Unreasonable

Hey, it wasn't just the Naderites blowing off the centrist wing; the spurning went both ways. DLC ideology ruled the day. It's not like Nader stole voters that belonged to Al Gore; Al Gore intentionally adopted positions that some liberal voters simply could not stomach.

For the life of me, I cannot remember Nader recommending a Dem loss as wakeup call. What I remember him saying is that the two major parties are similarly corrupt.

Not bitter, but still convinced his 3rd party screwed us up.

The availability of a 3d party candidate still wasn't enough to throw the election to Bush without Florida shenanigans.

Why not blame Al Gore's campaign for not trying to court those disenchanted voters back into the fold?

dj--let me ask the question I ask of all Nader apologists. Which state does Gore win by running left?

And, of course, without Nader Bush couldn't have stolen the election.

For the life of me, I cannot remember Nader recommending a Dem loss as wakeup call.

I don't know if Nader himself ever argued this (I doubt he did) but I do recall Nader supporters making this argument.

DJ-- let's be frank. It was Nader's fault. He will bear the burden of history for the deaths of many thousands of people. That's all there is to it.

It's just not clear to me why the onus should be on the voter to explain why he failed to vote for a candidate who feels entitled to his/her vote.

Gore calculated that a run to the very center was the way to go, and he lost significant votes on the left. One can argue--as you seem to be doing--that the loss in '00 would have been worse if he had run left, and lost votes in the center. But Al Gore's positioning within the Democratic ideological spectrum was a decision that he made. It seems very odd to say that the only people who can possibly be blamed for the consequences of that decision are the people who decided that Al's decision didn't sit well with them.

I'm no fan of Nader, and I think his candidacy is responsible for Bush winning in 2000. But it's a free country, and anyone can run for President. If the center and the left couldn't hold together enough to beat Bush, that's not Nader's fault.

This is a pet peeve of mine. What exactly is "Leninist" about the "get worse to get better" idea? I have never ever seen anyone, say, quote Lenin to show this. It seems to be a self-sustaining urban legend.

On which issues should Gore have run left? Serious question, keeping in mind that this is about how he campaigned, not about he would have governed.

On which issues should Gore have run left?

Trade and corporate oversight.

"Now, was that a price worth paying for the dead in Iraq, the torture, etc.? I don't really think so"

Don't really think so? Wow, Matt, that's a strange way of saying "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

The details are in the "etc.". How about global warming, corruption on an unprecedented scale, serfing USA -- the etc. goes on and on. And the justification for this monumental Nader-spawned catastrophe is that some Dems seem to have momentarily straightened their spine? I don't really think so.

Nader wasn't exactly the only other guy on the ballot, nor the only guy to Al Gore's left. You guys also need to be blaming all the people who voted Socialist, right? Because they also shouldn't have voted for the guy they wanted. And of course, the people who voted for, you know, George Bush.

This is a pet peeve of mine. What exactly is "Leninist" about the "get worse to get better" idea? I have never ever seen anyone, say, quote Lenin to show this.

I believe the actual analogy is supposed to be to the failure of German Communists to make common cause with Social-Democrats against the Nazis, which would make it Stalinist.

>Now, was that a price worth paying for the dead in Iraq, the torture, etc.? I don't really think so.

You "don't really think so"? How is it even close? No way the thousands of dead Americans and Iraqis are worth any political price.

The question is simple, and it is less for Nader than for those who voted for him. Knowing what you know now, about Iraq, about torture, about the unitary executive, about the tax cuts for the very wealthy, about the warrantless wiretapping, about the Patriot Act, about Guantanamo, about the de facto suspension of habeas corpus, do you still think that your vote for Nader was a wide use of your small bit of political power?
If Senators Clinton, Kerry and Edwards are to be called to account for enabling the war in Iraq by their misguided vote for the AUMF, why should you not be called to account for your votes for Nader, when they were needed to defeat Bush?

DJ -- you seem to be missing the point. Nader knew when he was running that he likely would be able to tip the scales towards Bush. If he had chosen not to run, do you believe that all of those voters would have voted for the local anarcho-syndicalist candidate?

Tom is right -- every Nader voter should be held to the same standard that we hold pro-Iraq war senators and congressmen. Unless you fucking apologize ten ways from sunday, you are not forgiven.

Knowing what you know now. . .do you still think that your vote for Nader was a wide use of your small bit of political power?

Well, I voted for Nader, but I was in California, where there was absolutely no way in hell that Nader was going to take the state. Had I lived in Florida (where I come from), I would never have run that risk.

But in the defense of the Floridians who lost the state for Gore--and I don't mean the Palm Beach County "Jews for Buchanan" in this instance--we didn't know then what we know now. War, of course, was hardly a big issue, and to the extent that it was, Bush came across as the isolationist.

The issues that were at stake in the actual election were much more about the management of the economy and globalization, and to say that Gore didn't come across as being significantly to Bush's left would be a bit of an understatement. That "lockbox" was a catchy theme, though, I have to give them credit for that.

On trade, from the 2000 platform:

It’s clear we live in a globalized world — and that there is no turning back. But globalization is neither good nor evil. It is a fact — and we have to deal with it. Democrats believe we must be leaders in the new global economy, not followers. We believe that globalization will work for all Americans only if there are rules of the road, as in the domestic economy, that promote both a strong economy and our basic American values.

We need to make the global economy work for all. That means making sure that all trade agreements contain provisions that will protect the environment and labor standards, as well as open markets in other countries. Al Gore will insist on and use the authority to enforce worker rights, human rights, and environmental protections in those agreements. We should use trade to lift up standards around the world, not drag down standards here at home.

True open trade is not just about profits, but about people; not a race to the bottom, but a dash to the top; about a rising tide lifting the boats of workers here and abroad; about reinforcing the values of freedom and liberty and the rule of law in the hearts and minds of people everywhere. The test of open trade in the years ahead is whether it empowers the many and not just the few, whether its blessings are widely shared, whether it helps to lift the poor out of poverty; and whether it works for working people.

Democrats know that to build a new consensus for more open trade, we must give workers the tools they need to compete in the global economy and support rules that will protect workers’ rights, human rights, and environmental protections. That’s why our lifelong learning and skill development proposals are so important. American workers need access to ongoing skills development so that they have the tools they need to succeed in the New Economy. In addition, our trade adjustment assistance programs should be improved so that all affected workers receive timely and adequate assistance, including measures to address health care coverage and pension protections.

With the leadership of Al Gore, Democrats helped America’s steel industry weather the effects of the Asian financial crisis. As President, Al Gore will move aggressively to reduce our overall trade deficit and stop the erosion of good paying manufacturing jobs. This includes negotiating tough agreements to reduce our persistent automotive trade imbalances with our major trading partners. We must continue to monitor imports and, consistent with the World Trade Organization, ensure that the United States utilizes all of its trade laws and other mechanisms, including product specific safeguards, to stop quickly and effectively any import surges when they threaten our workers and communities.

The President should be able to negotiate trade agreements with the nations of the world and should include worker rights, human rights, and environmental protections in those agreements, as well as market opening initiatives. At the same time, Al Gore will challenge American companies to ensure labor protections and worker safety at their overseas operations. And U.S. representatives at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank should also seek to advance fair treatment for workers internationally. We should create an environment in which electronic commerce can flourish globally as it has here in America. We are committed to supporting the rights of workers around the world. And we should vigorously monitor trade agreements to make sure other nations are not shirking their responsibilities.

I actually voted for Nader in 2000. I didn't know nearly as much about politics as I do now, but I probably did know more then the average voter. I never thought Nader would make a good president, but in retrospect he couldn't have been worse then Bush.

So, why did I vote for him? Well, I didn't like either Bush or Gore, and neither one of them did anything to appeal to me, at the same time I felt like it was my "duty" as an American to vote. I also voted for Bill Bradley in the Iowa caucus, because (ironically enough) he was more "economically centrist". The only reason I became a democrat, at that time, was because I figured that going to a democratic caucus would just be more fun then one held by stodgy old republicans. I've been a registered democrat ever since, but at the time it was just a necessity in order to caucus.

But what really irritated me was the way that Gore supporters acted like he deserved my vote. WTF is that? The sense of ownership of my vote displayed Gore supporters irritated the hell out of me. Why the hell did I owe them anything?

And again, Bush in 2000 looked nothing like Bush after the election. If I had known what was going to happen, I wouldn't have voted for him, obviously, but how could I have known?

The whole idea of pandering to the right and to special interests (who else opposes universal healthcare?) in, order to win votes, is idiotic. But gore bought it hook line and sinker.

For the life of me, I cannot remember Nader recommending a Dem loss as wakeup call. What I remember him saying is that the two major parties are similarly corrupt.

