I could blame myself for watching too many TV shows in 2000 instead of writing letters to newspapers and/or Democratic party leaders. (I don't blame myself, as much, for lack of "get out the vote" telephone work, because in San Francisco, I could skip voting entirely and most of the people I would have chosen would still carry the city and state.)

I could blame myself for not lying my body in front of the Supreme Court offices to protest the decision they made about Florida. That feels a bit more like it.

Maybe we all need to become "freedom riders" in 2004 -- traveling to other states to do "get out the vote" phone work, if we know that our own local regions will probably vote Democrat.

What can we do in the meantime? Try to educate ourselves to write and talk rationally about politics, I guess (with thanks to many of the Blog publishers on the Electrolite sidebar).

My "non-rational" self wants to do what my friend David Gans gets to do -- broadcast Steppenwolf's recording of "Monster" over the radio. More watts, more righteous rock n roll.

Though there was a time when I had a lot of respect for Ralph Nader, I never really considered voting for him given the stakes in 2000, but I felt completely vindicated in my judgement when Ralphie opined that there was "no difference between Bush and Gore".

A statement like that can only mean one of two things: (1) he's lying (that is, saying something which he knows to be a falsehood), and it's a devastating lie, totally negating his pretense of honesty; or (2) he's insane (that is, completely out of touch with reality), thus negating his suitability for any position of responsibility.

That was when I knew that Ralph Nader had lost it and was no longer deserving of anything but pity. And that's pretty much all he gets anymore. He has lost any clout he ever had (and there was a time when he had a fair amount). Now, he can gather a crowd of fools around him to hear him blather, but people who are serious about saving this country will have nothing to do with him.

Deb, I'm glad you said that.

I think there are many principled reasons for voting many different ways. I voted for Gore and a very good friend of mine voted for Bush, and we're both still very good friends, since we voted for the same principles. We both are in strong support of the Bill of Rights. The only difference is, I vote for the candidate who'll do the best for the 1st Amendment and he votes for the one who'll do the best for the 2nd.

I will admit that with Gore, I was less than thrilled for voting for Mr. V-chip and his record-censoring wife. However, with Mr. Prayer-in-School and Amendment-Against-Flag-Burning (aka. "Repeal the 1st Amendment") on the other hand, I was willing to cast my lot with Gore, taking it as a bright sign that the Democrats had been sitting on Tipper since her little censorship spree in the 80s.

Nader? Not an option, even though I register as "Green" to give that party more districting.

Hindsight is always 20/20. My personal thought is to simply blame Bush and have done with it, or blame the Supreme Court for their little bit of partisan politics playing kingmaker.

> and completely in the case of the Presidency,
> the winner will have a (D) or (R) after his
> name. Period. End of Statement.

Hey, don't be disrespecting Millard Fillmore. I think the Whig party's long overdue for a comeback.

Urm, folks -
It doesn't matter who voted for Nader; they didn't count the vote.

Somewhat true. But what allowed them to steal the election was having the election close enough that one state's Electors would be enough to turn the tide. If Nader's voters had voted for Gore in Florida or New Hampshire, it would have been over before the fighting started. It was when the bad guys realized that they could steal the election that they did so.

Hell, here's the offical results from Florida, using only the top three vote-getters.

Bush, George W. 2,912,790 48.85%

Gore, Al 2,912,253 48.84%

Nader, Ralph 97,488 1.63%

If ONE FUCKING PERCENT of the so-called principled Nader voters had looked at the situation, we wouldn't be here. They couldn't have stolen the election. By letting it get that close, they opened the door.

But they had principles. And, of course, by voting for Nader, we can see just how liberal this country is becoming -- hell, we can see just how liberal the Democratic Party is becoming.

The more I think about this, the more angry I get.

well I lived over twenty years in the U.S, never took citizenship, and live back in my own country now. If you're saying that someone in voting for a person actually votes for the person they don't want to vote for because the first person has no possibility of winning then I guess voting in the U.S doesn't mean shit. Hmm, might be why I never went for citizenship.

The selfsame Guardian recently ran an article priasing Palestinian suicide bombers, and long supported the IRA (Irish terrorists - remember them) agenda.

How about the sentiments expressed in the Telegraph which has a readership 3 to 4 times that of the Grauniad.

I didn't vote in the last election for the same reason as Bryan - I can't. However, before the election I said exactly the same thing as Nader: there is no meaningful difference on any real issue between Bush and Gore. There was little agenda for meaningful reform on either side, nor were the two terribly far apart on any major issue that I thought they could actually control.

I was wrong. I confess that without hesitation. Bush has been orders of magnitude worse than I imagined. My wife - the life long Democrat - voted for Gore and told me this would happen if Bush got in. I didn't believe her.

However, in November 2000 it was hard to take Bushes "faith-based" rhetoric as any different than his father's. Bush was pandering to the right, and considering the first Bush administration it made a lot of sense to think that what he said while campaigning wasn't going to mean much in office. I took Bush to be the not especially talented son of a patrician family who would basically be led around by his father's clique.

Bush Sr. was hardly the greatest president in American history, but he knew what he could and couldn't get away with. Bush Sr. was not a disaster, and there was quite a lot of continuity between Clinton polices and Bush Sr.'s policies. I took it as a given that the new president, whoever he was, wasn't going to risk rocking the boat or making major changes. They might talk big, but I didn't expect to see action.

I was wrong, but I don't think my conclusions in Fall 2000 were unreasonable or politically irresponsible, and I don't think it's right to blame the Nader voters for having come to the same conclusions.

Voting for minor party candidates has traditionally been a pretty safe thing to do - a simple and viable way of indicating one's preference for an alternative the big parties aren't covering at this point. When elections are settled with margins of five, ten, or twenty percent, then the individual enjoys substantial freedom to do this kind of thing, and a few percent total spread around the alternatives is a good thing.

That's one of the more quietly pernicious consequences of this total lack of concensus we've got. I do not fundamentally agree with either the Democratic or the Republican Parties. But when outcomes continue to rest on fractions of a percent, then I really do feel obligated to engage in some lesser-of-two-evil decision-making. There seems every reason to believe that we're in for some more of it in at least most elections for a while yet, and I think it sucks. I would be obligated to eitehr party if they'd manage to actually swing a significant voting majority so I could go back to exercising the franchise on behalf of *gasp* candidates I'd actually want to see elected.

Ptrck, y gnrnt slt. (Pre-vowelectomized!)

I agree with you that our rulers are appalling, but that's as far as it goes. First, there's a huge issue of contingency here. Absent the September massacres, it's doubtful that the Imperial Wing of Bush's party would have had the leverage to sway him so completely to the side of millenarian fantasy. Without the carcasses on which the jackals of the Imperium pounced (Rumsfeld, Cheney and the PNAC crowd), liberals would be complaining chiefly about fiscal policy and cloning - serious policy matters, to be sure, but not issues that implicate the essence of the country in the same way as perpetual war and detentions without charge. You can't blame Nader voters for lack of a crystal ball.

Second, while I no longer believe Gore could have done worse, I'm still far from convinced how much better he would be. The Democratic Party has its own Imperial Wing, and Gore, with his connections to the New Republic, the DLC and the intervention-happy Clinton Administration, was arguably more plugged in, pre-election, than Bush was. He was part of an administration that pursued the policy of poking a caged Saddam Hussein with a sharp stick for twelve years, launching an average of 47,000 sorties a year and maintaining and defending the sanctions regime (and Arabian-based troop deployments) that made business so brisk at the al Qaeda recruitment office. By their fruits ye shall know them, and the fruits of the Administration in which Gore served were an unauthorized (by Congress or the UN) war, sundry other interventions and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

Gore was never much of a civil libertarian, and, his criticisms of the Bush Administration since coming out of his post-election "shell" have not, from what I can see, overly stressed the threat to individual rights. And Gore has his own weakness for "central organizing principle" grandiosity. His Cross is simply Green. And we've established that under Clinton-Gore, the US government was just as willing to render its captives unto foreign torturers.

