Boils. Yeah, thats it, Old Testament boils, head to toe…frogs, too! OK, frogs is stupid…crabs. Sabre tooth crabs, deforesting his scrotum and lighting bonfires…
That’s just fucking ludicrous. The Federal Election Commission’s numbers spell it out, plain as day. If the election were direct, i.e. based on popular vote alone, Gore would have taken office in 2000. He got more votes. It’s irrefutable.
I haven’t seen any evidence to back up your assertion, either. I’ve been eligible to vote in presidential elections since 1988, and didn’t do so until 2000, precisely because I didn’t like either the Democrat or the Republican. Or is that “apathetic and lazy” in your book?
Well, if they were allowed the same air time and given the same federal funding the big dogs get, they would be viable.
Yes, they spoil it for the Democrats and the Republicans, 'cos those two want it to be just their party every four years. It’s total bullshit on their part.
Fuck you, you festering spineless pile of horseshit. I’ll vote for whom I damn well please, and withhold my vote when I don’t like the options. If Kerry wants my vote, he can earn it by speaking to the issues that concern me, not by trying to scare me with specters of a Republican White House. Hell, I grew up under that pretentious gasbag halfwit Reagan. Bush can’t hold a candle to that asshole. Hell, Reagan now is smarter than Dubya.
I’ve read up on Kerry. He supports sending more troops to Afghanistan and Iraq - UN troops if he can get Europe and Russia on board, more US troops if he can’t. He’s certain the US will have to intervene militarily - unilaterally or otherwise - in Korea and Africa in the coming years. He’s sure that the WTO and the IMF are the keys to global prosperity for the poorer and underdeveloped nations. I’m strongly opposed to these things now while Bush is still in office. Why should I vote for another candidate who also stands for these things? Just because I hate the incumbent more? Bullshit.
I voted Nader because he argued we had to start the challenge to the two dominant political parties somewhere. I didn’t agree with him fully on a number of things, either, but IMO he was a damn sight better than Bush or Gore. And if he runs again, I’ll seriously consider voting for him this time around too. Blaming me and other Nader voters for Gore’s because we had the audacity to vote our consciences is unutterably stupid. Gore ultimately lost because Bush played filthy pool in Florida and pwecious Pwince Albuht didn’t have enough spine to challenge it. His loss is his own fault, not Nader’s or that of the people who voted for him.
Voting isn’t about the guy you like. Its about making a choice, however difficult and unrewarding. Few duties are pleasant. A committment to democracy is not to suggest that democracy is the most efficient, but the most just. Will we always select wise leaders? History suggests otherwise. But will we have our leaders chosen for us by men no wiser than ourselves?
Not this little black duck, in the words of Tom Paine.
Oh yeah, well in that case I’m sending Pat Buchanan a $100 check and all my best wishes!
:: tinfoil hat ON ::
How do we know the Republicans aren’t funding a new Nader run? They’ve got plenty of money, and Nader’s last run sure didn’t hurt them.
:: tinfoil hat OFF ::
That’s ridiculous! Nader’s against just about everything the current administration is pushing! Why would he take their money?
:: tinfoil hat ON ::
Ah, but it’s such a LOT of money, isn’t it? Nader’s not getting any younger, is he? A man has to think about the golden years, after all, and why not make sure the retirement nest is well-feathered?
Then, too, Nader’s glory days are decades past. He doesn’t get much media attention these days, does he? Last big splash he made, last time he had reporters and cameras swarming about him, was in the 2000 presidential race. A guy can get addicted to the limelight, ya know…
:: tinfoil hat OFF ::
What are you, crazy?
:: tinfoil hat ON ::
(knowing smirk) We’ll see. We’ll see who laughs last.
Now, would you kindly step away from my grounding rod? You’re disturbing the force waves.
Don’t forget! Fold the hat parallel to true magnetic North, otherwise protection from telepathic rays is compromised.
I’m with you, paranoid kinsman. Yes, I’m kidding and no, I’m not. There isn’t the slightest doubt that the Tighty Righty’s will view Nader’s candidacy as manna from heaven. I also have little doubt that Republican money found its way into Dean’s hands, seeing as he was the guy they wanted to run against.
If ever they had a scruple about this sort of thing, it is gone. They have sobered up to the bleak fact that their man stands a real good chance of losing. That the investigations they have been at such pains to postpone until after the election may be conducted under an Admin. not nearly so sympathetic and respectful.
