Slight hijack, but I wonder how many Americans participating in anti-war demonstrations didn’t vote in 2000.
Plenty of people said “a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush” in support of Al Gore. Examples include the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. Gore, I think, was too circumspect to say it himself when he didn’t have to say it.
A vote for Nader was a vote for Bush, as Minty has shown. More specifically, it was instrumental in allowing the recent proposals to permit aging factories to avoid putting in new anti-pollution gear, exempt entire forest management plans from NEPA, and to reduce EPA protections on wetlands and rivers. Those fine initiatives have all been proposed just in the past six months. It’s too depressing to go over the actions of the past two years.
And you, Naderites, can’t do jack shit to stop them now. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now: Nader supporters have facilitated the destruction of the very thing they sought to protect, and we will all have to deal with the consequences.
You Green Party people out there should be ashamed of what you did, and you should recognize that the responsibility for reconciliation with the Democrats lies with you, not they. It is a weighty and solemn responsibility, and I suggest you get the hell to work right now to change the platform of the one party with the power and the moral conscience to reverse the disasters that have befallen our environment. You wanted to change things, and you sure as hell did. Now come the hell down from the clouds and do something constructive instead.
Harrumph. Good day.
Sofa:
I kind of agree with you, but how about a rant against the Dems to make a REAL effort to bring the Nader folks into the mainstream of your party? I’d bet, though, that quite a few Nader supporters think that 4 yrs of Bush will help them in the long run-- i.e., more support for Nader in the future. My guess is that those really disatisfied with Bush will be less willing to “throw away their vote” next time around. Of course we may have a whole new set of issues that could set up something similar for either party.
Not in North Carolina it wasn’t – votes for Gore or for Nader were pure message votes here. Care to explain otherwise?
More importantly, what do you think about my question: in 2004, will Democrats be more or less likely to ignore the concerns of the people who chose Nader over Gore in 2000? That is, will Democrats risk another loss in order to punish the progressives in the party, or will they decide that it’s worth adopting stronger leftist positions in order to capture the votes of the Naderites?
Daniel
One other point: the idea that a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush is mathematical nonsense.
Imagine a theoretical election in which 25 people will vote. So far, 23 have voted:
12 for Gore
11 for Bush
The remaining two people are trying to decide who to vote for.
If they vote for Bush, the final results are a Bush win:
12 for Gore
13 for Bush.
If they vote for Gore, the final results are a Gore win:
14 for Gore
11 for Bush
If they vote for Nader, the final results are a Gore win:
12 for Gore
11 for Bush
2 for Nader
What we see is that, if Gore is going to win anyway, a vote for Nader doesn’t have any effect, whereas a vote for Bush does. A vote for Nader != a vote for Bush.
Of course, you can reverse the scenario: make it so that Bush was going to win anyway. In this case, a vote for Nader leads to the same result as a vote for Bush.
But since the result doesn’t lead to similarities in all cases, clearly, the two are different.
A vote for Nader was a vote against the increasing right-wing trend that a lot of folks see in the Democratic Party. It was a huge issue in 1991, and it’s been getting worse.
If a result of Gore’s close loss is that the Democratic Party becomes more responsive to its left-wing – say, by electing Nancy Pelosi as the Speaker of the House – then the gamble might pay off.
Whether it’s worth the devastation that Bush is inflicting? That’s where I’m of two minds about it. Is the short-term gamble worth the long-term gamble? I don’t know.
Daniel
Daniel:
We had similar question. Of course it’s a balancing act. As th Dems go farther left, they gain some Naderites, but lose some right leaning folks in the process. I’m sure the party operatives would love the situation to be static, but it’s got to be a tough call.
It probably says a lot about the American psyche that the two major parties are similar in so many areas. I guess that means there aren’t that many huge rifts among the general population.
I disagree. Nader himself had the length of the campaign to at least try to make his case to the public, and the polls leading up to the election measured the degree of Nader’s popular support, which certainly counts as an opportunity to ‘say’ something.
But like me in my meeting, you only get one vote, and you get to choose between using it for the best proposal/candidate that can actually win, or using it to play Cassandra. So I still think my analogy holds up well.
Daniel - I think Gore ran a very lefty campaign in 2000, relative to the times. So much so that I thought he overplayed his hand, starting to look almost like a caricature of the knee-jerk liberal. There was the whole “top 1%” thing, which I agree with, but he was saying it as a mantra, rather than saying what that meant for America. There was his week of pick-on-a-different-industry-each-day, and I’d have no trouble finding that many to pick on, but it was the sort of thing that should have been red meat to the far left, but also the sort of thing that makes centrists nervous.