One can easily imagine a worst-case Gore scenario in which, instead of thinly-veiled attempts to link left wing war protesters to Saddam and Al Qaeda, the White House spin machine hammers tenuous or notional "links" between Al Qaeda and "the radical right," with an eye toward delegitimizing anyone to starboard of Joe Lieberman (akin to the actual practice of the post-OKC Clinton Administration). Ironically, one can also imagine the UN rolling over on Iraq - remember those Imperial connections - and making it EASIER for the (different) administration to immire us in a half-century's morass of occupation and retaliation. As it stands, the very arrogance and incompetence of the Bush, ahem, BRAIN TRUST may yet manage to scuttle the whole adventure - at great cost, sure, but nothing approaching the cost of actually going through with it.

Your jibe at the Nader voters is akin to the certitude of the people who know - for certain - just exactly how well things would have worked out if Chamberlain hadn't signed that document at Munich or Roosevelt had been stiffer at Yalta or GHWB had gone "on to Baghdad!" in 1991. We are facing a much, much bigger issue than the uncertain effects of the Democratic Party's inability to win over two percent of liberal voters three years ago.

The election was close enough that we could vent the same anger at people who voted for other fringe parties, too, except that the Nader 1.5% is probably usually a vote the Democrats get and that this time they didn't get. Like many others, I think Al Gore and his party deserve at least some of the blame as well--Gore for running a lousy campaign, his party (and its voters) for nominating him in the first place.

The best reason to get angry with a Nader voter isn't that they lost the election for Gore--though that WAS their declared aim--it's that they voted *for* Ralph Nader. Ralph Nader, who quite possibly would have been an even worse president than George Bush, if that's possible. Certainly it is hard to imagine a man less ill-suited tempermentally to lead the United States. R-a-l-p-h N-a-d-e-r. That's all I need to see to think a Nader voter is a ninny. Either they really wanted him as president, and therefore need a serious reality check, or they were trying to deny the Democrats the victory, and therefore are need a serious reality check.

I think it was totally reasonable to vote for Nader IF you come from a state that was unrepentantly Republican. Say, Texas...where I'm from. No need to go through that formal "vote-swap" scheme (which seemed a great idea)...A Gore vote there is wasted, and you can send your message to the dems to grow some glands (either type) and move to the left with the civilized people. And get the underwhelming Nader his 5%, future debate access and matching funds...and we could have been treated to radical, revolutionary rhetoric, on prime time...sounds like - single payer, minimum wage, maybe even, gun control.

BUT, if I lived in a state where it might be close (many of them)...I would have been tempted to still vote Nader, and I would be kicking myself. I feel safe in saying the dems would not take us this far afield in foreign policy (in spite of their me-too-isms in congress)...maybe a limited Afghan adventure, but definitely not this new war. If our next leader apologises and writes a few really large checks, our international relations will recover. But, trainloads of Iraqis will still be dead.

Re Kevin Marks' remarks on the Guardian: I'm a long-time reader of the Guardian, and I have never, ever seen articles praising Palestinian suicide bombers, or supporting the IRA. They've certainly given space for op-eds to people who do support such things, but that's not the same, is it? (It's also a healthy sign of a free press, something you Americans may no longer be readily acquainted with nowadays.)

And the last time I looked, the Daily Torygraph's circulation was falling gently as the Tory party's faithful die off or forget how to read from senility (at around 25, mostly), and is now only 2.5 times more than the rising Grauniad. (And if you want a real buzz, look at the list of which newspaper websites are most visited, and rated most influential? You'll find the Guardian at the top!)

As for Patrick's original piece, from over here, it looks to be right on the money. How on earth can the USA claim any kind of leadership in the world with such incompetents in the White House?

I think Erik is exactly right—and I respect his passion in argument. I'm from the opposite end of the pol spectrum, but I spent all 8 years of the Clinton Admin wishing death to Perot voters and Buchananites. (Heck, in my worse moments, I still do.)

For what it's worth.

I live in Michigan. It was clear that Gore would carry Michigan. I voted for Nader. I don't see anything wrong with that. I used my vote to make a statement. But I would have voted for Gore if I had thought that Bush might carry the state.

"I hope they choke on it."

"Choke on it."

"I hope they choke to death on any assertions that there's no difference between Gore and Bush."

Well, I didn't (and don't) make the last assertion.

Folks, I don't hope any of you choke on anything. I wish you could offer me the same respect.

Patrick, you had me going until the last bit about Nader. I voted for Nader, and I'm glad I did. I live in New York, and I knew Gore would win my state, and he did. If I had felt the election was close in NY, I would have reluctantly voted for Gore. Yes, of course, it was clear Nader would not win. Mr. Olsen seems to think that Nader (and Buchanan) voters were too stupid to see this. But the role of minority parties in American history has been to have their ideas adopted, or coopted, by the major parties. A win by Gore, which did happen, with a strong showing by Nader, would be more likely to influence the Republicans-in-Democrats'-clothing to move to the left.
I'll just end with this question for all you self-righteous Gore voters: Are you going to vote for Joe Lieberman if he's nominated? Here's a man who whole-heartedly supports Bush's naked aggression. As do so many Democrats. As do so many Americans. The problem is a lot deeper than you want to admit, so you engage in cheap factionalism. I share your horror at what's happening to this country. But it wouldn't be happening without many Democrats' approval.

The point is not the last election: the point is the election that is coming up: why don't more people recognize that the heads of our government are the worst manifestation of every bad impulse that exists in the American charactor? Is our country populated with such fools?

I have been walking around for months now muttering, "There must have been Germans that felt like this."

Mr. Olsen (ObCorrection: Olson) seems to think that Nader (and Buchanan) voters were too stupid to see this.

Sorry. But I do think the vast majority of them were. The entire "Gore and Bush are the same" line shows a seriously critical lack of perception. Even a cursory glance would show you *vast* differences in background, temperment, education and beliefs.

But the role of minority parties in American history has been to have their ideas adopted, or coopted, by the major parties.

And the way you do that is from the bottom up, not the top down. You don't hand the prize to the enemy, and then stand up and say, "Well, at least it was principled." The Southern Democrats did that in the 1850s. Worked out just fine for them -- if you don't count the (rightful) destruction of the antebellum South.

Greens, esp., love to forget how intelligent and nuanced Gore really is. Yes, he's a pretty moderate-to-liberal Republican. But he makes mistakes, he fixes them. He cares about his country and the future of it. The Greens and Nader didn't run against Gore. They ran against the GOP's image of Gore. This show a critical lack of thought on Nader supporters.

I'll be the first to agree that there are *serious* problems with the Democratic Party. But they are trivial when compared to the GOP.

We are led by knaves, criminals and morons. Bullies, sadists, and fools. Even by the standards of everyday politics, this Administration is made up of notably ghastly and hapless human beings.

While I agree, I think you miss the most interesting part of that statement. Many of the people in positions of power in our current administration have been in power for 20-30 years. They didn't suddenly become knaves at stroke of midnight on Bush Jr.'s inauguration. The world hasn't gone to hell in a mere 2 years. Its taken decards of concerted effort on the part of our government for things to get this bad. And voting for the lesser of 2 evils doesn't make it any better.