Oh, dear.
Fine. But you also have to be realistic - there was virtually no chance of Nader winning that election, and many of the people who voted for him would have cast their votes for the Democratic candidate if Nader hadn’t run. Those are votes lost to the Democrats, which makes a Republican victory more likely. From my perspective, the Greens erred in the timing of their challenge. Had Nader run four years earlier, he would still have served as a Democratic spoiler, and the result would have been a Republican in office - but that Republican would have been Bob Dole. Bob Dole is no George Bush; a Dole presidency would not have been my preference, but it also wouldn’t have been the disaster that Bush’s presidency has been.
The time to try to reform the two-party system is when the candidate being backed by the major party whose platform positions and general ideology are furthest from your own is one who is reasonably moderate. The time NOT to mount such a challenge is when that candidate is ideologically more extreme, for if the challenge fails (which it most likely will), the major party candidate winning the office will have views much further removed from the ones you support.
Success in politics doesn’t just involve ideology and passion; it also requires a good sense of strategy and tactics.
Wait, you mean the same federal funding that both Bush and Kerry have rejected? How is boosting a 3rd party candidate with federal funds going to do anything when he’s being outspent by a stupendous margin?
The two parties are viable because they appeal to large blocs of voters, and the small time parties lack that mass appeal. Money doesn’t change the message, and it’s not like people don’t know what the Greens are about.
And if doing this not only fails to advance your agenda, but aids those who work against you, what good came of it? Did your vote mean what you wanted it to? Voting is an action aimed at achieving an effect. In this case, a vote for Nader had the opposite effect: it moved power away from the left. Seriously, man, check the links, they give examples for all the voting systems and explain what strategies are best in order to achieve the desired effect. If all you wanted to do was say, “I like Nader more than Gore” you could do that in any number of public and private forums. If what you wanted to do was move political power to the left, you have to understand the system you’re in. Frankly, I don’t think you do. You are certainly free to vote however you like, or not to vote; I won’t say otherwise. But if you’re going to vote, I’m going to stress that you understand what your vote actually does. Because it is not always what it says.
Specters? What the fuck?
You vote for who you want. I’m just pointing out that your vote does not always have the effect you think it has because of the way a winner is determined.
That’s not stopping you from running at the mouth about it, though.
Gore could have run his campaign better. I don’t see anyone disputing this. If only a tiny fraction of Nader voters switched, we wouldn’t have this monster in the white house. This isn’t a terribly difficult point to understand.
This is to both you and Airman Doors. 48% of the eligible voting population stayed home during the 2000 election. And the 52% who did vote were split almost exactly 50/50 between Bush and Gore. Which means they each got 26% of the voting population to vote for them. Overall, that’s not really a “large bloc” of voters, is it? Gore could just as easily have run his campaign to attract the votes of the remaining 48% as he could trying to win votes away from Nader. It’s like three children building sand castles in a contest at the beach - the one who came in second wails about the third place contestant using “his” sand when there’s a whole beach around them that hasn’t been touched. If the voter turnout had been far closer to 100%, and it was still that close a race, I might be inclined to agree with the argument you’ve been putting forth. But that’s not the case, so it’s quite useless to argue the difference between what a vote says and what it does.
artemis - your logic is giving me headaches. If attempts at reform of the two-party system are acceptable only under certain nebulous conditions, and those attempts are going to fail anyway, why try to reform the system at all? Why should we wait for four years just to see which candidate wins the nomination and only then go ahead with reform attempts if he’s moderate enough? If that’s the only chance I thought I’d have of doing something about it, I’d probably just stay home instead. It would seem 48% of the voting populace likely thinks the same way.
You are quite right on another point, however; success in politics requires a good sense of strategy and tactics as well as energy and passion. But strategy and tactics shouldn’t be based on unthinking acceptance of what two major political parties tell me is the only possible thing to do.
I don’t see why that matters. Votes determine the election, not how many people vote. If things were different they wouldn’t be the same, I agree.
I get that, man, truly I do. Gore fucked up. He ran a poor campaign. I won’t deny that or argue that. But I will continue to point out that if a voter’s intent was to shift political power to the left, a vote for Nader didn’t accomplish what they intended. I feel there are enough Nader voters that would have preferred Gore to Bush, and that if they knew in advance that their votes would change the election, they would vote differently. I intend to craft my arguments to address these people. If you are not one of them, then I won’t waste any more of your time.