I remember a quote from him in an article saying that.

And I think it turned out to be true. The Democratic Party today, is far more vital and controls congress. I think we'll win in '08, as well. The Republican Party may be out of power for a long time, and that's a good thing.

Although I doubt you're average Iraqi would look at things that way.

Tom is right -- every Nader voter should be held to the same standard that we hold pro-Iraq war senators and congressmen. Unless you fucking apologize ten ways from sunday, you are not forgiven.
Posted by: IP Guy on February 3, 2007 01:37 PM

I don't give a crap about your forgiveness. I don't owe you a damn thing and I never have.

I assume that all people who voted for Nader in states where things were close assumed that it didn't matter if Bush or Gore won. In solid blue or red states it didn't really matter and I probably would have voted for Nader had I lived in one of them.

We'll never know for sure if it would have mattered.

But considering the way things have gone since 2000 it's hard for me to imagine that Gore policy would not have been significantly different (and by different I mean better) than W's.

So my working assumpion that they were wrong, that there was a significant difference between the two candidates. But to each their own conscience, they made their choice and it can't be undone. I certainly would not trust the political judgement of a Nader voter (in a borderline state like Florida) but that's a separate issue.

I think that Nader's campaign was a terrible mistake, but I don't think that the issue is what Gore should have done differently in 2000, or who whould have been nominated instead of Gore.

When Reagan was elected, Nader found to his surprise that no one paid any attention to him any more. His issues all died. 12 years later, when Clinton came to office, he thought that that would change, bit it didn't because Clinton was a corporate Democrat. (Nader first ran for Prez in 1996, though no one noticed.)

In other words, Clinton's triangulation had a lot to do with it. Liberals were being told in ono uncertain terms, "Take it or leave it", and unfortunately, some of us left it.

A second more controversial point: I believe that some influential people in the Democratic Party with center-right agendas realized that if the party remained weak, and especially if it put less effort into party-building, message development, and message dissemination (what "soft money" was theoretically for), it would always be possible to say "We must move to the right because that's what will win elections".

The rightward move also brought $$$$ into the party, and the operatives and consultants recommending the rightward move were all about $$$$.

Within a 2000-2006 perspective Nader looks awful, but within a 1992-2000 perspective it's possible to see what he was trying to do. By 2000 the Clintonistas had been ignoring him for 8 years. (And of course, from a corporate Democrat point of view, the Clintonistas were right to do so.)

Chad,

You're correct, you don't need my forgiveness, and you owe me nothing -- I was talking about the forgiveness of the dead in Iraq. They may have a different opinion.

If I had voted for Nader, I would ask for their forgiveness every day. And I would understand if it was never granted.

Also, everyone who failed to vote at all needs the forgiveness of everyone in Iraq. Turnout was about 50%.

John Emerson --

Amen, brother.

Seriously, IP guy, that kind of bloody shirt waving is obnoxious. If you'd had one, you probably would have thrown in a cute puppy with big brown eyes being killed. No one can know all the outcomes of every choice they make, and disasters are always possible. Were people who voted for LBJ responsible for the Vietnam War?

Well, for things like tax cuts and Supreme Court justices--things where the differences were plainly foreseeable--I think Naderites and non-voters can be held accountable for the consequences of their negligence. But there was an intervening event--i.e., 9/11--that renders all or most of the civil liberties and war stuff an unforeseeable consequence of Bush's election.

The only rational motive for a Nader run in 2000 would be to gain the Green Party enough votes (5%) to gain eligibility for federal funding of future runs. The way to do that is to go where lots of liberal voters live, places like Berkeley, CA, Cambridge, MA and Manhatten. However, this is not what Nader did. In the last two weeks of the campaign, he appeared almost exclusively in swing states in an attempt to make Gore lose. This is what I cannot forgive.

And then there is fact that four years later, Nader is still arguing that there is no difference between the Democrats and Republicans.

John --

Fair enough, and it is pretty obnoxious, I'll admit (and I apologize for perhaps being a bit over the top). But I think that we in the progressive community ask a lot of our politicians -- and we should ask no more of ourselves. If we want to confront Senators who voted for the Iraq war, and request that they (in effect) apologize for a lot of things that they honestly didn't foresee, then we need to do the same to ourselves. We are far too easy on ourselves, and far too quick to blame our politicians. Nader voters need to ask for forgivenes, the way we all ask for forgiveness when we make a mistake -- to those who were hurt, whether that was our intention or not. But what bothers me is the fact that many Nader voters (particularly those who were in battleground states -- I don't really have too much of a problem with Nader voters in, say, California, where it obviously would make little difference) refuse to acknowledge their mistake. Just as we in the progressive community would not forgive a Democratic Senator who continued to believe their vote was the correct one on Iraq, we need to hold ourselves to the same standard. That's all.

DJ Moonbat --
I understand that we did not know then what we know now, and that it was possible to draw some distinctions between Gore and Nader that would lead a person to vote for Nader. And contra IP Guy, I am not dealing in forgiveness. What I am arguing is that in almost every circumstance that I can imagine, the differences between Republicans and Democrats is so great, and potentially so dangerous, that voting for a third candidate is a very risky proposition.
I am old enough to remember believing that it made no difference at all whether Humphrey or Nixon won the election in 1968. I am old enough to remember declaiming in a public meeting that it was inconceivable that any President could be worse than Lyndon Johnson. Obviously I didn't know then what I know now.
The point is that in just a few clicks of the mouse, you can read people saying that they would NEVER NEVER EVER vote for Hillary Clinton for President, that they would rather write in the name of Molly Ivins, ad infinitum.
But we do know now what we didn't know then, and we need to act on it.

If I had voted for Nader, I would ask for their forgiveness every day. And I would understand if it was never granted.

First of all, my state went for gore anyway, so it didn't make any difference whatsoever.

Second of all, there is no realistic way anyone could have expected the Iraq war based on Bush's 2000 campaign. If he had run on a platform of going to war with Iraq, I would have voted against him.

That's the difference between Nader voters and Senators who voted for the war. It was obvious that there was a good chance we would go to war if the measure was approved, but there was no reason to think that voting for someone other then Gore would have resulted in war.

Blaming Nader voters for the war is like blaming a Rape Victim for being in the park that night. If she hadn't been there, she wouldn't have been raped, right? It was her choice to go, and so she's responsible for the rape.

Whatever.

Demanding public contrition for past political affiliation--I like this cut-rate Stalinism. Tough on defense; tough on crimes of ideology. There's a good slogan for Democratic victory. For the Party!

Couldn't all the Ralphites just say the Kol Nidre or something?

Nader's run in 2000 proves that the two-party system will be here forever. I don't particularly draw any more lessons beyond that.

IOZ --

Now THAT was funny. I don't think we should demand public contrition. Contrary to what some of my earlier posts may have sounded like, my problem is the opposite, really: we should not be faced with holier-than-thou attitudes from people who made a serious mistake that cost thousands of lives. A lot of Nader supporters fall into that category (and to be fair, not many who hang out on these boards) and that attitude is insufferable, and causes many of us fairly calm, normal types to turn into Stalinists.

When is the group hate?

The problem isn't with Nader or Gore, rather the "winner takes all" system of the US and UK is inherently flawed.

I still have sour memories of people my age at the college I was going to admitting that okay, maybe some other people would get hurt by Bush's policies that wouldn't otherwise get hurt in a Gore administration, but by God, that's a price they were willing to pay for the health of The Progressive Movement. Very noble of them. Reminds me of the chickenhawks who cheer on war when they're not affected by it.

The argument that Nader didn't cost Gore the election because Gore should have done X is a non sequiter. In an election that close, you can point to any one factor out of 20 and say, "If even one had been done differently, Gore would have won." Nader was one of those factors. Pointing out other factors doesn't rebut the argument. Especially when the most popular Naderite arguments ("Gore should have won his conservative home state of Tennessee") undermine the central rationale behind Nader's candidacy ("Gore is running too conservative.").

Re: The argument that Democratic Party leaders should have started chasing after Green voters in the wake of 2000.

According to the 2000 CNN Exit Poll:

*2% of Democrats voted for Nader, whereas 11% voted for Bush.

*6% of independents voted for Nader, whereas 47% voted for Bush.

*2% of moderates voted for Nader, whereas 44% voted for Bush.

and, most interestingly,

*6% of liberals voted for Nader, whereas 13% voted for Bush.

As Katha Pollitt noted after the election, "The Greens...failed to dislodge the old progressive voting blocs--feminists, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, labor. The typical Nader voter was a young white man, college educated but income poor. Nader did well among students, independents and Perot voters; outside a few left strongholds--Madison, Portland, Berkeley, western Massachusetts--his best counties were rural, his best state Alaska (10 percent), of all places. None of this sounds like a recipe for a powerful progressive voting bloc."