The decision to have supported Nader--it's a complex issue, isn't it? On one side you've got ardent progressives who voted for "their man" in order to send a clear message that the illusion of choice between democrats and republicans was just that: an illusion. On the other side, you've got those who believe, correctly, that if everyone who'd voted for Nader had voted for Gore, Bush would not be president.

Accepting that those Nader supporters ought to have supported Gore, what do we say of the many people who came out to vote specifically for Nader, and who would not have voted otherwise? One assumes that these people added votes to many non-presidential dems' tallies, since the Greens were not on every ticket in 2000. Asking those people to vote for Gore would have been asking them to compromise their principles, since many of them believe that the two-party system is terminally bankrupt (don't ask me to defend that viewpoint; I don't share it).

To further complicate the issue, Gore was not at all the candidate that progressive Democrats wanted. His "me too" performance in the second debate was painful for a lot of us to watch, and his track record as VP and as Senator isn't one that makes a liberal democrat jump up and dance for joy. I think to many liberal democrats, voting for Nader was a message that the party had better learn how to differentiate itself from the GOP, or else prepare to be abandoned by the left. Since Gore and W. appeared to many of us to differ only slightly in temperament and somewhat more in apparent intelligence, the vindictive "let's see what the Dems do after four years of Bush: the Sequel" sentiment was one I heard from a lot of former yellow-dog Democrats.

Either way you look at it, I think that had any of us known just how bad things could get, many more Nader supporters in critical states would have voted Gore, hindsight being 20/20.

Fortunately for me, I was living here in Texas, where my vote was mere symbolism if for Gore, and had the potential to get my candidate matching funds and greater legitimacy (read: an invitation to debates) if I voted for Nader. So for me it was a no-brainer. If we survive until 2004, perhaps cooler heads will prevail on both sides of the progressive fence.

Your pardon, but supporting Nader isn't a complex issue.

It's a very simple, basic issue.

Do you support public policies based on their expected and observed material results, or based on their moral standing?

Everyone who choses the later, whether they voted for Nader or Bush or Gore or anyone else, is in the same camp, and has the same basic belief about the world, irrespective of their differences about what *is* moral.

A construction of principle detached from the consequences of one's principled choices is broken beyond any utility in the world we actually have to inhabit.

I share the passionate anger and despair about what is happening to my country which motivates Erik and Patrick. I loathed Bush Major with every fiber of my being and I could tell, from the beginning, Bush Minor was worse. But I had no idea how much worse.

I'd like to point out that Deb hasn't said what the principles were which motivated her vote. Choosing one and excoriating her for it is futile. Excoriating her for any reason is pretty much futile at this point no matter how good it might feel. It's more of the divisiveness which has helped to put us where we are now. People who voted for Nader, for whatever reason, are probably just as appalled at what the Bushies are doing as those of us who voted for Gore. This makes them our allies. Don't turn on them

MKK

Ah, so the message was that a vote for Nader was a message to the Democrats that they'd better respect their progressive wing or prepare to be abandoned wholesale by it?

Great! So maybe if the Democrats respectfully move to strongly accomodate their progressive wing, they can manage to lose unambiguously rather than futzing around with these 50/50 results. That would help clarify things, at least.

This is not to say that the current intellectual and ideological muddle among leading Democrats is preferable. There are certain progressive positions that I think could light a real populist fire--and I think a genuinely principled, take-no-prisoners candidate would have real appeal to independents.

But the idea that Ralph Nader is the kind of candidate that progressives ought to prefer and should get if the Democrats would only respect their left wing is bitterly hilarious. Not only would a Nader-like candidate lose a general election to a Republican by a margin that would make George McGovern look like a winner by comparison, Nader himself is one of the least attractive figures to bid for high office in recent memory, a humorless scold whose declared convictions hover between the impractical and the actively stupid.

I wish people who voted for Nader could get their stories straight so we could figure out just which principle it was that they were allegedly standing for.

To the idea that Woody Bush waited for Sept. 11th before revealing his true ideological roots, I note that he reinstated the Mexico City standard, that no international health care organization that even mentioned the possibility of an abortion could receive US funding. He did this on his first day in office.

Now, I'm sure that some libertarians in the audience are happy to see any government policy defunded by any means possible. But some of us believe that if policies are to be defunded, the decision should be based on something other than attempts to force a stupid and anti-human sexual morality down the throats of the rest of the world as a warm-up and proxy for forcing it down the throats of America.

The Wage Slave Journal has a good feature, the Scorecard of Evil, a chronological list of all of the things that the Rove administration has done that offend liberals. It didn't start with Sept. 11th. I'm sure that the reading this comment thread will have a wide range of responses to the scorecard, but it's a good aide de memoire about what was important in early 2001, and how the administration intended to govern for their eight years.

As to the Nader issue: I thought for a while about whether to vote for Nader. Then, the first time he said that there was no difference between Bush and Gore, I realized that he was either insane or lying. I'm not going to make a principled stand in favor of someone who try to convince people to make a principled stand by lying to them.

Greetings to all. This is my first post, though I've been lurking on both Patrick and Teresa's blogs for quite a while. You all are some smart, articulate, people.

What prompted me to write finally is a sincere puzzlement over the motivation to blame Nader for the Shrub disaster. I have observed this in a number of places since the 2000 election, and I just don't understand where the impulse comes from.

To me, the obvious reaction to what happened is to blame Bush and his cronies. They are the ones who threw the election. In my opinion, Bush DID NOT win, even in the electoral college, because the Florida votes should have gone to Gore. The extent of dirty tricks and out-and-out illegal tactics is mind-boggling and a severe breach of democratic principles. To me, this is where the lion's share of blame belongs.

Yet the tone of many Nader bashers is that all the rest of what went wrong in the election is meaningless: he and the people who voted for him are responsible. In some of the comments above, there is also a minor theme of "Gore is responsible". Both of these viewpoints seem to me to be missing the big honking picture in front of them: the criminals currently in the White House are responsible!

Is this just too obvious for most people to mention? Am I such an obvious kind of person that I can't see the point of dumping bile on anyone but the hulking bullies currently bedeviling our country?

What's going on here?

Erik - part of the problem is that the two-party system, combined with our voting process, is a self-reinforcing process; nobody is going to support any effort to change the voting system to a more complex, but more representative, one unless there is some evidence that there is a need to; and that evidence would most easily come in the form of third-party candidates who could say that they had substantial political support.

Given that, if you believe that the two-party system is politically wrongheaded, the most effective thing you can do to change it is to vote for third party candidates.

Andy - I will freely admit that my "misguided choice", as you term it, was in part based upon the fact that I am a citizen of California, a state which Gore carried by a landslide and in which Bush had no chance of winning; my vote for Nader was therefore able to serve the ends which I wanted served (promoting the existence of third parties) without being harmful. I do not know whether or not I would have done the same in a close election.

Alantex - the rubric that there is no difference between the Democratic and Republican parties is common among people on the margins on both sides of the political spectrum; the idea is that both parties endorse key elements of our economic and political system which are rejected by extremists. From the point of view of many in the Green party, both the Democrats and the Republicans support a political system which is under the influence of corporate money; choosing between them is like choosing between flavors of ice cream when (if you're a Green activist) what you really want is pecan pie.

Jim - you are absolutely correct that we are facing a bigger issue than the Nader voters; the Democratic party seems completely adrift, unsure of its core principles, and unable to promote them effectively. Many of the attacks against Nader supporters that I have seen have struck me as being attempts to deflect scrutiny from the party's problems, in the vein of "it's not our fault."

