And a lot easier to swallow.
:sings: If ifs and buts/were candy and nuts/Gore lost because of Nader do the math.
Sorry it doesn’t rhyme better. Gore ran a lousy campaign and was a boring candidate, but without Nader he would have won Florida by more votes than Bush could have thrown out. And New Hampshire, and perhaps a couple of other states.
I never said reform attempts were guarenteed to fail - I said they are likely to fail. And history backs me up on that - third-party candidates with popular appeal far stronger than Nader’s have run for President several times in the past and failed to win the office. There’s always the slim possibility that this time will be an exception, and that this time the third-party candidate will draw enough votes to win, but the greater probability is that he won’t. And given that, yes, it DOES make sense to consider the likely worst-case outcome before deciding whether or not to try a serious reform attempt in any particular election year.
That Bush would be a disastrous president (from the standpoint of leftists) was abundantly clear very early - those people who claimed to see no difference between him and Gore simply weren’t looking. Anyone who’d studied his record as Govenor of Texas KNEW how he’d run the country if he got his hands on it. And sure enough, he’s lived up (or perhaps I should say down) to expectations.
Like it or not, sometimes voting for the lesser of two evils IS necessary. It isn’t that way in every election, fortunately; there are Republicans out there who aren’t simply Radical Right lapdogs. But Bush isn’t one of them. And once it became clear that the Shrub was indeed going to be the Republican’s candidate, those of us on the political left should have focused on keeping him out of office, not on reforming the system or sending the Democrats a message.
And why should anyone care about that 48%? They’ve rendered themselves irrelevant. No political party pays much attention to non-voters.
(Now if you can form a political party that will appeal to a very large percentage of those non-voters and turn them into voters, suddenly the two big parties will care very much indeed. That’s a more than viable route to take if you want true reform. But the Green Party hadn’t yet succeeded in getting large numbers of those non-voters to turn out and vote for their candidates in state or Congressional elections; why think a Presidential race would be any different?)
In all fairness, I gave to point out that, if the election laws were different, both candidates would have run a completely different campaign. With the electoral college in place, you can neglect both the safe states and the states which will go to your opponent. Oh, sure, you make a token effort, because you don’t want to seem to neglect any constituants, but that’s the way they run.
In a strictly popular vote campaign I would expect to see both candidates fight very hard for the heavily populated areas, such as the Boston to Washington corridor, and ignore the sparsely populated states.
It’s like saying after a football game that if the victory were based on total yardage rather than points scored you would have won, when in fact both teams stategies are predicated on the existing rules.
That being said, many votes for third party candidates are probably because they are cast in states where the outcome is never in doubt, and it’s therefore safe to make a protest vote. It really is only the swing states that matter, like it or not. It’s just bad luck that Florida was one.
Well, looks like he will enter the 2004 race. How odd his advisers told Fox News on Friday. You’d think they’d give the heads up to NPR or any of those “liberal” stations.
So you’re saying that the political parties knew months in advance that 48% of the voting populace would stay home in November, and that therefore they could safely focus on fighting over the remaining 52%? The only day they were non-voters is Election Day; the rest of the time they’re up for grabs. And it seems to me a much more sound electoral policy is to find ways of speaking to the issues that concern those who might not come out Election Day, in the hopes of getting their vote, instead of writing them off completely.
This site (scroll down past the ad thing) says that turnout in 2000 was 51.3, and this was the highest turnout since '92. Regardless, the answer is yes: the parties are aware that about half the population is going to stay home, since that’s what happens every Presidential election. Corollary to that is the fact that most of them are simply to lazy to bother to vote in the first place- so it would be a waste of effort for the parties to spend too much time reaching out to them. Somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, sure, but I find it a little hard to blame them.
That’d be nice if it was true instead of patently absurd, wouldn’t it? Alarming numbers of people in this country simply don’t give a shit. Non-Presidential election years are even worse; the last time 40% of the population bothered to vote was 1970!
Do you think someone follows the race for months and then decides on Election Day not to vote? I doubt it. Maybe a few people get too busy, but the cast majority choose to be ignorant, by which I mean they pay no attention and stay uninvolved in something that you would think is pretty important.