Now, tell me, you're the leader of the Democratic Party in the wake of the 2000 election. You've got a 2002 Senate calander that's tilted towards Southern and Mountain West states that Bush won heavily. You've got GOP legislatures redistricting Democratic House incumbents into more Republican seats. For the 2% of Democrats who thought Gore was too conservative, you've got 11% who thought he was too liberal.

Are you seriously suggesting that the smartest political strategy for the Democrats at that point would have been to adopt the Green Party platform? To somehow make Tim Johnson, Max Cleland, Mary Landrieu, etc., renounce their prior voting records and campaign on freeing Mumia, ending the drug war, cutting the defense budget in half, paying reparations for slavery, and opposing military action in Afghanistan after 9/11? Would taking this course of action would have activated massive amounts of non-voters to take to the streets in joy and, even though they disagreed, won the respect of moderates and conservative voters for the Democrats' new "authenticity"? Is this what you're suggesting? If it's not, if this is an unfair caricature, then what?

My suspicion is that what most Nader voters really want is to remain pure and be able to hector everyone else for their lack of purity. This is what makes them happy.

Obviously it isn't the case that Nader voters in 2000 may have been among the few members of the American electorate who not only did their constitutional duty in turning out to vote but actually voted their conscience. It is also not the case that the classier politicians as well as their supporters are humble in victory, and take responsibility for their own defeat. I have found in my own life that investing a great deal of time blaming my irresponsible father for my position in life has advanced that position in innumerable and positive ways.

"I believe the actual analogy is supposed to be to the failure of German Communists to make common cause with Social-Democrats against the Nazis, which would make it Stalinist."

I would trace it more to the Zimmerwald Conference before WWI; differences with the Mensheviks & SDP's; and collapse of the International (2nd? 3rd?)

Wikipedia is not bad on "Leninism" in quotes because there are at least three ways it is used; the others being state/party communism as opposed to council communism or syndicalism; and Leninist revolutionary military tactics as opposed to say Maoist tactics.

From Wiki:"Leninism holds that capitalism can only be overthrown by revolutionary means; that is, any attempts to reform capitalism from within, such as Fabianism and non-revolutionary forms of democratic socialism are doomed to fail"

This does not necessarily involve making conditions worse; it does involve not making conditions marginally better.

You are welcome.

I forgot to get to this earlier, but Matt: it is unbelievably fucked-up for you—who advocated the war at one point—to be trying to lay the war at the feet of Nader supporters, for whom the war was utterly unforeseeable.

I would trace it more to the Zimmerwald Conference before WWI

I definitely remember people taunting Naderites with the slogan "Nach Hitler, uns!"

I don't buy Matt's theory at all. The Democrats don't have some kind of entitlement to progressive votes any more than they have an entitlement to anyone else's vote. Saying progressive voters can only cast a protest vote when it couldn't possibly matter is essentially asking progressive voters to throw away the only weapon in their arsenal: the threat to vote for a progressive third-party candidate (or stay home). If progressives just show up and vote for Democrats no matter how far right the Democrats move, you'll have removed any incentive Democrats have to pay attention to the concerns of progressive voters rather than the concerns of Big Money and "swing voters".

Chris: the Nader bloc proved not to be much of a bloc, but you have to look at the Nader issues in their substance. Everything isn't about an election tactics.

And voting for a war really is voting for war, whereas failing to vote for a candidate who probably wouldn't have started the war is NOT voting for war.

Now, was that a price worth paying for the dead in Iraq, the torture, etc.? I don't really think so.

This is too much, Mr. Yglesias. dj moonbat is not the only reader here who remembers where you initially stood on the war. We might have to put you in the box with Andrew Sullivan.

In 2000, the Naderites put forth a somewhat testable hypothesis: that a Democratic loss in 2000 would make the Democratic party, more progressive. Thus, if the Democratic candidate in 2004 was more liberal than Al Gore, the hypothesis was vindicated; if the candidate was more conservative, the hypothesis was shown to be wrong.

I think it's clear that John Kerry was not a more liberal candidate than Al Gore; in no way would a Kerry presidency in 2004 have been more liberal than a Gore presidency in 2000. If a Democrat wins in 2008, I don't anticipate that win to usher in a more liberal era than a putative Gore presidency. As a bonus, we will have suffered under eight years of... everything we've been suffering under.

So without questioning the motives of Naderites, I think it's pretty clear that their project was a failure, and harmful for the country.

One of the most ridiculous statements from Vietnam was "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

One of the most ridiculous concepts from Naderites is "...a period of Republican governance would pull the Democrats in a more progressive direction in terms of, for example, questioning 'Washington Consensus' globalization"

Assuming a properly formed concience voting one's concience is a good thing, otherwise it is merely an exercise in narcissism.

Back in 2000, Nader voters knew they were about to do the wrong thing for what they felt was the "right" reason. In order to justify themselves they claimed that there was no difference between Gore and Bush, and they claimed that a Democratic loss would be good for the Democrats and for America. In short, they knew they were handing the election to Bush, and they did so with their eyes wide open, with forethought, even with predictions that it would be "good."

Naderites didn't force Bush to do any of the things that he's done, but just like the guy who turns his keys over to a drunk, they bear responsibility for setting in motion a chain of events which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, in the squandering of nearly a trillion dollars, and in the wrecking of America.

But they voted their concience, so there's no questioning their dedication to themselves.

As we get ready to hold our noses and vote for Hillary --
Pro-invading Iraq
Pro-invading Iran
Pro-drug war
Pro-Likud
Pro globalization/corporatization
Anti-Kyoto compliance
Anti Single Payer Universal Health Care
Thinks video games are a problem

--we really do have to ask ourselves, at some point, doesn't it make sense to vote for someone who actually has good positions on important issues? Do we give up any hope of building a third party, and continually enable the DLC just because the alternative is worse? I don't have a good answer either, but it's a really sucky feeling looking forward to working hard and contributing money and devoting energy to electing someone who's disastrously wrong on every important issue.

PS: Gore didn't lose the election, therefore Nader could not possibly have cost him the election. Gore couldn't carry his home state, and then he and Lieberman gave Florida to Bush.

One very, very common refrain one hears about the Religious Right is that the Republican Party takes them for granted. If somebody with evangelical street cred ran as a third party, sapping the GOP of votes for a cycle, don't you think that would change pretty fast?

PS again:
Clinton/Gore -- opposed to putting locking cabin doors on airplanes because it would cost the airlines too much. (assuming a Pentagon-quality $1000 lock, four dollars extra per passenger for just one single flight)
Bush/Cheney -- opposed to putting locking cabin doors on airplanes, same reason.
Ralph Nader: For locking cabin doors long vefore 9/11. Only sane man in the race.
If electing Nader could have prevented 9/11, would those of us who voted for him be vindicated? (I'm in CA, so I did; if I'd been in Florida, I wouldn't have). Is the blood of every 9/11 victim on the hands of people who didn't vote for Nader?

All of this is well and good, but it ignores the central point: Nader knew that by running a serious 3rd party campaign he would likely elect George W. Bush. People who voted for Nader knew that the most they could hope for in terms off electoral success was that they might be electing George W. Bush.

Moreover, on the Iraq war thing, Matt has apologized. Most of the relevant senators have apologized. Hell, even Andrew Sullivan has apologized. I have not heard Ralph Nader apologize.

Leaves us centrist demos pretty much screwed, doesn't it?

Gore has only himself to blame for that wooden, kludgy, faux-populist ("I don't have my heart in this") campaign that annoyed even his friends. And you want Leninist, just give as bit of thought to what a Nader presidency would have looked like.

Bruce: Like what, for example?

I don't understand the antipathy: yes, there have been negative consequences to Nader's run. But if a group of people is part of a coalition that (a) disregards their concerns, and (b) insists that they fall into line when election season rolls around, what is that group to do?

one of the memes floating about in the Nadersphere has, I think, been vindicated: Namely the basically Leninist idea that a Democratic loss and a period of Republican governance would pull the Democrats in a more progressive direction

How can you say this approach has been vindicated when the "vindicating" event is clearly an outlier when it comes to Republican administrations? I recall the argument you're talking about, but I certainly don't recall it ever being framed as "the Bush administration would be the worst presidency in our history, and would launch at least one unprovoked quagmire of a war, etc." If we hadn't gotten attacked eight months into his term, would anything happen to vindicate Nader's claim?

just give as bit of thought to what a Nader presidency would have looked like

I believe a Nader presidency would look a lot like pigs flying out of Ralph's ass.