Timothy - you leave out the possibility that a Nader voter (a) knew that Nader could not win, and (b) lived in a state where Bush could not win, and so therefore found voting for Nader an effective way of promoting the Green party, and third parties in general, independant of the candidate. (For what it's worth, Nader was a horrible representative for the party; he refused to endorse the platform, and seemed to capture the party's nomination by star power, using a mechanism which I did not fully understand). Also, I think the problem you are having with wanting people who voted for Nader to get their stories straight is that different people are telling you different stories, not that any one person's story is changing.

So, here're the facts:
*we have an Administration and Congress run by Retrograde Corrupt Fools
*said RCF are stealing elections, own the media, are shredding the Constitution and building a police state
*we need to change this.
Did I get that right?

Well, assuming the electoral system still functions, there is one general guideline worth thinking about: as a general rule, the more people who turn out to vote, the more progressive the results. If we want to change the regime, we need to turn out the voters.

I don't have any One Big Answer that'll fix this mess we're in - indeed, I'm beginning to fear that fixing it is going to take the rest of our lives - but I have been thinking of a small, potentially useful idea.

What if everyone who feels as we do agreed to do this one thing: take election day off, and help get people to the polls. Drive old people. Man phone banks. That sort of thing. And, preferably, do it in swing districts, where a couple hundred voters sometimes means the difference between a D and an R.

The Democratic Party is broken. They can't and won't pull this off. But we and folks we know have a lot of expertise in helping large, distributed groups of people collaborate on projects.

Perhaps those who want to do more could take more days off, say, make a four-day weekend of it. Those who are really steamed could get to work earlier, registering the unregistered and talking to voters about how they feel about the Administration and its policies.

This may sound stupidly basic, and it is. But I've spent a little time around politics, and have always been amazed at how few people are involved at all. In many congressional races, ten volunteers can make a measurable difference. In any congressional race, 100 smart, dedicated volunteers are a force to be reckoned with. I can't imagine but that there are a large number of people who feel like us, but don't know what to do about it. A nationwide effort to encourage taking election day off to get out the vote might really have an impact.

Dumb idea? Worth kicking around? You tell me.

Erik Olson writes that "If you vote for a third party, you are supporting the candidate you hate most." (He also writes that if 1% of the Nader voters in Florida had voted for Gore, he would have won, which I think shows a severe underestimation of the extent the JBush-KHarris forces would go to manipulate the count.)

To Erik's passionate argument in favor of "lesser of two evil" voting, I would like to offer an epigram which I believe comes from Robert A. Heinlein: "Be careful what you vote for: you may get it."

(On googling the central part of this slogan, I find only two hits: one from a nut who uses it to warn against a totalitarian socialist agenda from the Democrats; the other is from a 2000 letter to the editor arguing that Gore is as indebted to the oil industry as Bush is. That's not a very encouraging total, but I believe there's still a valid point here.)

I heard the "lesser of two evil" argument made in the 1980 election, concerning 3d-party candidate John Anderson. I think most here will agree that Reagan was a terrible president, and did bad things Carter would never have done. Yet Carter was no prize in office (he's been a fine ex-president, but so was Herbert Hoover in some respects), and some of us gave up on him when he promulgated the "Carter Doctrine" and started to sound like Reagan.

Many potential Anderson voters did indeed turn to Carter, for fear of Reagan or other reasons. But here's the thing: even if every single ACTUAL Anderson voter had voted for Carter, Reagan would still have won. Those of us who stuck with Anderson were being asked, by the 1980-era Erik Olsons, to give up their integrity and get nothing in return.

The difference with 2000, of course, is that this time, the Nader vote did make the difference. (Maybe. Even if every single actual Nader voter in Florida had voted for Gore, I wouldn't put it past Bush & Harris to have manipulated the count so that Bush's brother still came out ahead; and I don't know if Nader voters made the difference in other states.)

In both cases, 1980 and 2000, this outcome was no surprise. The polls predicted it.

Erik says that 3d-party candidates can't win. How does he know this ahead of time? Because the polls tell him so. (At one point in the 1980 campaign, if everyone who said they liked Anderson best of the candidates had also said they intended to vote for him, he would have had the lead. But too many didn't intend to vote for him. Why? Because the polls said he couldn't win.) The same polls which said that Anderson couldn't win, also said, by the end, that Carter couldn't win. And they were right.

So I can't take Erik's dictum as an absolute. It depends on circumstances. It's not applicable to 1980. It might have been applicable to 2000 ...

But are we absolutely sure? Nader claimed the differences between Gore and Bush were insignificant: are we sure he wasn't right? We know that Bush has sold out to corporate interests; are we sure Gore wouldn't have done many, if not all, of the same things? We know what Bush did after 9/11; do we have any idea at all what Gore would have done? I don't take his actual speeches as definitive evidence: being President is a very different thing from being not-President. (Remember what Nader said when asked what he would have done about 9/11 if he were President: he said that if he were President, 9/11 wouldn't have happened. A clever debating answer, but I don't believe it.)

Who would have guessed in 1964 what LBJ would do in Vietnam? If Goldwater had somehow won, and had done everything LBJ actually did - which is what we were expecting Goldwater to do - would we be pining for Johnson as we are now pining for Gore?

I may sound like a Nader voter. I wasn't one. I voted for Gore, but not happily. I was partly influenced by the closeness of the polls, and partly by the sense that he was not the lesser of two evils, but the least of three evils, for I gradually came to the conclusion that Nader was nuts.

But for those who admired Nader, and who refused to follow Erik Olson's notions of limited predestination, I cannot blame them now.

Nor can I blame the sorry souls who were deluded into voting for Bush, like the person who wrote this 2000 letter to the editor which I found on the same page as the one I mentioned above:

"Mr. in-your-face Gore told me what he's thinking: It's my way or the highway. He must have said 'I'll fight for you' half a dozen times. We don't need a fighter to lead. We need reconciliation, restoration, mediation and trust. The governor of Texas is that man."

Have you ever seen a sadder misestimation of a man? And don't you put the blame squarely on Mr. Bush himself for the way he lied to the voters?

What is it about the Naderites? Are you saying they should have voted for Gore, and prevented all of this? Have you fogotten, Gore won the election?

"Have you ever seen a sadder misestimation of a man?"

Yes. I heard an undecided voter about two days before the 2000 election say that, because he was a farmer, he was leaning towards Bush, because Bush was a businessman who understood how hard life is for small businesses and he would certainly work to support them.

Timothy Burke (cross-post) ridicules the notion of Nader supporters trying to force the Democratic party to nominate Nader-like candidates.

To that there are two two-word answers, one for each end of the standard political spectrum:

Eugene Debs.

Barry Goldwater.

Each lost overwhelmingly. But each put his political ideas into circulation, and those ideas eventually flourished.

It was often observed that what FDR actually enacted in the 1930s bore a startling resemblance to Debs's platforms of 20 years earlier. And it's a commonplace that Reagan's 1980 election was the culmination of what the Goldwater wing of the Republicans had been working for for nearly 20 years.

It doesn't always work (Bill Clinton was hardly a 20-years-later George McGovern), but never stop trying. Don't let Timothy Burke stop you, whatever your political beliefs.

Blaming each other in lieu of the enemy has been the downfall of so many progressive movements in this country; I hate to see it happening again.

You don't see a certain bitter irony in a Nader voter saying this?

I've been told that polls indicatee that most Nader voters are folks who wouldn't have voted for anyone had Nader (or perhaps another Green) not been running. I don't know if it makes sense to blame Nader voter more than people who didn't vote at all (and there are lots more of the latter). And, of course, the most blame-worthy are the Bush voters. And Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, and the Supreme Court Five. And Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Bush his own damn self.

To Julia:

Me: "Blaming each other in lieu of the enemy has been the downfall of so many progressive movements in this country; I hate to see it happening again."

