There is a good probability that less than half ofthe registered voters will vote in the general election. Since elections are taken so seriously in the United States, what are we argueing about? 
If you use this definition, and if you say you are acting against their best interests, you just lost a good portion of the senior vote, a group of people who DO vote most of the time, unlike the rest of America. Not a good strategy for winning a tight election.
I have a question for those who claim one should vote against someone rather than for them. Suppose that a voter despised Bush, dislikes Kerry yet agrees with most if not all of the positions that Nader holds. ( this is a hypothetical, not a statement of personal opinion, although I do despise Bush and dislike Kerry ) You seem to feel that this person would be out of line to vote FOR the candidate that most nearly represents his views simply because it’s unlikely ( alright, impossible ) for that candidate to win, instead you maintain that he should vote AGAINST the one of the two possible winning candidates that he dislikes more. Dosen’t this strike you as standing the system on it’s head? My God, what ever happened to principles, to voting your beliefs? Are we that partisan nowadays that getting someone out is more important than who we put in?
Hey, that’s Great Debates, where they check you for weapons at the door and loan you a few if you don’t have at least three. 
Besides, a GD equivalent to this would be someone writing, “I know George W. Bush is a liar and an idiot who’s running the country into the ground, but I’m voting for him anyway because I like morons.” You don’t usually get this frank admission of stupidity in Great Debates, except from some of the more long-term Bushistas. 
In any event, don’t mistake my support for Olentzero’s principles as support for his position or his candidate. “I may not agree with you, but will defend” blab blab blab. To steal from Randi Rhodes, I think of Nader as a “luxury candidate” – normally I’d give some weight for what he’s saying, but this is not the time for luxuries. But just because I think Nader is being an egotistical moron (does he seriously believe he will draw votes away from the Bush-backing conservative base?) doesn’t mean I need to vilify the folks who support him.
Better to make the effort to convince the undecided voters and the disgrunted conservatives, methinks. There’s certainly more of them than Nader voters.
I’m not vilifying Olentzero, just giving him a little tough love. Ordinarily, I’d have no problem with his support for Nader, but the times are simply too dire for, as you put it, luxuries. I want him to help defeat Bush, and not help him, however indirectly.
Well, you’re talking to a disgruntled conservative right here, and there’s plenty more like me. I’m volunteering to help with the campaign because as unenchanted with Kerry as I might be, he’s better than that lying POS we have in the White House now. I’m urging everyone I know to register and vote, including my boyfriend’s GOP family, who are not happy with Bush either.
Perhaps Comrade **Olentzero ** is following Lenin’s exhortation “*Khuzhe luchshe * - The worse, the better” - the worse the oppression of the working class by the capitalists gets, the more ripe the conditions for the inevitable revolution, and the sooner the means of production can be controlled by the glorious proletariat. With that mindset, it follows that one must dismiss the Democrats as feckless Mensheviks and instead vote so that the Republicans win.
Is anyone going to take a stab at answering my question from above?
Well, Weirddave, with all due respect, that’s not the question. The question is whether or not you’re willing to do what people do in republics all the time: compromise.
If you are, then you vote for the person who is both closest to your views and most likely to win. If not, not.
Looked at that way, the fact that two ideologues, Libertarian and Olentzero, are both voting Nader is completely unsurprising.
As for the question of alternatives to the two big parties, the way you build a party is the same as the way you build a company or a career: start small and work your way up. Which for a new party would mean getting elected first locally, then at the state level, and then at the national level with some Congressmen, then with some Senators, and only after all of that going after the Presidency.
If the party you intend to vote for can’t even get a Congressman elected, well, you’re pissing in the wind.
Well, I can understand this, it’s just that a lot of people are saying that it is so vitally important to vote for person B simply because he’s not person A. It dosen’t seem to matter to them weather someone likes person C or not, or thinks they could do the job, what person B actually stands for, or anything else, it’s all “Vote for B because he’s the only one who can beat A”. Frankly, neither Kerry nor Bush is qualified to run a dog pound. Neither is Nader, but that’s beside the point I’m making. If Bush and Kerry are about equally unpalatable, shouldn’t our hypothetical voter vote his consience reguardless?
Depends, I suppose.
I was a boy during Vietnam, with an older brother. Towards the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, my parents (who, while Democrats, are hardly radicals) began to become obsessed with what to do about my older brother, who would become eligible for the draft soon.