I really, really don't see how anyone can defend Nader after 2004. I think it's pretty clear that the goal of Nader 2000 was to sink Gore's campaign - see, for instance, Nader's determined attempt to campaign in swing states, where there were fewer Green votes to pick up, but where he could take the biggest chunk out of Gore - but even if one accepts that Nader was simply a well-intentioned patsy in 2000, his motives in 2004 were pretty fucking clear. After three years of Bush, Iraq, Guantanamo and state-sponsored torture, no one could honestly claim that there wasn't "a dime's worth of difference" between Bush and Gore, but there was Ralph, repeating the same "Stop the Republocrats" mantra.

And then there were always the little moments, like when people asked him about the right-wing court judges Bush would appoint to the courts, and the effect they would have on gay and reproductive rights, which Ralph dismissed as "genital politics."

People who believe that Gore's presidency would have been a victory for progressives should reconsider in light of the fact that he had Joe Lieberman as his VP candidate. If you knew then what you know now about Lierberman as a DINO (democrat in name only) would you still be so excited about a Gore presidency in 2000?

Additionally, it is such nonsense to keep up this whine about Nader losing the election for Gore. Nader did not lose the election for Gore. Gore lost the election for Gore.

And finally, progressive voters have a responsibility to vote their conscience for candidates who support their issues, whether or not those voters are in the Democratic Party. I for one with support Kucinich for the primaries, knowing that he will not win. And if Hillary wins the nomination, I will vote for anyone to the left of her who gets on the ballot, or I will write-in for a decent candidate who didn't make it to the ballot. Democratic Party candidates who support corporate issues and the NeoCon agenda do not deserve progressive votes.

Nader 2000 was a hope that, by having a sort of well-known name at the top of the ticket, we could achieve various ballot threshholds here and there that would get the Green Party on the ballot for the next election. Was Nader using us to keep Gore from winning the election, or were we using Nader?

Nader 2004 was something else entirely, which I wouldn't begin to defend. Any more than I'd defend the Neocon/DLC axis that runs the Democratic party.

How did the religious right get such a hammer-lock on the Republican Party 2001-2006? By putting forth their issues instead of falling into realpolitik compromise.

How is it that the political center has slid inexorably to the right in the last 30 years? By progressives continuously announcing that they would vote for the Democratic nominee no matter what.

Remember the right-wing beast Richard Nixon? He ended the draft, got 18-year-olds the right to vote, was toying with a guaranteed national income, went to China and pulled the U.S. troops out of Vietnam. That's not a tribute to Nixon. That's a statement about where the political center has moved from.

Perhaps Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry should be apologizing to all those suckers who compromised their consciences and got nothing to show for it.

You really can't falsify anything with a dataset of one instance. Politics involves a lot of gambling.

Alan asks "--we really do have to ask ourselves, at some point, doesn't it make sense to vote for someone who actually has good positions on important issues?"

Absolutely it does. But you've gotta start at the beginning, not the ending. The Moral Majority didn't start by running Falwell for president, it started by electing school board members and city council members, then state reps and congressmen, and then providing the winning margin for a president or two.

What have Nader and his team done? They ran one symbolic campaign designed to demonstrate Ralph's righeousness, drew off enough votes to throw the vote to their sworn political enemy, and then had the balls to declare themselves irrelevant to the result of the election, a goal better achieved by having Ralph stay home.

Here's a question: How is it that Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has had a greater progressive effect on actual governance in America in 4 years than Ralph Nader has in 40?

By his own statements, it seems Gore would have devoted more time and resources to stabilizing Afghanistan before invading Iraq. Assuming he won a second term, he would eventually have invaded Iraq and by the end of his second term we would be about where we are now.

This obviously depends on one's evaluation of the 'incompetence dodge'.

CP: We have multiple Greens on the Board of Supervisors and the School Board in SF, and came within an inch of electing a Green mayor, but you're right, and I agree with you. Still, as I said earlier, a lot of Greens viewed Nader as a way to achieve vote threshholds that would get us on the ballot next election. I don't think a lot of us were necessarily pro-Nader, although I might add that Nader has done more for pollution control, consumer protection, and product safety than a hundred Al Gores. In fact has done more for the public good in any one of those three areas than everything Al Gore has done put together. Not that I wouldn't vote for Gore if he ran now.

> What I am arguing is that in almost every
> circumstance that I can imagine, the
> differences between Republicans and
> Democrats is so great, and potentially
> so dangerous, that voting for a third
> candidate is a very risky proposition.

I just love how the actions of the DLC, the DLCers, and the Clintonites are just popped into the memory hole. IIRC I finally decided to vote for Gore in 2000 because Bush's actions as Gov of TX worried me, but right up to the time I left for the polling place I was considering voting for Nader /specifically because I was sick of the corporate-leaning, civil-liberties selling-out[1], triangulating behavior of the Clintonites/. To pretend that the actions of the DLC in _deliberatly_ dragging the Democratic Party as far to the right as they possibly could (and way, waaaaay to the right of the center) is just absurd. Why don't you people who did this, and who later were afraid to to oppose Bush on Iraq for /exactly the same triangulating reasons/ apologize to the dead in Iraq?!? Becuase that is _exactly_ where Nader got his support.

Cranky

[1] Yes, W is slamming the door on civil liberties. This process started with one WJC who sold out our personal privacy rights for starters.

Certainly there is something surreal about someone who supported the invasion of Iraq feeling bitter about the Naderites. What a noxious labyrinth! Maybe Lieberman helped Gore win Florida- but then Gore didn't 'win' Florida at all.

A lot of you seem to think democracy should be a kind of better dictatorship- one in which voters make the right choices, because they look into the future and see the consequences of their actions, and then the enlightened despot makes the right choices, because the voters chose the right person.

Here's a newsflash- it doesn't work that way.

And it especially doesn't work that way in America. There are reasons you're not carrying a national ID card that shows you voted in the last election. Frankly, considering how people are treated in America by the elites of both parties, you should be glad when they vote at all.

So, try to remember that if Gore-Lieberman had won, the Republican governor of Lieberman's state would have appointed his replacement in the Senate, and that the Gore you see today was nowhere in evidence in 2000.

Maybe voting is an abominable task in which, with fear and loathing, we vote against the worst candidate in the hopes of slowing the putrid growth of the ruling oligarchy. If that's your meta-narrative, you better start re-writing the books and citizenship pamphlets because, rightly or wrongly, that's not the way most of us see it.

Um, anyone who is arguing that Ralph was not using the utterly indefensible "things have to get worse before they get better" argument should probably take a look at some of his quotes.

"Let me tell you something: I'd rather have a provocateur than an anesthetizer in the White House. Remember what James Watt [Reagan's Secretary of the Interior] did for the environmental movement? He galvanized it. Gore and his buddy Clinton are anesthetizers. " Rolling Stone Q&A, 2000.

"After lambasting Gore as part of a do-nothing Clinton administration, Nader said, 'If it were a choice between a provocateur and an anesthetizer, I'd rather have a provocateur. It would mobilize us.' " LA Times, October 2000

So, tens to hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis later, even more thousands of lives ravaged, a war with no good end in sight, the incredible loss of civil liberties at home, an American tolerance for torture well underway, global warming running rampant ... how you feeling Ralph? You get what you wanted?

I guess he did. Fanatics always put causes over actual human beings.

The late, beloved Molly Ivins was, as usual, eloquent as hell about this, not to mention prescient, in her 2000 plea to swing staters.

"When I was your age, I was, I suspect, far angrier than most of you. Some people I loved died in Vietnam -- it was an ugly, bad, nasty time. We'll not go into it again, but in 1968, I could not bring myself to vote for Hubert Humphrey. So I helped elect Richard Nixon president by writing in Gene McCarthy; and if you ask me, 30 years on, it's hard to think of a worse turn I could have done my country ...

"I know it's hard for young people to envision age or illness, or the sick feeling of frantic despair when your old wreck of a car finally dies (it always does this in traffic) and will not start again. People who work two and even three jobs to support their kids get so tired -- you can't imagine how tired -- and guilt and depression and anxiety all pile on, too. The difference between Gore and Bush matters to those folks ...

"In the primaries, I vote to change the world; in November, I vote for a sliver more for programs that help the needy. I do not believe that things have to get worse before they can get better. I think you will find that most mothers object to the idea that you would deliberately do something to make a child's life worse in order to bring about some presumed greater good in the long run. I believe that the best can be the enemy of the better. I believe in taking half a loaf, or even a slice."

Cogent words, Tracy. Except as pointed out upthread, you are projecting the (seemingly) older, wiser, eyes-opened, enviro-intense Al Gore onto the 2000 version. The 2000 Al Gore was significantly different from the person the 2007 Gore claims to be.