Julia: "You don't see a certain bitter irony in a Nader voter saying this?"

No, I honestly don't. Can you explain?

Here's a bit more on the subject, with numbers and everything:

http://www.kirbymountain.com/rosenlake/green/goreloss.html

Giving Debs credit for American social democracy in the New Deal, which is what I presume you would say Debs deserves credit for, strikes me as being at least a complex claim. Moreover, Debs was frankly a more viable candidate in his time and place than Nader.

Goldwater is the example that reveals just how stupid support for Nader really was, and how much a certain segment of progressives seems to love whistling past the graveyard. Goldwater got his ideas into circulation through his candidacy in two ways: first, because the ideas had a certain kind of philosophical rigor and force to them. Ok, let's grant for the sake of argument that the Naderite left has that. (It doesn't, but ok.) But secondly, Goldwater's political platform tapped into a very substantial demographic of middle-income voters, particularly in the West (Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm is brilliant on this point) and Goldwater's campaign served as a practical basis for building an organization that made that demographic a solid base for future campaigns.

Where's the solid potential base of progressive support? Pull hard enough in any of the directions of the Naderite-Green platform and you fracture the small ragtag coalition that feeds into progressive voting apart, hard. Push certain kinds of electoral and governmental reform hard enough and you can kiss urban labor unions in the Northeast and Midwest good-bye, and probably urban African-American politicians as well; the same goes for the anti-globalization platforms.

Explain to me how Nader's 2000 platform ever garners more than 5% of the vote, or if influential on another party, manages to grow in popularity enough to carry the day rather than flat-out lose an election by its presence. What populations of voters do you imagine would be mobilized by it? Ph.Ds in the Northeast and California? What's the plan here?

In any event, historical differences aside, it also comes down to personalities. And Ralph Nader is no Eugene Debs or Barry Goldwater.

If you want a REAL viable third party in America, I give you the recipe that I think would rip away members from both parties:

1. Strong, unbending civil and cultural libertarianism; strong suspicion of government intervention into free speech or any civil rights, whether it's the Patriot Act or "hate speech" codes in progressive communities. Support for abortion rights, gun ownership, drug legalization, etc.
2. Modest commitment to basic social democracy and "safety nets" coupled with strong commitments to fiscal restraint and suspicion of major new expansions of government responsibility.
3. Strong anti-trust philosophy coupled with major new restraints and oversight on corporate governance coupled with a deep philosophical commitment to free markets at home and abroad
4. Cautious pragmatism on foreign affairs and national security issues; reduction in size and mission of US military coupled with willingness to defend vital interests where necessary.

Essentially, this peels away some Republicans uneasy with the religious right and some neo-liberals uneasy with the cultural left. It's the Bull Moose Party, circa 2003. You want a viable third party, that's the only winning recipe I see out there right now.

Not to change the subject, but yesterday the Guardian ran an article pointing out that the Gov't has already issued a contract to Halliburton (that texas company Cheney used to run)to rebuild Iraq after the US blows the f**k out of it. Boy, talk about making oportunities for your friends!

The meeting must have gone something like this:

Dick: Hey guys! I really enjoyed working with you, but I have a new job in Washington to go to. Give me a call if I can do anything for you!

the guys: Uh, yeah. Look Dick, uh, you can help. Maybe you could, uh, you know, uh, blow the f**k outa someplace, and we could, uh, you know, go in and fix'er up for you. That'd be cool.

dick: Damn! That' a good idea! But what can we use as a reason?

the guys: Reason? Why would you need a f**king reason? This is the f**king United States, goddamit! Who's gonna stop us?

"It's the Bull Moose Party, circa 2003."

So, who's up to heading out to Sagamore Hill with a shovel and a resurrection scroll?

Timothy Burke: I'm not giving Debs credit for the New Deal: that would be too strong; I'm merely observing that ideas he brought into US political discourse were enacted by the New Deal. That was an important, perhaps even essential, step along the way. Perhaps you disagree, but this observation is a mainstream historical commonplace.

I don't know what you mean by saying that Debs was more viable than Nader. He got a higher percentage of the vote; but he still could not possibly have been elected at the time. That would be my definition of viable.

Did Goldwater ride a rising tide? Apparently in retrospect; but that's not how it appeared at the time. The wise and judicious Timothy Burkes of 1964 were busy explaining how Goldwater's shockingly poor vote meant that his brand of politics had a strictly limited appeal even among Republicans; and the course of the 1968 Republican nomination campaign seemed to prove them right.

Is progressivism really as unviable as you say it is? Don't tell the progressives of a century ago. Specific issues have changed greatly, of course; but the principle can be made to appeal.

Your 4-point program seems designed to steer a middle-of-the-road judiciousness, but by that token also has something to offend everybody ... You might peel off some Clinton Democrats with that program but not, I think, very many Republicans, at least not ones I know.

Julia: Your bitter irony was exceedingly obvious to me, even if it wasn't obvious to the Nader voters. Perhaps that's because I'm not one.

Simon:

The problem is that your logic could be made to apply to every single existing fringe party in existence. Strike Naderite or Green or progressive from anything you've said and substitute "Libertarian" or "Democratic Socialist" or "Reform Party" and it's equally valid, or invalid. They could all be frogs waiting to be kissed by the princess of majoritarian politics.

As a basic observation, I can't contest it. The future is by its nature unpredictable, and I'm sure that it will surprise us all in many ways. Sure, Nader's ideas could have surprising influence on American politics in the future, but so could Jacques Chirac's or Abimael Guzman's,or space aliens from the outer darkness, for that matter. Anything is possible.

If you want to go beyond that unexceptional observation, you need to explain to me what actually existing populations and structures might be mobilized by some aspect of the Nader platform or by Nader himself, or concretely how his ideas might become part of one of the two major parties in such a way that they would be electorally appealing to a significant plurality of voters. As Perlstein observes, there were many people both inside and outside the Goldwater campaign who saw and understood the sources of its potential long-term success, and who worked steadily towards that goal. It didn't happen immaculately, or to the complete surprise of every observer. The same could be true of social democracy as a response to Debs' socialism: it was hardly unanticipated, though its surfacing in the form of the New Deal was something of a novel surprise in response to crisis.

Who is drawn to some aspect of Nader's ideas besides the 1.8% who voted for him? How will his ideas actually infiltrate a party which now hates his guts with a passion? How will said infiltration not end up costing that party the general election again and again?

From Simon Shoedecker,

"The difference with 2000, of course, is that this time, the Nader vote did make the difference. (Maybe. Even if every single actual Nader voter in Florida had voted for Gore, I wouldn't put it past Bush & Harris to have manipulated the count so that Bush's brother still came out ahead; and I don't know if Nader voters made the difference in other states.)"

It's a possibility. However, Jeb and Harris and Scalia had to deal with a far smaller margin than they'd have had to deal with otherwise.

Using Erik's figures above, the final margin (with all that Jeb and Harris did) came down to 537 votes, vs 97,488 Nader votes. Even if most of the Nader votes would have abstained in Nader's absence, that's still a lot - tens of 1,000's vs several hundred.

Remember, their power to sway the election was somewhat limited. In the end, it came down to preventing the hand-counting of ballots. A powerful machine would never let it get that far - they'd have an actual large majority, or an initial 'count' that looked so lopsided that recounting would look ridiculous.

Just did a quick search on the discussion so far, and got the message: cannot find "blair."

Lost in the discussion about the Greens (where I agree with Patrick) is any about the inherent contradiction in the Guardian's (and thus Patrick's) point. Whether you find it necessary to believe that the Administration is populated by fools, knaves, and criminals is beside the point of whether they may be right about the threat Saddam poses. Blair illustrates that a reasonable human being, presumably privy to somewhat more information than the rest of us, can in fact agree about that threat.