Oddly enough, the big issue Big Al neglected was his signature issue, the environment. I can’t fathom this - environmental issues are the Greens’ reason for being, and the differences between Bush and Gore on most environmental issues are a win for Gore with centrists, so it would have helped him at both ends. But it remains that lefties should have been able to figure out on their own that Bush was already cuddly with the mining and lumber industries, and Gore wasn’t likely to ever be.
So IMHO, the Dems in 2000 paid more than sufficient attention to the concerns of those who chose Nader over Gore in 2000, and got nothing out of the deal. Where that leaves the Dems and Greens, I don’t know, but I think the Greens ought to suck it up and vote for the Dem nominee in ‘04 as repentance, even if the Dems run Joe friggin’ Leiberman.
What the Green’s did in the 2000 elections was horrible.
It’s the Green Party’s fault that Gore lost his home state, something very few sitting VPs have managed to do in the history of this country.
It’s the Green Party’s fault that a Democratic county canvassing board designed a supposedly confusing butterfly ballot.
It’s the Green Party’s fault that Democratic voters are too lazy to look at the ballot ahead of time so they know who to vote for.
It’s the Green Party’s fault that Democratic voters are so stupid that they actually vote for Pat Buchanan instead.
It’s the Green Party’s fault that the Democrats lost seats in the mid-term elections to the Republicans.
I’m waiting for the Democrats to blame the Green Party for eating babies. Democrats don’t take any responsibility for their own actions in both the 2000 and the mid-term elections. At least when I voted for Nader, I had a clue and voted for the candidate I wanted to.
Asked DanielWithrow
Oh, I think the Dems will fall all over themselves to shore up the environmentally friendly/conservationist side of their platform, no doubt about it. There won’t be any punishment, if the Democrats have the remnant of a clue. (On a personal note, that prospect makes me very happy indeed.) What this Administration has already done provides a dump’s worth of ammo, and the Democrats would be fools not to pick it up and start shooting with back at the President.
The problem, from my point of view, is this: the change is going to come (or not come) at the cost of irreparable harm to our environment. I don’t give a damn how effective the message is, in my book Nader blew any credibility he had straight out of the water when things were looking close and he refused to concede. Nader could have extracted serious concessions from a President who probably would have recognized the good service rendered by bowing out.
Let me put it another way: which would have been better, the fiasco we have on our hands now, or a Gore version of the Council on Environmental Quality headed up by Ralph himself? Hell, they might have even snuck him past the Senate for Secretary of the Interior, considering the fact that the Senate green-lighted his equally radical polar opposite, Gale Norton.
As it is, I think this next tragic year is going to do a very effective job in driving a deep wedge between Bush and people on the left and the right. The snowmobilers and loggers are going to piss off the hunters, good fishing spots are going to go to shit, and, given good misfortune, entire communities will be affected by the relaxation of dumping and runoff regulations. It could prove to be a “leverage” issue that pushes the middle back in the other direction, and it might be the Democrats’ best chance for regaining the White House.
But at what cost?
Once again, that’s just silly. In point of fact, you DON’T KNOW ahead of time whether Bush or Gore is going to win, at least in those states where the race is competitive. Your purported analysis there is nothing more than backwards-looking rationalization.
If you voted in a state like Texas where there was no question that Bush was going to win, fine, it’s not your fault. My criticism goes specifically to those states that were competitive, and where Nader did or easily could have swung the presidency to a guy who is vigorously opposed to everything you stand for, instead of a guy who actually embraces a bunch of the same stuff as your beloved spoiler candidate (but without all the namby-pamby socialist nonsense).
Look at the bloody numbers, Daniel. Nader incontrovertibly gave Florida’s 25 electoral votes to Bush. He almost certainly gave New Hampshire’s 4 electoral votes to Bush. He came unbelievably close to handing Bush a total of 30 more electoral votes in Iowa, Oregon, New Mexico, and Wisconsin. And that’s not even counting the states like Ohio, Missouri, Nevada, and Tennessee, where Nader’s votes would have come damn close to putting Gore in front.
But hey, you got what you asked for. He’s your president now. Welcome to him.
As the starter of the (infamous?) “Fuck you, Ralph Fucking Nader” thread on election night, 2000, I figured I should check in here. Basically, I agree with damned near everything Sofa King has said. I stand by everythign I said in that thread, and I think that time has proven me correct.
I’ve got zero interest in laying or claiming blame. My interest is in deciding what to do in 2004. And I’ll say right now, Lieberman ain’t never gonna get my vote, be he running against David Duke.