And again, you are just popping the Lieberman VP selection into the memory hole. The same Lieberman who is the loudest advocate of the Iraq War in the Senate and who stated that it is the mission of the United States to "pop the head off the snake in Iran". Since you can tell exactly how things would have happened, please tell me how the _2000_ Al Gore (not the retooled 2007 version) would have reacted on 9/12 with Lieberman demanding an immediate invasion of some Middle Eastern country to avoid "looking weak"?

Cranky

Nader may have used the "things have to get worse before they get better," and probably a lot of youngish supporters who didn't know what 'worse' was agreed with that. But a lot of us voted for Nader in 2000 because 1) We were diametrically opposed to Al Gore's views on virtually every major issue; 2) Given a chance to define what was at stake in the 2000 election, Al Gore chose to define the stakes as "He's for more school testing, and I'm for even more school testing; 3) We wanted to achieve vote threshholds that would get the Green Party on various ballots in the next election; and, 4) The Democratic Party told us to go fuck ourselves, and is still doing so today.

PS: Let me reiterate that I'm in California, and I'm not really sure that people in Florida who voted for Nader did the right thing. But to say that the blood of Iraq is on their hands is, as I said earlier, as reasonable as saying that the blood of the 9/11 victims is on the hands of anyone who voted for the "no locks on cabin doors" candidates.

> 4) The Democratic Party told us to go
> fuck ourselves, and is still doing so today.

That's really the thing for me. The Democratic Party has been controlled for at least the last 15 years by people who think the best possible strategy is to stick a finger in the eye of their base, redefine their middle as "far left", run from the word liberal, and suck up as close to the McCain wing of the Republican Party as they can. And then they are suprised at the blowback (yes, blowback affects Democrats too).

So I spent 2004 sucking up my doubts and working my ass off for Kerry - including lying to my neighbors about what a great guy I thought he was (knew that corporate management training would come in good for something). That worked out real well too.

And guess what? Here comes Hillary! Yeaaaaaaaaa! Of course, we must vote for her because the alternatives are so much worse...

Cranky

A few points, mostly in defense of Nader.

1. In theory, any presidential candidate on the ballot of enough states to amass 270 electoral votes can win the election. So in theory, a Nader vote wasn´t "wasted", Nader had just as much chance as Gore and Bush. In reality, we all know that only the Democratic or the Republican candidate will win, based on tradition and polls. However, by the same calculation, we know that in a competitive election about half the states will always vote Democratic or Republican (this includes deep red states like Texas), and the Democrats aren´t hurt by losing some conscience votes. Basically, if you live in New York, Texas, or a number of politically similar smaller states, your vote is pretty meaningless for presidential elections anyway, you might as well throw it away.

2. You can argue that in economic terms, the Clinton administration was farther to the right than the Reagan administration. Reagan never signed on to anything like NAFTA, welfare reform, the media consolidation act, etc. So if you are on the left, what do you do after eight years of this? If you are always going to vote for the Democrat, even if a Democratic president is screwing you, then your vote will be taken for granted and you will guarantee always getting screwed by a Democratic president. Sorry, but a revolt every now and then is necessary if the left is to have any influence with the Democratic Party. And I suspect that the most hard core antiNaderites are right wing Democrats who want the party to be able to take left wing votes for granted.

3. In 1932, Hitler ran for President of Germany against Hindenburg. Hindenburg was a monarchist who made no secret of his disdaine for the Republic, and had been opposed by German socialists and liberals when he was elected in 1925. However, in 1932, socialists (not the communists) and liberals rallied around Hindenburg to block Hitler. This would seem to be a no brainer, you have to do what it takes to keep Hitler from coming to power. The result was that Hindenburg defeated Hitler in the elction, then appointed Hitler chancellor. The point here is that ordinary voters, and even fairly sophisticated voters, really don´t have enough information on what the political actors are going to do to engage in game theory type strategy when they are using their vote. The best strategy is usually to vote for who you want.

4. Don´t assume that all Nader votes were automatic Gore votes. The figures show that some of his support seems to have come from the old Perot coalition. There is also a remarkable consistency, down to the county level, in the 1996 Clinton, the 2000 Gore, and the 2004 Kerry vote.

5. The previous points granted, I think it was better in 2000 to vote for Gore over Nader, mainly because the post election statements and activities of both men show that Gore was the more admirable figure. Gore may get the Nobel peace prize, while Nader seems to be going senile.

I was a senior in college in 2000, and me and all my friends were voting in our first presidential election. I tried to talk a few people out of voting for Nader, and for them, "if Bush wins, it'll be electro-stimulate the left" was a significant part of Nader's rebellious appeal. I heard from them that Gore and Bush were the same. (It was in the media a lot, too. Remember Bill Maher and "Gush"?) Admittedly, they seemed a lot more similar then than they do now, but even at the time, there was one guy whose favorite philosopher was Jesus and who campaigned on huge tax breaks for the wealthy, and another guy who was obviously a lot smarter and had written "Earth in the Balance." And then I remember, as it was announced that Gore had lost West Virginia, Nader appearing on television and saying that he'd lost the state by being too far to the left on coal-related environmental issues, when polls were demonstrating the exact opposite. There just seemed to be a lot of willful blindness behind the Nader campaign. So, congratulations, Nader-voters. You killed Saddam Hussein. Broke his spirit, first.

> So, congratulations, Nader-voters. You
> killed Saddam Hussein. Broke his spirit, first.

I hope you understand that that sort of self-righteousness is likely to increase, not decrease the possibility of another Nader2000 situation.

Cranky

I did my share of yelling at Nader voters in 2002-2004, but in the wake of further reporting on election fraud, I stopped in 2005. If anyone here was the object of my ire then, I apologize again, and I think that anyone who wants to blame Nader for Gore's loss has to account for two factors first:

#1. The incredibly hostile media environment. See Media Matters and the like for the details on just how much the press lied about and misrepresented Gore to the general public.

#2. More important, organized Republican efforts to steal the vote in key areas.

I don't think it's appropriate to say anything like "it's Nader's fault" - or the fault of anyone or anything else - until, above all, someone can present a full accounting for Republican fraud and show that it's insufficient to get Bush into power. Keep in mind things like the tens of thousands of Florida voters removed from rolls before election day and like that - it's not just about what happened on that one day, but about the weeks and months beforehand, and the campaign to sabotage honest tallying afterward.

Start with the victors. Then see who else may or may not deserve to be labeled responsible. It doesn't seem to me that a full consideration of the Republican machine and its cowed media establishment leaves much fault lying over to attach to others.

bob mcmanus - this is a while ago, but that's silly. "Don't fight for reforms" is not the same as "hope things get worse", and "reforms will not really solve anything" is not the same as "don't fight for reforms". As anyone with a decent command of history ought to know, self-identified Leninists from the Bolsheviks on have fought for any number of transitional demands short of socialism, and sometimes been key to those fights (in the U.S. think Detroit general strike or Scottsboro Boys). The Stalinism/Nazis explanation, however, makes some sense - despite the complicating factor Ed notes above.

In defense of Nader, and against the Molly Ivins quote, which IMO is the strongest way to put the Gore/Kerry case. There is a real difference between the Dems and the GOP, always has been. But there are so many more things they, or at least the wings of their parties which always have and always will control their leaderships, agree on - from the general desirability of U.S. control over the world to free universal health care or college education. For each woman who won't be able to get an abortion because the Left votes for Nader and Bush beats Gore and SCOTUS narrows Roe v Wade even more, there are dozens of Palestinians who will be stuck in grinding poverty in refugee camps and dozens of disproportionately Black Americans who will stay in prison for years of their lives on nonviolent drug offenses indefinitely if U.S. politics never move to the left of the Democrats and Republicans. It comes down, for me, to which path offers some long-term hope of a seriously better world, and that path is the one where the Left doesn't surrender its goals to a lesser evil which gets more evil every four years.

You know, there's a million ways to create alternate scenarios for the 2000 election. Let's just say Nader did everything he could to elect Bush, and leave it there.

We don't ask Ken Mehlman or Karen Hughes to apologize--why ask Ralph?

How much of the blame for 2000 does Gore take for selecting Lieberman as his running mate? If everyone knew the election was going to be close, shouldn't Gore have picked someone who brought more to the table than piousness? My understanding from AIPAC and Alan Dershowitz is that there are anti-semites behind every tree in America. It is conceivable that, rather than vote for Lieberman, enough of them stayed home to throw the election to Bush. Was 2000 really the year to put a Jew on the ticket?

Hindsight is not always 20/20.

You are just popping the Lieberman VP selection into the memory hole. The same Lieberman who is the loudest advocate of the Iraq War in the Senate and who stated that it is the mission of the United States to "pop the head off the snake in Iran".