As Mark Kleiman writes,

All of that said, it looks to me as if we have a choice between fighting Iraq before the Iraqis have fully deployed nuclear and biological weapons, or after. And that still looks to me like an easy choice.

A couple of points to reflect the British perspective on this.

1. British politics doesn't have an equivalent to the Republicans. No, not even the Tories; the NYTimes noted that its manifesto for 2001 was to the left of the Democrats in its embrace of public services. The extreme-right in the UK is more than tinged with white-English-nationalism (BNP, UKIP) and there's no real religious influence on British political debate. (The secular nature of the state is clearer de facto in the UK than in the US.)

2. Bush managed to conceal the most hawkish elements fairly well from the electorate. I saw through it while watching the campaign, but I was also looking at British media sources which noted the ideological tenets of the Bush team, and didn't engage in the profound silliness so voluminously documented by Bob Somerby's Daily Howler.

So, it's more than credible that Blair didn't really have any idea who or what he was dealing with. We know now just what a vicious horde of paleowarmongers they are.

Blair illustrates that a reasonable human being, presumably privy to somewhat more information than the rest of us, can in fact agree about that threat.

Blair is a classic Gladstonian liberal interventionist. Except that Gladstone had direct control of the gunboats and troops to deliver on his sense of moral purpose. Blair has to subcontract his moral vision to the Bush regime, the Pentagon's plan to sell out the Kurds, and the plan to bankroll Halliburton with Iraqi oil revenue. That means he might as well put out his eyes with a hot poker.

To do the wrong thing for the right reasons appears to be Blair's nemesis.

And Gladstone split his party too.

Trust me, I'm not going to sit around years from now wondering how "we" got here. I live in Florida, voted for Gore and know exactly how "we" got here. The only blame I accept for any of this mess is voting for Senators and Representatives who were either bald-faced liars to begin with or were corruptable at a lower threshold than even I could have imagined.

I voted for Gore, thought voting for Nader was a huge mistake at the time, still think so, and yet I too think it would be best to stop dwelling on our resentment at Nader voters. It's not a luxury we can afford ourselves at the time. Save it for later, after we've gotten these arrogant, cruel tyrants out of our government.

Some thoughts:

First, Nader's candidacy is only one of several factors that seem to have led to Bush's appointment. If they'd simply counted all the votes in Florida, Gore would have won handily, Nader or no Nader. If Theresa LaPore had designed a better ballot, ditto. I can come up with eight or ten of these without even breathing hard.

Second, I no longer even feel sure that I can trust the publicized election results. With the recent concerns about electronic voting machines, and with all I've read about the voter fraud in Florida, I don't feel I can trust the numbers I've seen beyond a reasonable doubt. For all I know, Nader's numbers could have been carefully tailored just to encourage us to quarrel among ourselves. (My only doubt is whether the Rove team has the actual power to pull something like this off; I have no doubt now that they are morally capable of having done it, smirking all the while.) I'm not ready to break off all relations with people who in so many other ways I am in agreement with, when I have some serious doubts about the apparent consequences of their votes.

And finally, sheesh, these are terrible times, our real enemy is bigger than any of us, and we have to get our priorities straight here. None of us has led a politically and intellectually spotless life, we were all born ignorant and selfish and none of us overcame our heritage so completely that he or she has never held a misguided political opinion since turning 18. Once you start with the blame-finding, there is no end to it. I still feel voting for Nader was a mistake, but I can also certainly see that few people did it out of spite or meaning deliberately to hurt the country. I don't know of anyone who was paying attention to the PNAC in 2000, and you'd pretty much have to have been aware of things like that to foresee how ghastly the Bush Administration would be. I certainly wasn't. Maybe I can pat myself on the back for having voted for Gore, but I certainly cannot credit myself with having suspected in my wildest nightmares that the Bush Administration would bring us to the brink of Armageddon in just a couple years. So I can hardly blame anyone else for not having seen how enormous the difference between Bush and Gore would turn out to be.

We really really really need to put aside the post-morteming and put all our energies into correcting our immediate situation, which is dire.

I knew there was a reason I liked Timothy. So where do I sign up for The Bullmoose Party: TNG?

I voted for Nader (albeit in Minnesota where Gore had a rock solid lead in the polls), and did so recognizing what the worst case scenario was: a Bush victory.

So far, we've gotten exactly what I expected from that scenario: a vile, overreaching and consumately arrogant know-nothing administration that is slowly but surely creating a political sh*tstorm that will ensure no Republican can be elected to the White House in the foreseeable future (pretty much like what Coolidge-Hoover did to the Republicans in the 1920s). The more W wins, the more he discredits the Republican Party and makes it clear that money is all that counts in his America.

The only thing I didn't expect was that the Democrats in Congress would lay down and not fight any of this Republican BS. But then again, that's why I didn't vote for Gore, a man who chose not to fight when it counted in Florida, just as he went along in Congress with the pro-corporate agenda that eventually ruined our economy by touting short-term profits at the expense of long-term planning, social-economic justice, and common sense.

Had Gore been elected, Republican trickery and thievery would have continued unabated, aided by their corrupt Democratic allies in Congress. The most important thing to remember is that our entire Congress has been bought off by corporate campaign donations. Despite some lip service, changing that wasn't part of Gore's agenda, never was, and never would have been.

BTW, like many Nader supporters I know, I'm a former Democratic Party activist who put in literally thousands of volunteer hours in the '70s and '80s. My friends and I didn't vote for Nader out of love of Nader, we voted for Ralph to send a strong signal to the DNC that they could either be Democrats and win, or Faux Republicans, and lose. The party chose the DLC route and sold out the nation. Today there is no major liberal political party in the U.S., and that's a much bigger problem than anything pResident W can do to us in just four years.

At the risk of adding more fuel... The rise to power of the current governing coalition in the USA was the end of a 20-year process. Nader, the Greens, and the people who voted for him were part of it, yes. But not, I think, that big of a part.

The enemy here, I think, is worldwide choking despair, manifesting in different ways in different places. Here in the USA the despair made it seem that a vote for a very conservative leftist and and environmentalist was somehow a lesser evil than the risk of the current lot of reactionary authoritarians. It was easy to find out what these people were--it had been since the Reagan administration. Yet, somehow, the choice of Al Gore who, whatever his faults, would never have done so much damage to US foreign relations or made
the kinds of attacks on civil liberties that this adminstration is undertaking--was seen as more threatening, on both the left and the right, than what we have now. There was, I think, so little hope that many of us--simply didn't take mind. With what results we all know.

I think...I think the despair comes from a vast fear of the changes that will take place in this century. The environment, the vast political and religious conflicts, the global disparities of wealth: I believe we must address these if the freedom we so value, and perhaps civilization itself, is to last. And perhaps there is something else, some shadow that I can't quite name.

There is hope. Remember Gandhi. Remember King. Look to South Africa. But, even before the 2000 election, and then 9/11, I could only say this will be a hard road but one worth travelling. It is still that, even if it does not seem so now.

More balanced views from a Grauniad reader I see. Here's the article entitled 'Welsh Pensioner turns freedom fighter:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,905395,00.html
The Pensioner is quoted as follows:
"I really, really understand the martyrs [suicide bombers]. I am very good friends with the family of the two who went on the mission to Tel Aviv. One saw the other explode, and then he walked away and blew himself up. They are such lovely families and very proud of their sons."

Twenty-three people died in those bombings in Tel Aviv in January, including many poor foreign workers. Was it wrong?

