Lizardo:
Let me get this straight: You preferred Gore, but you voted for Nader. That makes so much sense, I wonder why more people didn’t think of it.
Kudos to you Nader supporters who voted your conscience. You have (had?) more balls than I do.
But, dammit, when I think of that seriously misguided, bible thumping, script reading, philistine leading our nation into war on the foreign front and into serious economic troubles domestically I feel so helpless that it borders on depression and despair.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I can “sell out” on some of my ideals in order to keep my sanity?
Is there an implied suggestion in the OP that Gore wouldn’t be doing what the Bush administration is doing? If so, do you have some evidence to back that up?
After all, the official Iraq policy of regime change was formulated in the Clinton administration. Clinton in 1998 sounded exactly like Tony Blair sounds today. Even Hillary Clinton now has come out and said that she ‘fully supports’ the Bush Administration’s policies with respect to Iraq.
In addition, being a Democrat Gore would have faced much stiffer opposition from Republicans had he adopted a more dovish policy than Bush would have had he done the same. So there would have been even more pressure on Gore to be a hawk.
Not that he needs it. Gore supports overthrowing Saddam as well.
One thing would be different, however. Gore would have had much more support from the American people. Because the conservatives would have supported a war regardless of who was in the oval office, and a lot of the knee-jerk lefties who oppose this war because it will be waged by a Republican administration would have supported it had Democrats been running the show.
The only question is whether Gore would have had either the political capital or the backbone to see the war through in the face of massive European discontent.
Gore would not have dreamed up this policy in the first place, Sam. Not because he’s such a wonderful peace-loving guy; but because the whole idea that invading Iraq was a logical first step in a “war on terrorism” (a term that I can imagine Gore having used) would not have occured to a Gore administration. Gore would not have considered a preemptive doctrine which is entirely unique in American history. Gore would not have considered taking any measure without the support of the UN or, at the very least, the whole of NATO. Clinton was far from a saint, but he was an internationalist, not a unilateralist.
The fact that Hillary is now jumping on the hawkish bandwagon doesn’t demonstrate that Gore would have done what Bush has done. It only demonstrates what is well known about the Clintons: that they are politically opportunistic and will glom onto most things that they believe are, or will eventually become, popular. Clinton can see that due to 9/11 Americans are scared and want a “tough” foreign policy–so he wants to see the Democrats also have a tough foreign policy, and many Democrats are following suit. The fact remains though that Bushs’s tough foreign policy makes no sense; only it’s risky to try to make that argument to Americans when they are confused about the facts, and when they are likely to fall into line in the now likely event that the war proceeds.
Well, I guess we’ll never know, but I’d remind you that Bush was a lot more isolationist than Gore before 9/11. Events have a way of propelling people along.
—What specifically about the platform meant that it had zero percent chance of winning, except for, y’know, the fact that not enough people voted for it?—
hm: I’ll go with tax increases, higher oil prices as a GOAL, and a host of other things that managed to alienate both most unions AND their bosses? For a start?
—Like I said, you’re not going to get votes if you tell the voters outright, “hey- vote for me. I’m the lesser of two evils. What choice do you have?”—
Ah. “The coverage isn’t to blame… and to prove it, I’m going to repeat something that was stated over and over by pundits as THEIR take on Gore.”
----Gore acted like they were his to lose, and he lost them.----
Amazing how everyone has exactly the same things to say… and they just happen to be almost word for word exactly the same unsupported catchphrases that… oh, nevermind, it won’t do any good.
All right, I admit it. I voted for Nader when I would have preferred a different candidate, in this case, the Libertarian candidate. I don’t like or espouse the principles of the Republican or the Democratic parties, and, as a rule, I see no reason to vote for them. I have and will vote for individual candidates of both parties, but that’s because of the individual, not the party. As it happens, I did see a difference between Bush and Gore, and, while I might have slightly preferred one of them, if I could penetrate the layers of spin, that did not override my desire for a government which is responsive to the will of the people, even cussed Independents like me.
CJ
Bush is still an isolationist. Holy Batdroppings, Bush wants to invade Iraq, force a regime change and control Iraq for the foreseeable future no matter what the UN says or how many US allies refuse to go along. That is isolationist and not internationalist.
Same as Bush talking about working both sides of the aisle on domestic policies.
[pardon me if you were using extreme sarcasm and I just got whooshed.]