With you, maybe. If one person votes, and only one person votes, the vote still does something. In fact, it does exactly what it says. If five people vote, two go to Bush, one goes to Gore, and two go to two seperate independents, Bush wins. Suppose for a moment that, if they were asked, the independents would strictly prefer Gore to Bush. Now: did their vote represent their preferences with respect to the outcome of the election?
I voted for Nader because, frankly, at the time I considered it a race between TweedleDee and TweedleDum. Hindsight having proven me wrong, this year’s vote will go to a ham sandwich if that’s what the Democrats nominate.
I would be astonished if Nader draws even 1/10 of the vote he did in 2000. Without even the limited resources of the Green Party behind him, and with the history of the last four years, Nader voters will (mostly) return to the Democratic fold.
Interesting stuff. I don’t think Duverger’s Law applies in cases when the public become sufficiently disenchanted. In India, they have gone from a strong 1 or 2 party system to a whole slew of parties vying for votes divided across social, economic, caste, class, language and religious lines. A large number of parties compete for various targeted vote banks and the voting public do not compromise because all they care about is representation. So, we end with up a geographical divide as well, with different parties obtaining certain segements of vote, winning localized seats… people get the representation they want. The problem is with such a divided congress, parties are now forced to enter into alliances, which are usually unprincipled.
So, I guess, as an alternative to the voting public compromising, the parties are compromising, but it comes much easier to them 
So, in a sense, it can happen here as well if the voting public get disenchanted enough and make it electorally shown.
I didn’t follow the campaign closely but I remember the SNL skits about Gore and Bush being the same. Interesting, in hindsight.
Yeah, litost, the analysis changes depending on whether we are discussing multi-seat or single-seat elections. Multi-seat elections are much more conducive to multiple parties because people can concentrate themselves geographically. This is much harder to do for national, single-seat elections. For multi-seat elections, my preference would be Party List Proportional voting which can tend towards encourage minority party support. For single-seat elections, approval voting or runoff voting is far superior to what America currently has.
FTR, I have no beef at all with the EC, lest anyone think so. It’s a completely tangential issue. I wish more states apportioned their EC votes according to proportion of support, but that’s a state by state issue and national platforms can’t do anything about it.
OK, I see your point here. No, I didn’t vote Nader because I thought he had a real chance of winning the White House, or that political power would really shift to the left if he made a decent showing. I voted Nader because both Republicans and Democrats disgust me, and I’d like to see a multiparty system established here in the US. At least it would provide a larger forum for politics that pose themselves as alternatives to the self-described “mainstream”.
I voted for Nader in 2000, and was rather smug about it for some months afterward. I don’t care if Gore lost because of Nader, I said. I’d vote for Nader again, I said. Nobody remembers this now, but after one of the debates, all the press could talk about was how few times Gore and Bush disagreed (!) Yes, I was quite the idealistic citizen, voting my conscience and all.
Sometime in 2002 I realized what a fool I’d been, when Bush did everything short of writing Enron a check for $1 trillion drawn on the U.S. Treasury. I’d be harder on myself except that there was little indication prior to the election of the full depth of the blackhearted incompetence that is the George W. Bush presidency.
I really question Nader’s motives. If the goal is to use a no-chance-in-hell presidential bid to promote your position before an attentive press, the proven method is to get into the race early, show up at a few debates, then beat a hasty retreat when the primaries start. He’s already missed the most important part of the primary season, and he has to know that he has zero chance of actually winning. I have to say that Nader has disappointed me far more than Bush ever could have. If he really does run again, it is my considered opinion that he is a big fucking donkey dick who deserves to be chained in a pit with his own filth.
If your disgust with both major parties are equal, Olentzero, then I agree that not voting for them was correct. I’d imagine a lot of libertarians feel the same way, as with Buchanan supporters. I just know that some greens voted for Nader as a protest against a candidate they thought would win without them, not because they strictly didn’t want a democrat in office. These people genuinely made a mistake, and I don’t hold it against them, but we all have a lot to learn from that election.
I’d love to see a multi-party system. I wish wish wish some candidate would make this an issue. Do you think that would motivate more voters to vote, I mean among the large portion of the population that simply doesn’t vote?
which would STILL be more intelligent than Bush.