Cranky, you are projecting the (seemingly) older, crazier, Bush-and-9/11-deranged Joe Lieberman onto the 2000 version. The 2007 Joe Lieberman is significantly different from the person the 2000 Lieberman seemed to be.

Also, my take is no one in 2000 was talking about terrorism or preemptive war--Bush wanted a "more humble" foreign policy as a critique of Clinton's role in Bosnia, Haiti, etc.--and the way they presented themselves in the campaigns was actually not that different. Bush wanted tax cuts, more conservative judges, and no child left behind; Gore was a little more enviro-friendly and wanted to shore up entitlements ("lockbox"). Nothing that's happened since 9/11 was foreseeable, nor can we really be sure that Al Gore, in power with a Republican Congress, would have been much better.

Wow, I can't believe this many people still haven't gotten over 2000. I met my wife when she was tabling for Nader, and I voted for Nader to get laid. So bite me, you celibate Gore supporters!

/In Kentucky, where Gore and Nader had the same chance of winning--0!
//My in-laws in Tennessee, who would have voted for Bush, voted Nader. So our sum total effect on the Gore vote in Kentucky was 0.

Alan wrote: But a lot of us voted for Nader in 2000 because 1) We were diametrically opposed to Al Gore's views on virtually every major issue....PS: Let me reiterate that I'm in California, and I'm not really sure that people in Florida who voted for Nader did the right thing.

How totally self-serving is this BS?

In 2000 the Green Party either used or was used by Ralph Nader, and Greens either voted their concience or where wrong to vote for Nader, depending on the position of the sun and the longitude of their voting booth. IN 2006 the Greens sucked down GOP dollars to try to oppose Casey in PA and thus re-elect that Progressive Saint (NOT) Rick Santorum. It took the courts to declare that effort both corrupt and illegal.

Naderites are GOP shills. Greens are GOP shills. Felix Dzerzhinsky couldn't have created a better front with which to splinter the opposition. When what makes it a matter of concience or an error to vote for a candidate is longitude, you know the deck is stacked.

Progressives need to reject Nader and the Greens and to get to work supporting Democratic candidates whose values are progressive. There's no reason that progressives can't have the same effect on the Democrats that the Moral Majority had on the GOP. History shows that voting for faux third-party candidates only delivers the election to your opponents, with effects far beyond the predictable.

For the record, it was George W. Bush who proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was "diametrically opposed" to all things Al Gore. That Greens would rather place themselves in Bush's camp than admit error tells you everything you need to know.

1. Seems to me people have a great case against Nader. He ran, he knew it might splinter the Democratic coalition, and the election of Bush turned out to be a disaster. But you do have to mitigate against that fact the fact that Al Gore was running a sickeningly conservative campaign in 2000 (even repudiating a commitment to national health care in the primary against Bradley) and that Bush didn't look nearly this bad at the time (he was pretty bipartisan as a governor in Texas and actually wasn't terrible). Still, in retrospect, that was a real boner by Nader.

2. Nonetheless, this idea that any Nader voter has ANYTHING to answer for is foolish. As others have said, Al Gore was entitled to exactly one vote for President-- his own. He had to make the sale to his left wing. It is true, as Scott Lemieux says, that making that sale can sometimes cost you votes in the center. Still, the mark of a good politician is to make the sale to your base. We can vilify Karl Rove all we want, but one thing that is notable about the man is he understands this and figured out a way for Bush to win elections (or come close enough that electoral shenanigans could put him over the top) while keeping the base happy. Al Gore didn't give a crap about his base-- he chose one of the most right wing politicians in America as his running mate (and yes, Lieberman was hard right in all the ways that mattered long before Iraq), repudiated national health insurance, and distanced himself from Clinton's successes in order to strike a pose of prudish distance from a sex scandal that he had nothing to do with. He also was a shameless corporate whore who even raised campaign money in a Buddhist temple, supposedly from impoverished monks.

Gore could have and should have made the sale. He didn't. Nader voters are not responsible for that.

3. If Hillary Clinton runs for the Democrats, she isn't entitled to anyone's votes either. The fact is, I don't trust her to stop the Iraq war or not to start a war with Iran. I don't trust her to do anything that might allow conservatives to bash on her. She is too cautious and seems to have no core beliefs whatsoever. I will not vote for her. Whether I vote for anyone else depends on whether anyone else deserves my vote.

And if she runs against Chuck Hagel-- who WOULD end the Iraq war and WOULD NOT go to war with Iran, I am sorry, I am voting for Hagel.

The fact is, people who rehash these Nader arguments are undervaluing the issue of fundamental political principles. 3,000 American servicemembers have died in Iraq, and countless Iraqis, because Hillary Clinton thought that the way to become President was to kill them. A person with no regard for human life is not qualified to be President. The viscissitudes of partisan politics pale in comparison to the value of those innocent people's lives.

4. Al Gore, ironically enough, can have a do-over. If he decides to run, the nomination and the presidency are almost certainly his.

CP: You make a lot of good points that I can't really argue with, except take a look at the bottom line results: progressives have been at work trying to elect progressive Dems for longer than the Moral Majority's been at work electing their people, and the Democratic Party today is less progressive than it was when we started.

And yes, there are actual reasons why we can't accomplish what the Moral Majority and their friends did: 1) because the right wing has an enormous corporate sponsorship, and we have the DLC, and 2) Because the Republican party's far-right base stays home when the party neglects their issues, whereas we progressives troop to the polls and dutifully vote for each new DLC clone no matter how much they call us dirty hippies and tell us to get lost.

I don't think Matt's saying that Nader voters--even Nader voters from Florida--are personally responsible for the Iraq war deaths. I think he's saying that even if years in the wilderness did in fact make the Dems more liberal, it wasn't worth the price. Does anyone disagree with that statement?

It is odd the animosity that Nader voters get compared to nonvoters. "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" always annoyed me--as far as the outcome of the election, the effect is 0 for Gore, not +1 for Bush. It's half as bad as voting for Bush and exactly the same as staying home. It didn't make a difference in many states, and people could be certain it wouldn't make a difference in most states.

(I lived in Massachusetts and tried to vote-swap...I still regret giving him even that much support after the campaigning-in-swing-states crap, and still regret not being a member of Gore's popular-vote majority, and I don't know what it would take to get me to not vote Democratic in the future. But as far as influencing the outcome of the election--if the guy in Oregon did his part I was a net positive; if not it had no effect, like every presidential vote cast in Mass.)

I came of political age in the 60's, and my political mentor was a quiet middle-aged fellow worker who turned out to be a Marxist. When the 1968 elections rolled around, I talked a lot of rot about there not being a dime's worth of difference between Humphrey and Nixon because Humphrey had been fatally stained by his support of the war. And she waited for my tirade to end and said calmly, "I have two words for you. Supreme Court." She was in her 50's at the time and I was 21; she was taking the long view. So I don't blame the Nader voters, particularly, since I remember the pleasures of outrage. But I do blame Nader.

Al gore should have run a more populist campaign. Nader voters should have grown a brain. But the media should have called a fair game. Instead they lied constantly and to a point where a private citizen would have had legal recourse to stop them. It is the media then that is to blame for the 2000 election. by choosing a candidate they wanted to win and lying in order to make that candidate look better, they through an election to a man who had no place being President. The number of idiot Nader voters pales in comparison the number of average Americans who the media led to believe that Al Gore was the Antichrist and George Bush was a saint. The media deserve our hatred and our scorn. Don't waste time attacking other leftists.

umm, that's threw not through.

It's a really simplistic thing to blame "corporate money" for the failure of liberal/progressives to effect policy, as it absolves liberal/progressives from responsibility and allows them to feel really good about being right while achieving nothing, but it's wrong.

Corporate money flows to people who can win, period. Back in the 70's it flowed to liberals. In the 80's and 90's it flowed to conservatives. Watch how much corporate money Dean, Pelosi and Reid manage to raise in the next two years, not because they're in bed with the DLC, but because Dems are on the upswing and the GOP has, once again, proven itself unfit to govern.

The campaign for progressive votes in 2000 wasn't just Nader/Gore, we don't have the luxury of living in that bubble after the primaries. Voters had a responsibility to understand Bush as well, a smirky arrogant slacker repeatedly bailed out by his family's connections to foreign money, whose claim to fame was his connection with his father, whose tenure in Texas was lackluster, and who was described by supporters as "incurious". To say Bush was just like Gore, no matter how much a stiff Gore was, is to buy the GOP talking points. Bush ran left in the 2000 campaign, a "compassionate conservative" who signed more death warrants than any other governor, a man whose "humble" foreign policy was designed to avoid the fact that he knew nothing of the world outside the US. The canard that Bush and Gore were the same originated in the GOP, from a liberal/progressive point of view they were as different as night and day.