I agree that the cost of the four years of Bush may prove extremely high. But Gore was also a pro-business, anti-labor candidate who downplayed environmental issues and seemed to scoff at the left wing of the party; my worry is that we were weighing four years of Bush against an unchecked slide to the right of the Democratic party. If that slide has stopped, then it might
-might-
be worth it.
And Minty, it’s not incontrovertible that Nader gave Florida to Bush. You can phrase it differently, and just as meaningfully: those folks who voted for Gore instead of for Nader gave the election to Bush. Or rather, those folks who voted for Bush gave the election to Bush. Or rather, those folks who didn’t vote gave the election to Bush.
I think it’s misleading at best to lay blame for a lost election on people who voted their conscience. There are many places to lay blame for the election; folks who voted for Nader are IMO at the bottom of the list.
Daniel
Of course you don’t. No one ever has to take any blame in Green-Land, as long as their motives were pure. For those of us who live in the real world, however,
This assertion sums up the moral bankruptcy of your position more eloquently than any parody I could possibly have constructed.
Really? By all means, explain those numbers in a way that plausibly denies Gore 1000 additional votes out of the 90,000+ lefty votes cast for Nader. Knock yourself out.
IMO, you’re at the top. They voted for a guy who you knew had zero–zero–chance of winning a goddamned thing, while knowing that there was an excellent chance votes given to him would swing the election in favor of a guy who really is right-wing.
But your vote was cast out of pure, untainted ideals, so you can’t be responsible for its outcome, can you?
:smack:
For those of us who live in the real world, however, it is correct and appropriate to give credence to the foreseeable consequences of our actions, not just the purity of our motives.
I’m curious, are there any good estimates out there for how many registered Democrats didn’t vote at all? Not counting those who were the subject of voting irregularities and tried to vote but couldn’t.
What you’re missing or plain denying, minty, is that one of the forseeable outcomes of voting for Nader is that the Democratic party may stop its slide to the right. I beileve that has to enter any political calculus.
I’ll ignore your snipey little bits about Greens not taking blame; as I said, I find them uninteresting.
But as I also said, deciding that Green voters have a greater debt to vote for Gore than, say, Democratic voters have to vote for Nader, or Republican voters have to vote for Gore, or non-voters have to vote for Gore, is arbitrary.
And the more that Democratic activists scream shrilly at Green voters, the more they alienate Green voters. It seems like poor strategy to me – and strategy, not blame, is what interests me.
Daniel
As for why I won’t vote for Lieberman: he would’ve made a great right-wing candidate back in 1980. If I vote for him now, what will the next Democratic candidate be: John McCain? How soon before George Bush is the Democratic candidate, and the Republican candidate is Patrick Buchanan?
The rightward slide of the party is real and dangerous; if protest votes are the only way to stop it, then I’ll make them. If that’s moral bankruptcy to you, bully for you.
Daniel
Joe Lieberman is just a boogeyman for the Greens. He has zero chance of winning the Democratic Party nomination.
I hope you’re right, davidw. While I’m unsure about whether voting for Nader in swing states was a wise decision in 2000, I’m willing to vote for just about a yellow dog this time around. But Lieberman… eewwww.
But I think you’re right: I don’t think the Dems are stupid enough to run him in 2004.
Daniel
minty, you’re generally pretty reasonable. However, in this matter you seem to be pretty pissed off, and I think you’re missing part of the picture. I have a question for you.
The Democrats, and the Gore 2000 campaign in particular, pretty much ignored the trend of people who were planning to vote for Nader. They knew about it, it was a clear movement in the making… and they ignored them. What did they do to address those people who were disenfranchised by the Democrats in general and Gore in particular. They did a full measure of squat to address these people. Instead of addressing the issues these people cared about, they went blithely about their course and lost the election.
In short, as has been said before, it was their election to lose. Even if the Nader vote was the deciding factor, as you seem to be asserting, then doesn’t the Democratic Party deserve just as much if not more blame for failing to address the concerns of those voters?
You seem to be aiming all of your ire at the Green Party, minty. My question is this: Why isn’t at least some of that aimed at the Democrats, and the Gore campaign? Do you disagree that they fucked up royally? Do you not think they missed major signals that their vote might be hurt by the Green campaign, or ignored them? Don’t the Democrats deserve some blame here? Don’t they have some things to fix before 2004?
And a further question, for you and everyone: In situations like this, when we are told that “every vote counts,” do you really believe that people should vote against their conscience and for a candidate they don’t whole-heartedly support? Or, do you think we should have a two-party system only, with no alternatives allowed?
I see a lot of bitching from you, minty, and I can only say I’m surprised. It seems out of character.