:rolleyes:
Aside from the fact that I very explicitly blamed the coverage, there’s the little fact that I heard Gore say over and over again, “A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush.”
Sheesh… sometime I wonder why I even bother typing this stuff in.
Cite, please.
Bush fooled me too. I saw the election as a rightish-centrist against a leftish-centrist, and was fairly content with that. Still preferred the lefty candidate, as always, but was not alarmed until I saw the extent to which the Pubbies were willing to go in their grasp for power.
Then when GeeDubya began to behave as though he had one a resounding landslide mandate…uh oh, this can’t be good.
But never mind the Nader vote. The Jews for Buchanan vote, theres the clincher.
I voted for Nader (and met him).
One cannot become president without being bought by the corporations.
I admit I was being idealistic, and overestimating the intelligence of voters (those who even voted).
We are not psychic however, no one is, so we do not know what would be happenign under President Gore.
I live in Ohio, and if all the Nader voters voted for Gore, he still wouldn’t have carried Ohio.
Everyone I know who voted for Gore said they were doing so only because Bush was the other candidate.
IMHO, the fix was in, Bush was to win no matter what happened (what with the help of Florida re; stopping blacks from voting, etc.)
In a vain effort to find words coming out of Al Gore’s mouth that in any way resemble “A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush,” I came across this pro-Nader commentary from just before the election. Its naivete in re Bush is simply stunning, so I figured I’d drop in some of its reasons why voting for Nader was the right thing to do:
Suckers.
How’s that global warming thing going for you? Not so good, huh? And let me guess, you’re crankier than ever about Big Oil and how it controls the country, right?
The problem with this is the concept of democracy.
This is the notion that we, the people, are the ultimate decision-makers, not the candidates themselves. We are supposed to be the actors, not the responders.
When we vote for/against someone simply because we think he did a better/worse job of stating his case, rather than because of whether he indeed has a better case, then we are abandoning that notion. We’re saying, “this is not a decision we need to take seriously; it’s more like whether to change the channel on a TV show.”
Our job, as voters, is to try to see past the annoying stuff like that: if Gore did say to vote for him as the lesser of two evils, or if he did say that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, so effin’ what?? This is your country, not a TV show. And it was up to you to decide whether Gore really was the lesser of two evils.
A vote for Nader was a likely vote for Bush, in close states - turned out to be that way in FL and NH - and it was your job, if you lived in such a state and were considering voting for Nader, to determine whether the difference between Gore and Bush was trivial, huge, or somewhere in between.
[Nader voter digression]
But sheesh - the gap between the parties had become an immense gulf by the mid-1990s. This was not breaking news by 2000; this was apparent from the 1994 midterm elections on, if not sooner. (In 1992, a guy named Perot ran a remarkably successful third-party candidacy by running up the middle, between the parties. That was a pretty good clue.) The 2000 primary season reinforced that, by showing that John McCain, a guy who was still significantly to the right of most centrist Democrats, was far to the left of the GOP mainstream.
How anybody with a brain could have concluded that it didn’t really matter whether Bush or Gore was president is beyond me.
[/Nader voter digression]
Anyone who really cares about the 2000 situation should be working to try to change the system so American voters will never again be faced with this kind of dilemma. The way to do this is to adopt INSTANT-RUNOFF VOTING.
It works like this: If more than two candidates are running for a particular office, you, the voter, instead of picking just one, get to rank-order them by preference, e.g.
1st choice: Ralph Nader (Green)
2nd choice: Al Gore (Democrat)
3rd choice: Harry Browne (Libertarian)
4th choice: George Bush (Republican)
5th choice: Pat Buchanan (Reform)
(That’s how I would have ordered my choices, anyway.) If your first-choice candidate does not get a majority, your second-choice vote still counts toward electing your second-choice candidate, and so on. This eliminates the “opposition-splitting” problem. Nader could have run without taking votes away from Gore; in fact he would have provided more votes for Gore by increasing voter turnout. At the same time, Nader supporters, even if they couldn’t elect their candidate, would have had the chance to make a very visible and effective protest vote – just look at all those “Gore” voters who really preferred Nader! That’s something President Gore could not ignore in making policy decisions. IRV also substitutes for, and eliminates any need for, a costly runoff election between the top two finishers (hence the name, “instant runoff”).