Just as Colin Powell will always be remembered for his UN speech, Nader deserves to always be remembered for his narcissistic 2000 campaign. Both actions were the culmination of a lifetime of service, and both will overshadow whatever good was done during their earlier careers.

A charming conceit of every anti-Nader thread is that Clinton and Gore really helped the poor, while the evil Republicans make their lives miserable. In reality, it's really hard to see any difference.

Oh sure, up in the clouds this program is "good" and that program is "bad", but in reality land on the ground, the Clinton years passed with the rich getting richer, and not much change at all for the poor, elderly, and disabled. Except "welfare reform", of course, which you would have thought the Clintons supported from what they said.

And don't even think about talkig to me about "competent administration" or "honesty in government". In Washington State, a liberal Democratic stronghold, I dealt with the Department of Social and Health Services, absolutely stuffed with Democratic hacks, and it is a total cesspool of lying thieving politicians who are not bothered a bit about the fact that their clients are, by definition, too poor and young or disabled to protect themselves in any way against DSHS. In fact, they depend on it to get away with what they do.

When SEIU came to Washington to help Medicaid caregivers organize and get the right to collective bargaining (something we were denied by law), the Democrats opposed the initiative just as much (actually more, from their roosts in DSHS) as Republicans. The public passed it with over 60% majority.

Ironically, drug arrests rose every year during the Clinton administration, and tens of thousands of voters were struck from the rolls in Florida because of their "criminal history".

Naturally, it is very shortsighted of the poor and disabled not to realize that an enormous federal debt will cause inflation that will result in a poorer economy that means their friends and relatives will have less money to give them to make up for the vanishing power of their disability check.

But if you were poor during the Clinton years, you noticed no change for the better, and if you're still poor during the Bush years, there hasn't been much change for the worse. If you weren't either of those, stop telling us how the poor and disabled need to have you vote the Democratic ticket no matter what the actual candidates have done.

Serial Catowner -- you know, you're right. The Clinton/Gore years were hardly perfect. There were significant flaws from a progressive perspective. And you know what? It was obvious to everyone at the time of the 2000 election that Gore was more progressive than Bush. If Nader voters wanted to change things, they should have focused on getting Greens elected to local offices. You don't jump ahead to the Presidency immediately. You need to build a base. Nader knew this, and went forward anyway, because he was a supreme egoist.

That sounds more like Trotsk'y position than Lenin's. I seem to recall Lenin vigorously opposing such shenanigans.

Uh... this isn't much of a debate. Nader was explicit. He figured that if Gore won, the left would continue to weaken as the Clintonites governed from the center. He wanted the Democrats to lose because left-wingers denied them their votes. Then he wanted Bush to "galvanize" the moribund left. He said so, many times - start with Jacob Weisberg's pre-election piece.

All the other arguments (especially the one about how more Democrats voted Republican than Green - yes, Zell Miller Democrats who would have never voted for Gore) are rather silly, because Nader was very clear about what he wanted to do, and what he believes he did.

Far back in the comments: The "worse before better" strategy was not Lenin's, but came from the German Communists (following Stalin) in the last days of the Weimar Republic. "After Hitler, us". Which turned out to be true (sort of --- many of the German Communists who survived the war were ignored, or worse, by the occupying Russians who had their own plans for Germany). But the price was many 10s of millions dead (including 20M Russians, a majoriy of them civilians).

Maybe he was thinking of Lenin's "Revolutionary defeatism" in which Russian (not Soviet) defeat in WWI would bring down the Czarist regime, which of course it did.

Well, excuse me for living, but what made it so obvious that Gore was more progressive?

Nafta?
The continual rise in marijuana arrests?
Jocelyn Elder's dismissal?
Lieberman's vote to make dancing a federal crime?
Tipper Gore's campaign for "decency"?
"Don't ask, don't tell"?

Or was it the total silence of Gore/Lieberman on any actual progressive issue?

Believe me, someone who has voted the straight Democratic ticket for 30 years is not a person who gives up easily. I wanted Gore/Lieberman to give me one reason I should vote for them.

Not only did they fail to do so, they emphasized at every campaign stop that they were God-loving church-going people who would fight the libertine impulses that were weakening America.

And they obviously had no intention of cutting the military funding that gives my Democratic rep an 80% majority in every election.

You want to blame someone for the troops being in Iraq, start with the people who kept them ready to go. Just like giving a five-year old a loaded pistol. And believe it, there will always be a five-year old waiting in the wings. That's why the Constitution gives the Congress the power to declare war.

I voted for Nader in 2000 because I wanted to register my displeasure at people like Matthew Yeglisias who accomodate the right and disassociate themselves not only from the "left" but from everything that is right and honorable -- as events have shown -- in the name of pragmatism. Yglesias' views are so counterintuitive that it is hard to believe he is not being cynical and insincere. Isn't there enough cynicism on the GOP side without our having to engage in it?

Particularly I was upset at the way Nader, whose positions and views represented mine, was thrown out of the debates by "pragmatic" Democrats -- like a common criminal. This is a disgrace that the Democratic Party will never live down.

I also blame Gore for his "reinvention" of government, which he went on national TV to tout. Like the Iraq war, privatization has turned out to be the disaster that anyone could have predicted it would be. I won't even mention the nomination of the vile mole Lieberman, Clinton and Gore's support of NAFTA, and the dismantling of welfare, not to mention voting for Scalia and Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court.

We are all human and all of us make mistakes at times. Gore is a decent, if somewhat limited man. I admire his recent conduct, out of office (as I don't admire Nader's). I admire Gore's wife -- including her concern with decency in the media, unpopular as I realize that might be with many people. Obviously, he would have made a better president than the mobsters we now have. But why should Gore get a pass for his blunders, particularly when they have had such dire results. Why should Gore get a pass and the followers of Nader, who were right about everying, be crucified???

Naturally, I would not have voted for Nader had I lived in a so-called swing state and I urged my relatives and friends in those states not to vote for him. Where I live, however, the Democrats were so much in a majority that they didn't even bother to campaign here or put up a single poster. In 2004 I myself voted for Gore and Edwards. However, it is obvious that Gore was betrayed, not by Nader, but by the media and the supreme court who enabled Bush to steal the election and pushed for an insane colonial war. In focussing on Nader, Gore supporters are playing right into the hands of such people.

In the 1930s, many moderate leftists (uncluding many European socialists) declined to oppose Hitler or anti-Semitism and thus many principled people were driven into alliainces with the Communist Party, which vigorously opposed fascism in word and deed and which supported Roosevelt's reforms.

Dan Milliken is correct. It was followers of Trotsky who wanted things to get worse so that there could be a violent, world-wide revolution. These nuts were understandably few in number. No other leftists were pure or radical enough for them. No reforms were the right thing or enough. In fact, they opposed any peaceful reform and hated Roosevelt and the New Deal. These people and their offspring have morphed into today's Neo-cons. They are probably delighted at seeing the Democrats turning on those who should be their allies.

Some of the most recent comments demonstrate exactly what is so exasperating about Nader and his supporters. Nader did not run to win. He never thought he could win. He wanted to prove his relevance by causing the Democratic candidate to lose. That is not principle -- it is narcissim. And the voters who enabled him should recognize their mistake in following his ruthlessly self-centered example. Instead, they preach to us that we were all insufficiently pure, and that we were the guilty ones. Anyone who did not believe that George Bush was going to be a disaster as President was not paying much attention to the campagin. And just as we should blame the media for being unfair to Gore, we should blame Nader, and should not forget that his run in 2000 had nothing to do with any issue but himself.

I agree that Nader should have endorsed Kerry in 2004. However IP guy has not addressed a single point that I have raised but instead has countered with name calling and ad hominem attacks on Nader. Does IP really think it was right to exclude Nader from the debates? Does he think this tactic really helped the Democrats win? Does raising this issue really make me a "purist." OK, I concede. I am a purist when it comes to common decency and inclusiveness versus thuggishness and manhandling.
If this makes it hard to argue with me, then so be it. It ought to be hard to argue with.

All candidates must have a degree of narcissism. However, Nader opposed NAFTA, which has been a terrible program, favored reining in the credit card companies, and supported hundreds of other positions which have proved not to be narcissim, but common sense. The Democrats repeatedly caved to big business interest on all these things and treated those who supported them as traitors. They tried to be republicans lite and look where it got them. Perhaps instead of trying to badmouth Nader they should look to their own conduct.

Correction -- Kerry and Edwards. I could support Kerry, who appears to be more genuinely politically courageous, with an easier conscience than the 2000 version of Gore.