"I agree that it is a strategic mistake but I understand why they do it," she said. "Let's not blame the victims. It's clear who the real terrorists are here."

er, "Somehow a greater evil". Copyediting rulez.

If Gore "chose not to fight when it counted in Florida," then Mark Gisleson and I definitely live in different timelines. I recall a 36-day fight which Gore lost because the other side fought dirtier and had control of the refereeing apparatus.

Barry: True, Bush & Harris's ability to manipulate the vote may have been limited. If Gore had received 70% of the vote, they might have had a harder time of it. Maybe they could have disenfranchised more black people. But if Erik's figures show a 537-vote margin, that's because 537 votes was all they needed. Much of the manipulation was done after the election, and was done to the extent needed.

Timothy Burke: There's a middle ground between saying that successful new ideas could come from space aliens, and saying that they could only come from Timothy Burke's 4-point program. It is that middle ground that I seek.

How specifically could Green-progressive ideas get this to happen? It is merely necessary to note that stranger things have happened. The inevitability of the rise of the ideas of Debs and Goldwater is entirely retrospective. It was not at all obvious to the skeptical Timothy Burkes of the time.

But I will add that there are plenty of Democrats who find many Green ideas of great appeal - even Al Gore finds a lot of Green ideas of great appeal, he wrote a whole book about it - and if the Green Party continues to push those ideas, they'll continue to be before the public. And no factual unelectability of Greens, nor personal grudges against Ralph Nader, will prevent them from seeping into Democratic discourse. If they do not, it will be for other reasons.

Yeah. Because they're wrong.

I mean, geez, even Al Gore was a Green, by your accounting. That's enough to make my head spin: Al Gore, successful example of the ineluctable osmosis of Green ideas into the Democratic Party: so successful that the Green Party and Ralph Nader targeted Al Gore for defeat because of his supposed impermeability to progressive ideas.

Mary Kay Kare: People who voted for Nader, for whatever reason, are probably just as appalled at what the Bushies are doing as those of us who voted for Gore. This makes them our allies. Don't turn on them.

There were members of the Green party *pleading* with Nader to not run in any state where there might be doubt as to the outcome. Nader and his backers ignored that.

They might have been our allies -- but they aren't. Remember. "Gore and Bush are just the same."

Aphrael: Given that, if you believe that the two-party system is politically wrongheaded, the most effective thing you can do to change it is to vote for third party candidates.

Not if the result is to hand the country into tyranny. Furthermore, third-parties in the US do not fly when the two majors are strong, more on that in a moment. They can leverage themselves into major party status, by waiting for one of the majors to collapse -- see "Whigs" for an example.

Simon Shoedecker: Erik says that 3d-party candidates can't win. How does he know this ahead of time? Because the polls tell him so.

No. I know this *long before* the first poll is written, much less published. You don't need the press to tell you this (though the fact that they do, repeatedly, is one of the reasons third parties can't win.)

The entire US election system is strongly anchored around two parties, period. From federal funding, to ballot rules, to press coverage, it is built to explicity support two parties over all the rest.

Third parties get screwed in so many ways, it's hard to even count. Note that the most succesful non major-party candidates are not third party candidates -- they're pure independents, which is acutally easier.

You can argue that Ross Perot was an exception, but the Reform party *was* Ross Perot, and it's collapse into irrelevance shows that. Jesse Ventura ran on the Reform ticket (which, since Perot had done well, let him onto the ballot) but had no connection to the party as a whole.

If you want to build a third party, you cannot do so by winning the Presidency. The traditional way new parties gain the highest office is to wait until on of the old parties disitengrates, merge with some of the remnants, and use that as a leg up. You might be able to do it from the bottom up -- start with your local legislatures, get your candidates known in the state, work your way up. But the system is built to support the Big Two, and keep you down.

So, when faced with an *obvious* threat as Bush, if you chose to support Nader, well, that's fine. You can argue until the FBI takes you away that you made a noble and principled stand.

And, in case you haven't figured this out, the US is 9 Senators away from complete and unfettered Tyranny. The GOP gets cloture, and the game is over, they won, and you have lost. Anyone who doesn't belive that the GOP should be allowed to do this has bascially one choice -- get GOP officeholders out of office. Period.

Who's going to do that? Not the Greens.

Timothy Burke:

I mean, geez, even Al Gore was a Green, by your accounting. That's enough to make my head spin: Al Gore, successful example of the ineluctable osmosis of Green ideas into the Democratic Party: so successful that the Green Party and Ralph Nader targeted Al Gore for defeat because of his supposed impermeability to progressive ideas.

A. O. L.

"I recall a 36-day fight which Gore lost because the other side fought dirtier and had control of the refereeing apparatus."

I recall that time very well, and do not recall a single day that passed without my screaming at my tv "fight back damn you!"

Gore failed that test of leadership on every conceivable level if for no other reason than he and his surrogates refused to state for the record what Bush and his minions were doing. He had the national stage but, like McKinley, chose to campaign from his front porch.

I came out of the ranks of labor and for me the most unforgivable error was Gore telling Miami labor NOT to go to City Hall when the Republicans staged their "bourgeoise" riot. How different history might have been if newspapers had been forced to report that among the many battered and bleeding casualties admitted to the local hospitals that night were innumerable Republican Congressional staffers.

The time has come to hold Republicans accountable. We need to support those isolated Democrats who are trying to make a difference. They didn't all die in a plane crash in northern Minnesota.

Erik, sweets, I didn't say Nader, a man who is no one's friend but his own apparently, but those people who may have voted for him for whatever reason. They are the ones whom we must rally to our side for the next time in order to end this mess. If we can end this mess. I'm not at all sanguine.

MKK

Timothy Burke: Al Gore is a Green, to just about the same extent that FDR was a Socialist. FDR wasn't really anything of the sort, but he got called it a lot, because many of his policies were Socialist policies from the days of Debs.

Similarly, Gore has what look exactly like Green policies to those who don't hold them. Gore would have implemented the Kyoto accords. You don't think that every Republican in the nation considers that wild-eyed environmentalist radical nonsense? Come on, that's exactly what they were calling Gore throughout the campaign, the same way Republicans called FDR a Socialist.

Of course the Green Party was still unhappy with Gore. Don't you know the fiercest political battles are fratricidal? Isn't there always great anger at someone who comes part of the way with you and no further? And isn't there always a tendency to exaggerate that difference? Most of all, hasn't the main theme of this thread been the argument that Greens and Democrats should have pulled together in the face of GWB, because they have more in common than what separates them?

If you're really laughing at the notion that there's anything Green about Gore, or if the Nader campaign rhetoric convinces you that Gore is impervious to progressivism, then your political naivite exceeds my expectations.

Erik Olson: You're arguing against a lot of things I didn't say, but while it's certainly true that the system is biased towards the major parties, that bias can be overcome, if enough people want it to. I mentioned uptopic that at one point in the 1980 campaign, Anderson actually led in the polls as the preferred presidential candidate, and it was only the belief that "3rd party candidates can't win" that kept him from leading in actual voting intention at the time.

I'm not sure I follow your argument about Ventura. He won: therefore a 3rd-party candidate can win. But you emphasize his lack of connection with the Reform Party apparatus, as if that were an explanation of his winning. So he won because ... he was actually an independent? Is that what you mean? Well, fine: the 2-party bias is no less succeptible to being overcome because of that. What he calls himself, how large his organization is outside of his campaign, doesn't affect the point. (The extent to which you're addressing 3rd parties as continuing organizations, rather than the possibility of winning a single likely election - that's where you're addressing matters I didn't discuss.)

Mark, you are still describing a different timeline than the one I lived in. In my timeline, Gore and his minions were very active for those 36 days.