San Francisco recently adopted IRV for its municipal elections, the Vermont town meetings recently endorsed adoption of IRV for state elections, and the following organizations are working to publicize and promote IRV:
The Center for Voting and Democracy – www.fairvote.org
California Instant Runoff Voting Coalition – calirv.org
Coalition for Instant Runoff Voting in Washington – irvoting.org
Fairvote Utah – www.utah.fairvote.org
Fair Vote Massachusetts – www.ma.fairvote.org
NYS-IRV – www.nysirv.org
Reform America Inc. – www.reformamericainc.org
The Independent Progressive Politics Network – www.ippn.org
Instant Runoff .Com – www.instantrunoff.com
Massachusetts Voting Reform – www.massvote.org
Another proposed reform is “fusion” or “cross-endorsement” – a practice whereby one candidate can run as the nominee of more than one party, making it possible for several small parties to pool their strength. The candidate might get a line on the ballot for each party nomination, or might get just one ballot line with severaly parties’ names after the candidate’s name.
Fusion is legal in New York, Vermont, Connecticut, South Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, South Dakota, Utah and Idaho. In all other U.S. states, fusion is illegal or effectively banned. Democrats and Republican mostly write the laws, and they want to freeze out competition if they can.
The New Party, a non-socialist left-progressive party founded in 1992, made fusion the core of its strategy. It was effective, but only at the local and state levels and only in states where fusion was legal or possible. The New Party brought a First-Amendment-based court challenge to Minessota’s ban on fusion; it went up to the U.S. Supreme Court – I can’t find the cite, but I think the case was styled “Timmons v. Twin Cities New Party.” The New Party lost. You can read the details in Micah Sifry’s recent book, “Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America.”
After the Timmons case, the New Party became more or less inactive on the nationl level, though New-Party-spawned local organizations still exist at the state level – most notably the Working Families Party in New York. There are also NP groups active in Arkansas, Illinois, Massachusetts, Montana, Oregon, and Wisconsin. The New Party, as a national organization, still maintains a nominal existence, and a website at www.newparty.org (which has not been updated in a long time), but most of its leaders’ energies have gone into a new organization, the New Majority Education Fund – www.nmef.org – which is a single-issue organization, dedicated to spreading the word about fusion.
Some other time I’ll tell you about proportional representation.
(We’re drifting into hijack territory here, but…) RTFirefly, I don’t think you’re taking this reasoning far enough. The job of voters in a Presidential election is to specify who they want to be President. So yes, not voting for Gore because you don’t like the way he presents his case is not doing your job as a voter. But by the same token, not voting for Nader because you think Gore is less evil than Bush is also not doing your job as a voter. If a voter honestly preferred Nader to Bush and Gore, then they should have voted for Nader. That was their job: to express their preference, not to vote “strategically” just to keep Bush out.
Or in other words, I agree with DoctorJ.
(Apologies for the hijack, but this idea of “strategic” voting just bugs me.)
And say goodbye to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge too.
I also agree with BrainGlutton. Instant runoff voting–or preference voting, as it’s also called–is preferable to me. As is approval voting, where you vote for everyone on the ballot that you think would do a good job, and the person with the most aggregate votes wins.
Orbifold, I have to disagree with you. If I’m in a meeting where we’re debating between several alternatives, and after I make my case for the one I really care about, it’s clear that mine doesn’t have enough support to be chosen, then I’m going to put my weight behind the choice I think is the best one that might get the votes. If the alternative is to hold out for a better but unpopular alternative, I’ve (yes) thrown away my opportunity to influence the decision between the front-running choices.
I can’t see how being a voter is that much different.
BrainGlutton - while I’m not against instant-runoff voting, I think the ‘fusion’ bit (never heard that name for the idea before) would be more salable to the public: there’s no sense to restricting a party from putting anyone they want on their ticket.
Particularly, it would give room for third parties to build from the grass roots up: the Libertarians, the Greens, or whoever could put their preference of the major Presidential candidates at the top of their ticket, and maybe even the same in House and Senate races in the early going, while running their own candidates for state legislature, county commission, and so forth.
At any rate, there really needs to be a reasonable way for new parties to come along and supplant the old ones if the old ones aren’t doing the job. But that isn’t easy as long as voting for a third party to one side of the political center helps the major-party candidate on the other side.
BrainGlutton, I agree that changing the voting system is the best way to solve the problems we saw in 2000. And I’ve been a big proponent of proportional representation for a long time.
Unfortunately, given the resistance from officials to even minor changes to the way we vote, I don’t see it happening on a natiowide scale anytime soon, even though it is a great idea.