The communist party's role in the election of Hitler was deplorable, but that of the Catholic church, who instructed believers not to vote or to give any kind of support to democratic processes was equally bad if not worse. Not to mention the British and American industrialists who provided the Nazi Party with material support. There is more enough blame to go around there to ensure that virtually everyone who was alive at that time comes out looking very very bad.

It's not only the candidate's narcissism: we have before us a whole spate of people who didn't think their points of view got sufficient respect, and didn't think the VP worked hard enough for their vote. To the question 'are you happy now' they respond 'no, and it's your fault for not treating me like the very center of the universe that I am.'

While people who voted for Nader in places like California and Massachusetts didn't by that act tip the election to Bush, they did buy into a narrative -- and if they spoke of it spread a narrative -- that was not only false but seriously damaging.

What was this narrative one is not supposed to speak out about? How does "premature" opposition to NAFTA, de-regulation, and privatization amount to a claim of being at the center of the universe??

If a narrative is incorrect, false, or "dangerous," why not openly refute it rather than resorting to namecalling and censorship?

I find this entire debate annoying and tiresome. I voted for Nader in 2000 and stand by that decision unapologetic. I vote for the candidate that best represents my beliefs, period. In 2000, that was Ralph Nader.

Does that makes me culpable for what's occurred since? Guess what, in a democracy we're all culpable. One of my august Democratic senators gave full-throated support to the president's war "plans" back in 2002/2003. I've never voted for her, so my conscience is clear in that respect, but I'm still culpable because I have insufficiently opposed her.

That Democratic senator's one vote authorizing the use of military force in Iraq caused far more harm than every vote for Nader in our state in 2000 did.

Yes, had Nader not run, Gore probably would have won. (I wouldn't have voted for him then. In light of his subsequent behavior, I might vote for him now should he run again.) But, so what! Any one of several other factors, had they turned out differently, would have given Gore the presidency.

Why waste time and energy rehashing this now? Don't we all have more important things to be doing?

Have each of you called your senators and representative demanding their active opposition to the escalation of the Iraq war? Have you called your state representatives demanding they explore a resolution calling for the impeachment of the president?

Can you look at yourself in the mirror and honestly say you're doing everything you're capable of doing to mitigate the ongoing trainwreck we're all on?

For Harold:

There are Trotskyists and then there is Trotsky himself. I have no dog in any fight about such things (except that such Trotkyites as I have known strike me as certified loons), but if I remember aright Trotsky himself published many articles warning of the danger of Hitler and the Nazis all along. He was appalled about the Hitler-Stalin Pact that was the starting gun for WWII and I believe that is one of the main reasons that he was murdered.

To another point: the CPUSA supported Roosevelt during the war (my parents were CPUSAer's and I remember it fairly well.That we are Jews is no small part of this...it was the Red Army that "tore the guts out of the Wehrmacht" as CHurchill said and probably saved our lives.) But the record is also clear that at many points in the 30's, even after the Nazis took power, the CP followed the "line" that liberals (and Democrats, aside from the racists of the old southern party) were "social fascists" to be opposed strongly, particularly in the large unions. As to the responsibility of the Catholic Church in Europe, there is surely enough blame to go around, but that doesn't alter the fact that the German CP had its full share. Indeed, as the only potential organized opposition, since the Church "rendered unto Caesar" they bear a significant share.

Like the Naderites, of course they like all of us were unable to predict the results of their (and other s')actions. But unlike GWB and his robo-army, perhaps they might at least acknowledge that they made a mistake. I see that even the likes of Dick Armey has done so.

I'm a third party activist. I think the two party system is one of the major problems in US politics. I voted for Nader, I might do it again. But I don't understand why so many Dems are bitter about Nader. That doesn't make ANY sense. Gore won the election after all, the popular vote and the electoral college, since he won Florida. What he lost was a court case. Nader has nothing to do with that.

The dumbest thing Al Gore ever did was choose Joe Lieberman as his running mate.

They say hindsight is 20-20, but I say it's bullshit.

Harold:

Let's take your points one by one:

"Does IP really think it was right to exclude Nader from the debates?"

No -- I think that was wrong. If you're a legit candidate, you should get on.

"Does he think this tactic really helped the Democrats win?

No.

"Does raising this issue really make me a "purist." OK, I concede."

That's not the point -- the purist aspect is this: every group groused that Gore wasn't "left" enough for them, ins
instead of whether Bush would be bad.

You can thank Nader, if you blame him for Gore losing, for the birth of the progressive blogosphere too, since it wouldn't exist as it does today without progressives being out of power (or the Iraq war), and the form in which it would exist today would be largely critical of wishy-washy centrist empowered Democrats and nutty right wing Republicans, so plenty of fun and exciting thought experiments can be made about the 2000 election, but, no matter how you slice it, most generally cut against centrist Democrats (and all discussions should start with VP Joe Lieberman).

Jimm --

Nader responsible for the progressive blogosphere? That's so ridiculous as to beggar the imagination. Josh Marshall, Atrios, Kos, MyDD and the other major players would not have existed without Gore's loss, so we should give thanks to Nader? I think that Atrios would gladly give up his current job if he thought that it meant that Bush was not elected in 2000.

The narrative that Nader partisans want to construct is both bizarre and anti-historical, but it makes them feel better about the guilt, so we'll move on. Look, I would be in favor of grabbing hands, singing kumbaya, and forgetting about the past. Except that Nader is threatening to run again. Who will you vote for this time?

Nader -- the gift that keeps on giving: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070204/pl_nm/usa_politics_nader_dc_1

Note that he also supports Mike Gravel -- enough said.

IP Guy, I can't help it if your reading comprehension isn't that good, or that you assume I'm a Nader voter.

By the way, your contributions to this thread are consistently absurd and/or ridiculous and you should stop now and quit embarrassing yourself.

What JRosen and Hdgt both say sounds reasonable to me. I know very little about the Trotskyites, except what I heard from my parents and relatives, who were New Deal supporters. I once started to read Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution but didn't get very far. I also read a book by Dwight McDonald written in 1946 or so, that used all sorts of vicious ad hominem attacks on Henry Wallace, which struck me as appalling. (I think McDonald was disowned as being too crazy even by Trotsky.)

Had I been alive in Germany in 1932, I can only hope I would have been a Social Democrat rather than a Communist. However, it is easy enough to see the right side in retrospect and no one is immune from making mistakes. I dislike doctrinaire ideologues of any stripe, including Marxist ones.

Recently, I learned from Herbert P. Bix's biography of Hirohito that Stalin had made a non-aggression Pact with Hirohito in 1930 (?)or so, similar to the one he subsequently made with Hitler -- it was his modus operandi for buying time. Learning this gave me an insight into how some of his supporters could have rationalized the Hitler pact in 1939, though I guess most them were very glad when he declared war on Hitler. Many of Hitler's victims in his early years, after all, were communists and socialists.

I am aware that we would not have defeated Hitler without the tremendous sacrifices of the Russian people. Stalin's seizure of central Europe as a buffer against the West after the war is also comprehensible from a strategic standpoint, since these territories had traditionally been claimed for the Russian Empire by the Czar. His atrocities -- such as the massacre of the Polish officers and numberless other murders and betrayals of friends, enemies, and neutrals, of course are not; and I know of no one who would have wanted to defend them. It is the Trotskites and their neocon descendents who have made a habit of smearing all non-Trotskyite leftists of the 1930s as "Stalinists." That is what they were paid to do as part of the so-called "cultural cold war."

Are you really going to try and sell the dimes worth of difference being Middle East policy?

Guess who probably would have been Gore's point man on foreign policy?

VP Joe Lieberman.

Wow -- this thread is still going.

Did anyone ever respond to my point that the Far Right conntinually threatens to go Nader on the Republicans, which is why they've been so effective. Progressives, on the other hand, always vote for the worthless DLC clone in the end, so the party is free to tell us to go fuck ourselves.

BTW, CP's assertion that corporate money would flow to a progressive, if that progressive looks like a winner, is ludicrous, even if one ignores the obvious fact that corporate money would never allow a progressive to get into position to look like a winner in the first place. Watched any TV news the past ten years? As for Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, get back to me when they actually do something progressive.

During the so-called cultural cold war, CIA money, via big foundations, flowed to the crazy left (the Trotskyites, later neo-cons) to attack other progressives or at least to make them have to defend themselves as not being "Stalinists" everytime they opened their mouths. One might well ask cui bono? Who benefits when the left attacks other people on the left? Who benefits when the fatalities of the Iraq war are blamed on those who voted for Nader in 2000 instead of those (like Yglesias and Lieberman) who actually supported the war?

One thing that really strikes me every time this thread comes a