Also, in my timeline, bruised and bleeding Republican staffers would only have provided the Republicans with another opportunity to claim falsely that it was the Democrats who were fighting dirty.

No offense, but you sound like a Gore supporter. Everything by the rules and maintain decorum while you're getting mugged. Gore not fighting back legitimized Bush's theft of the election.

But don't get me wrong -- I'm still glad Gore lost. He just wasn't tough enough to keep the Republicans from stealing everything in sight with the cooperation of the Liebermans, Breaux and Kerrys and all the other pro-big business Democrats.

This is about much more than who runs the country. It's about the massive transfer of middle and lower class earnings to the ever greedier ultrarich. And the real crime wasn't/isn't Republican duplicity as much as it is Democratic complicity.

Sorry if that sounds a bit radical for you, but I've got LOTS of stats to back that up. The sad truth is that on the economy Bill Clinton was a middle of the road Republican and it took until the waning days of his administration for the boom to trickle down to the worker bees.

We need a regime change, not just a change in leaders.

I Voted for Nader - I would do so again in a heartbeat. The only way for change to take place in this country is for enough people to agree with me. Once that happens and the Greens get 5% of the vote they get matching funds. once THAT happens there is the possibility that the greens can get in on some of the debates, get media coverage, and possibly win an election. Until enough people agree with me we are stuck with choosing between the facist rebulicrats or the spineless democans. That is no choice at all.

Erik Olson: You're arguing against a lot of things I didn't say, but while it's certainly true that the system is biased towards the major parties, that bias can be overcome, if enough people want it to. I mentioned uptopic that at one point in the 1980 campaign, Anderson actually led in the polls as the preferred presidential candidate, and it was only the belief that "3rd party candidates can't win" that kept him from leading in actual voting intention at the time.

Erik, sweets, I didn't say Nader, a man who is no one's friend but his own apparently, but those people who may have voted for him for whatever reason. They are the ones whom we must rally to our side for the next time in order to end this mess.

Mary Kay, dear, I wasn't talking about Nader. I was talking about the people who apparently think the correct idea is to make it easier for Bush to win by voting for a non-Bush candidate who *cannot* win. This is, at best, sheer ignorance, at worst, the kind of egregiousness best seen in this post:

But don't get me wrong -- I'm still glad Gore lost. He just wasn't tough enough to keep the Republicans from stealing everything in sight with the cooperation of the Liebermans, Breaux and Kerrys and all the other pro-big business Democrats.

So, now, everything in site is being stolen by the GOP businessmen, and the chances of the Greens getting *any* say in what happens to them has gone from slim to none.

This is not an ally. This will not help me save this country. This is a declaration that Bush is, in fact, better than Gore.

That's the Greens. That's Nader voters. At best, they are too stupid to see the huge differences between Gore and Bush, at worst, they don't care -- they just know that Gore should lose.

Well, Gore lost. And, they *revel* in the fact.

These are not allies.

No. The systems isn't merely biased against third parties, it is activley built to prevent them from winning. And, you are citing a "preffered candidate" poll, which are infamous for having nothing to do with who actually wins. It's easy to say "I want Steve Jobs!" when a pollster asks you who'd you prefer, but come election day, rational people realize that Jobs isn't going to win, and vote for someone with a chance of winning.

This is why the hardest, and most worked at, issue in political polling is not finding out who the favorite candidate is -- it's finding out which candidate is going to get voted for.

Cite all the polls you want. Hell, *eliminate polling.* See how far third parties get. See if they even get on the ballot.

Just for the record:

1. I don't want anyone to choke, especially Deb.

2. Gore is green. Nader is not; he is anti-corporate, which is something else.

3. Anyone who couldn't tell that Gore and Bush were vastly different by October of 2000 was not paying attention. I'm sorry, but it was as plain as the nose on my face and I won't be told that they were indistinguishable by someone who couldn't even bother to look.

How's about instead of polls I rely on my direct experience in having worked with 7,000+ resume clients since 1988? I understand first hand how people get jobs and how the compensation system works and how everyone not at the top is getting ripped off. The system has been gamed and both parties are involved in rigging the rules and cutting out the little guys.

Right now I'm worried sick that we're going into Iraq come hell or high water, and that tens of thousands of civilians will die needlessly. If that happens I'll sincerely regret my Nader vote until my dying day.

We're paying a high price with Bush but Ralph Nader was the guy who stood up and talked about how rotten the system was, and that earned my vote, flawed though Nader may have been. Forgive my conceit, but I think my vote is worth quite a lot, and I don't think most of the current crop of Democrats has earned my support. Gore most certainly didn't. And if you think the difference between the two parties is like night and day, then all I can say is, you don't know many people who work behind counters or with their hands, do you?

This isn't about abortion or medicinal marijuana or due process. It's about the right and the ability of people to earn a living wage and live in decent housing with access to affordable health care. On those counts both parties are complete and abject failures. More despicably, neither party even cares.

I didn't leave the party, the party left me. They owe me an apology, but I'll settle for a decent candidate.

My .03 in the kitty: I would venture as far to say that true friends don't hope their friends choke.

I'm certain the vile and open loathing non-Nader voters have for Nader voters is precisely what the Republican party needs. Keep it up, haters.

I know my opinion isn't solicited, but I'll give it because up to this point I agreed with this weblog and what its author had to say. Not after yesterday.

But keep it up, haters. The bitter rancor only makes the cancer spread faster. Only makes the days that much darker.

You know, now that we've all been down this road a million times, could we please consider renouncing the minuet where the Democrat says "You worked to destroy my party and the fallout has severely damaged the country and I'm really pissed off that you did that" and the Nader supporter says "You and your party are regressive and venal and I was virtuous to work to destroy you, even if the country goes straight to hell, because you're no better than the pack of rabid animals I helped to put in office and (more in sorrow than in anger) I have to point out that your hostility is really messing up our relationship"?

Actions have consequences. One of the lesser consequences of choosing a candidate who chased votes in swing states, along than the whole mortally wounded democracy thing and the deficit and the war and kids losing school lunches, is that people aren't happy about what you've helped bequeath to us are really pissed off at what you did.

What did you expect?

Folks, I'd venture to say that you've all got your heads up your asses.

The thugs and the theocrats made it very plain, when they publically stole an election, and have continued to make it plain, when they appoint convicted criminals to high offices and lie routinely to everyone that they *do not care about democratic processes.*

At all. Not one whit. They're not trying to game the American system; they're trying to destroy it, in favour of one they expect to like better.

They're not going to stop when they lose -- if they can be caused to acknowledge losing, having put in vote counting machinery that produces uncheckable results -- an election.

They're going to stop if and only if their money and power is taken away from them.

Doing that requires, well, it requires the survival of government, the widespread adoption throughout the United States of a model of government recognized as legitimate, the support of real public policy, and the destruction of the legal principle that corporations have civil rights.

Voting isn't going to get you that no matter what you do. (Those spineless Democratic pols? They know that bit about not giving up, very clearly, that the options, the real, long term options, are accession to the rule of thugs and theocrats or civil war. None of them wants to be the first to die, since pols are generally not people with burning ideological fervor, and I doubt many of them are hopeful for eventual good results via either outcome.

General strikes won't do it; putting ten million people on the street won't do it. They don't care what you think and don't recognize the legitimacy of representative democracy.

It's easy to say now, when the cabal Dubya fronts for has fucked up beyond -- if not worst nightmares -- then beyond unreasonable expectation. Back when they were stealing Florida, avoiding civil war might well have seemed like the greater priority to Al Gore; I can't read his mind, and I don't know what he was thinking, but, well, given the information he