If such a thing was possible, it would be a great policy. But like the banner on this site says, fighting ignorance is kinda tough.
*Somewhere far beneath Shennandoah Mountains, Supreme Leader Karl Rove rolls nervously throughout the former nuclear fallout shelter, now converted to Bush Campaign Headquarters. His portly frame rests in an oversized stroller, pushed by a 300 pound non-English-speaking illegal immigrant named Mojito, who in turn is roped to an infant in yet another stroller. *
Rove: Dammit, we have unleashed a beast, here! We seeded the Dean campaign with millions of dollars, yet he failed in his mission.
[/url=http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr]Mojito: Usted agujero del asno, de que es porque usted instala a decano demasiado temprano para su irrisión pública. Cualquier tonto habría podido realizar que su brigada de griterío del mono saltaría sobre el candidato y lo rasgaría inmediatamente a los fragmentos. ¿ahora volar a San Francisco, o espere hasta que se pierde todo?
Rove: Ahh, friend Mojito. How the rhythms of your unintelligible primitive tounge comfort me so. The question now becomes, how do we combat this… actual combatant? My enormous data of historical knowledge tells me that in ancient history, near the eclipse of the Reagan administration, a candidate ran against a war hero and won. Control! Who was the war hero to whom Ronald Reagan lost?
Mojito: Era Bill Clinton che ha vinto contro George Bush – il George competente Bush – e lo ha fatto minimizzando la sua guerra record ed elevando la sua visione per il futuro in un’era della paralisi di politica straniera e di malaise economico.
Rove: Cease your babbling, Mojito! Control!
Control: Control, here. Uhh, your query generates a null answer in the database. However, we do have a modest correlation with the… administration prior to the current one.
Rove: And which administration was that, Control?
Control: The… um… administration which preceded the current administration which currently resides, sir, assuming the data is correct.
Rove: And what was the name of that administration, Control?
Control: The, um, administration of President… Clinton… Sir.
Rove: Clinton? CLINTON? Enforcement! Have the operator of Control sent to Guantanamo for questioning immediately!
Enforcement: Enforcement complying immediately.
Control: Hey, fuck you, Rove.
Rove: What did he say?
Mojito: Disse, “vai se foder, rove.” O companheiro está indo rot para sempre na prisão e está pagando seus respeitos a você.
Rove: Mojito, if you continue to interrupt my train of thought I will not hesitate to leave you and your child behind. Remember that.
Mojito: Ce sera le jour où nous tous surgissons et éteignons notre soif sur le sang de vous de grosses vaches de corporation. J’attends avec intérêt ce jour, vous bâtard arrogant.
Rove: Enough, you ignorant poltroon! We need a plan… yesssss. I seem to recall that once the great Republican Party used a tactic… what was it called?
Mojito: Conflation.
Rove: Stop interrupting me, Mojito! Conflation, I think it was. Mention the unproven crime and the candidate in the same sentence and bingo, the public will swallow the association like a lake bass on a Toronado. Excellent.
Mojito: Kriminell.
Rove: Yessssss. But it is still not enough. We need a way to offer those who were most harmed by this administration’s policies with an attractive protest vote. Control!
Control: Whachoowant?
Rove: How dare you speak to me in such an informal manner! Who is your superior?
Control: Sheeeit, ain’t noone here but the cleanup crew now.
Rove: Why isn’t Control back online yet!? What time is it?
Control: Two thirty pm, EST.
Rove: That’s past lunch hour! Where is Control, dammit?
Control: You asked me the time, not the date. They’re all in Guantanimo, now. They’ll be back when they start telling you what you want to hear, I guess. Try and come after me, bitch. I’m in a union.
Rove: My God! The Communists have taken over the government! Wolfowitz always said they were just lying low… There’s nothing left now but to… Mojito! Connect me with Ralph Nader!
Mojito: Seguro, jefe, pero usted realice que sus deudas anteriores de la campaña no pueden ser pagadas apagado tentándolo adentro a otra campaña sin romper la ley.
Rove: I am the law! Wait a minute. What did you say?
Mojito: Yo no se.
Rove: Ah, your prattle never ceases to amuse me, Mojito. Where’s Nader!?
I just want to say three words:
RALPH, YOU EEEDIOT!!!
