It’s a tiny bit more complicated than that.
Remember last Presidential election? Bush, Gore, or Nader?
I liked Nader. At the very least, I couldn’t think of any large corporations that like him. I couldn’t for the life of me think of who he might sell my ass to in order to finance his campaign. True, he might make me wear a helmet to drive on the interstate and/or go to the bathroom, but that’s certainly no worse than trying to start a war with Iraq and ignore North Korea when Iraq probably doesn’t have any nukes, but North Korea probably does.
It pained me that Nader was doomed.
Y’see… it ain’t just the candidates. It ain’t just the men in the suits. It ain’t just the Prez And His Running Mate.
It’s the Party.
It isn’t just George Dubya Bush and Little Dickie up there running the show, calling the shots. It’s the guys who put them there. It’s the Republican Party.
These are the Kingmakers, the Big Shots, the .90 Calibers, the men who make the men who make the world.
And they are politicians, the same as any other. They are powerful men, and they know about power, and they are in no hurry at all to turn it loose, and at any time, should they find that their power has DIMINISHED, they will not rest until they have regained it, and even THEN they will not rest, because if they do, they might lose some of it again.
Not bashing Republicans. At least not specifically. As far as I can tell, the Democrats aren’t much different. Just less well organized, more fractious.
And Lo, I opened up my Mystic Third Nostril, and with it, I smelt the stench of the Future, and All Possible Futures beside it.
I smelled Bush, of course. I knew he was very likely to take it. But I smelled Gore, as well… and far away, across a thousand lines of probability, I even smelled a world in which the American people, in an unprecedented epidemic of intelligence and sanity, elected Ralph Nader to be President Of The United States.
It was the worst mistake they ever made.
Almost before Nader finished his oath of office, the shitstorm began. Accusations were made. Congress promptly appointed a dozen special prosecutors to investigate a dozen weird and dodgy dealings Nader was said to have made in the past.
Meanwhile, President Nader moved to introduce legislation to Improve America.
Congress sat there. They stared at the legislation for a moment, as if it were a parking ticket with your name on it that has fallen off your car and landed in a pile of moist dogshit, face up, with your name clearly visible on it.
Then, all as one, they rose and blew it into steaming confetti.
Then the leaders of each party promptly came up with similar legislation, but with enough changes so as to not piss off the constituency, and allow anyone but Nader to take credit for it, and promptly began voting it through the House and Senate.
For four years, it went on like this. Any time President Nader attempted to do anything, he was promptly overridden by Congress. If he attempted to veto anything, Party leaders angrily called press conferences to roar about how the President was trying to stop vital health care legislation, tax relief, interfere with the economy, starve the poor, cheat the rich, and molest small animals and insects.
President Nader did attempt to appoint some judges to the Supreme Court. His nominations were not only NOT confirmed by Congress, they were laughed at. It finally reached a point where serious judicial wannabes were asking Nader NOT to try to appoint them to anything, so as to salvage what remained of their careers.
Towards the end of his first term, as the dozen investigations of the President’s financial, legal, and personal life ground on, President Nader complained on 60 Minutes that Congress, which was firmly in the grip of the Two Dominant Parties, was attempting to quash him as President, simply to make him look ineffective, and therefore further the chances of a Democrat or Republican to take the Presidency in '04.
Congress responded the next day by attempting impeachment procedures. The headlines went berserk. Dozens of innuendos and unverifiable rumors were leaked to a thousand newspapers, all claiming to be full of facts from the dozen juicy investigations of Nader’s background. Meanwhile, the U.S. Government remained deadlocked.
At one point, Pakistan, India, and North and South Korea all got into a four-way nuclear war. Congress immediately blamed the situation on Nader’s foreign policy.
…so who won the 2004 election in this faraway reality? Beats me. My Third Nostril cannot smell that far, alas. The last thing I percieved was President Nader being loaded into a van, wearing a straitjacket, giggling and shouting, “Je Suis Le Roi!”
I sure hope this reality turns out better.
Then again, in that one, at least the President was sane when he started his term.
There should be no space before the apostrophe in the genitive case: “elucidator 's”.