I just watched Nader announce his Independent candidacy on Meet the Press.
My impression: He kept going on and on about what needs to change and how many people support those ideas. But he seems to have (willfully?) failed to comprehend that, while many people may agree with his objectives/ideas, they don’t agree (this time around, given the results last time) that a run for the Presidency is the solution, or the best way to get those issues “out there”.
Russert was direct in asking him whether this was about “E.G.O.”, as many of Nader’s former supporters seem to be saying, and Nader responded by going on about (paraphrased) how it was “scandalous” that “the system” was crushing his attempt to run as a 3rd party candidate. Uh, no. While that may (may) be happening as well, 1) the people Russert was referencing were doing that all-American thing: expressing their opinion, and 2) when you start railing against your recent supporters as the enemy, it’s one step closer to tin-foil hat time.
I hope I’ve put enough qualifiers (many, some) in this so people don’t think I’m opposing their right to vote for whomever they wish.
Do you have any evidence for this, besides the fact of low voter turnout? How do you explain the 51 million people who registered to vote in the 2000 election but then didn’t? They weren’t lazy enough to register, but then they became too lazy to vote? It makes no sense.
Sofa King: that was beautiful. I never cease to be amazed at your posts.
In other views, what flodnak said. But this time, it won’t matter anyway. These third party guys never have more than one good year, something none of them ever seems to get.
The thing that bothers me most about Nader is the fact that he ran the most patently false campaign in 2000, and his hardcore supporters don’t seem to see that. Virtually his entire candidacy was based upon the fact that, in his words, “The only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door. That’s the only difference.”
This is clearly a lie. The entire basis for his platform was a lie. Sure, Bush (whom I loathe) may have lied about a few numbers on taxes, or on exactly how extreme his foreign policy was. Gore may have lied about medicare, or some such. But listening to the two of them, you still got the gist of the election: Bush on the right, Gore farther left.
Nader distorted the very base of the election: To hear him, it was Gore and Bush both on the right, on top of one another, and Nader to the left. Of course, Nader was, in fact, to the right of Gore, who was, in turn, to the left of Bush.
This is pretty much undeniable. He lied about the big picture. EVERYTHING he said was colored by what was perhaps the biggest political lie since McCarthy. And he accomplished his goal: Giving the race to the Republicans.
And that is why Ralph Nader is the most disgusting person in politics today.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Fuck you, Ralph Fucking Nader.
What other possibly explanation is there? Unless you can find some other common factor between that 51% of people - which I don’t think you will - then I’ll hold that apathy is the link.
After careful thought, the man who couldn’t even score enough votes to earn public funding for his campaign decided he would run for president in order to beat GWB??? 
DENY? What in Eris’s name is this crazy SOB thinking? He cried censorship earlier, and now he’s claiming that people are denied votes? What planet is this guy on?
WHAT? How does it make more sense now, after we see the track record Bush has? Nader won 3% of the vote. 3%. Even if his “ideology” (read: supreme ego) manages to captivate three times as many voters he still sucks.
I don’t see why they have to all have a common factor.
How is it a lie? Are you saying the Democrats accepted no corporate contributions for Gore’s campaign? That they’re not beholden to the same corporate interests as the Republicans? What, exactly, is the lie?
Thanks to the wonders of motor-voter legislation, registering to vote is as easy as signing your driver’s license. Why would you say “No” when asked if you want to register? It costs you absolutely nothing to do so. Still, registration is not a solemn promise that you’re going to vote. I surmise that the people who didn’t vote before are no more likely to vote now simply because they’re registered to do so.
That’s so evil :eek:
I voted for Nader in 2000, b/c NY was obviously going to the Dems and I like to support third parties.
But if you think that Nader is even going to get CLOSE to the votes he had before, you’ve got to up your medication. Democrats in swing states are going to be so utterly paranoid during this election that there’s no WAY they’re going to vote for Nader instead of Sen. Lesser Evil Than Bush.
That being said, I’ll probably vote for Nader again. NY will go Dem again. And I hate throwing my vote away… it might as well go towards Nader, b/c otherwise it’s sure as hell not making a difference. And I refuse not to vote. Not voting is the most reprehensible passivity one can show as an american. Bah.