Canada was on the plate.
That kind of thing tends to form a brand on your brain.
The President, you have to understand, really doesn’t have much in the way of Constitutional powers. Even his power to make war is rung around with a variety of restrictions that were meant to avoid what happened in both Iraq and Vietnam: a rush to war, based on nothing but the word of the Executive.
This President has violated his only real Constitutional power in the most fundamental way. Given that the political reality is that even though hundreds of our servicemen are dead, and thousands wounded, many of them maimed for life, because of the whim of this piece of shit now occupying the White House (I refer to Iraq, not Afghanistan), there is no greater imperative than to get him out. Yesterday would be preferable. November, under the circumstances, will have to do.
I have zero patience, therefore, with those who claim to be on the left, like Olentzero, but who are unwilling to do what is necessary to get Bush out, especially when the man running against said turd volunteered to fight in Vietnam twice, but who had the brains, at the end of it all, to figure out that the whole damned thing was wrong. Such discernment is a rare thing.
Try reading my OP before you make statements like this, would you?
You’re right, I stand corrected.
I was reading the second page of this this morning, and responding to Weirddave.
However, the fact remains you are, by admission of your OP, staying home, because no one passes through your filter. So, in what we all know is going to be another tight election, Bush is going to get a pass from you, again.
So either way, my point stands: as an avowed ideologue, you can’t see your way clear to voting for a mere Democrat, as that would violate your ideological purity, even though the current occupant is demonstrably responsible for the deaths and maimings of thousands of his fellow citizens (we won’t even begin to get into the Iraqis who are dead/maimed by his hand). That, not to put too fine a point on it, is shameful.
I’m rather interested in finding out more about this little exhortation you quote. Unfortunately, since the Complete Works are about 45 volumes in size, and I’ve practically no idea where in the Subject Index I should even start to look, I’d appreciate a citation of source. Everything I know about the man and his politics runs directly counter to the assertion you lay out.
Why is it a tight election, though? If Kerry is such an obviously palatable alternative to four more years of Bush, why isn’t he landsliding in the polls even now?
Kim, I haven’t forgotten your post; it’s going to take some research that I’ve only just started now in order to answer it fully. But I intend to do just that.
Because half the country
a) benefits from his taxation policies
b) benefits from Greenspan’s low interest rate policies, which allow them to refi their houses and get a nice bonus on that, and they naturally place the praise for that windfall on Bush,
c) think Iraq was a good thing, because after all it’s a whole freakin’ country of angry Mohammedans and after that horrifying Fallujah incident, angry Mohammedan barbarians, and
d) he’s a Republican, which automatically gets him 40% of the vote regardless.
Not that hard to understand, really. Any republic naturally splits into half left and half right. In any given election the incumbent has the advantage, so the side that incumbent comes from - the right in this case - has the advantage. The left has an uphill fight therefore this November.
Okay, first off, running an animal shelter is harder than it looks :). Second, voting your conscience in this case can be (and for me, must be) equivalent to voting one man out.
If I had my real choice, I’d be voting to turn the world into a happy fun ice cream playland. But that’s not going to be one of the choices on the ballot. Realistically, I, a progressive, have three real choices:
- Cast a vote for Kerry, which prevents the furthering of Bush’s radical, horrible agenda;
- Cast a vote for Bush, which furthers Bush’s radical, horrible agenda; or
- Do anything else (vote for Nader, stay home, urinate on the Diebold logo, etc.), which does nothing to stop Bush’s radical, horrible agenda.
The Christian Coalition knows that olentzero and I aren’t going to choose option 2, so they’re desperately hoping we’ll choose option 3. Frankly, I don’t much like cooperating with the CC. Olentzero apparently has no problem doing what Pat Robertson wants him to do: Pat wants him to stay out of the way so that the radical right can stay in power, and olentzero is happy to oblige.
Voting for Kerry is necessarily voting against Bush. We don’t have other realistic choices. And we are responsible for the choices we make, for the foreseeable outcome of those choices.
Daniel
Ever hear of Google? 0.16 seconds. 3 pages of attributions, including some pretty scholarly-looking stuff about it reflecting part of Lenin’s views. Disagree if you like; I don’t want to get into it. But, oddly, the only cite, Rabotnitsa, July 19, 1917 (c’mon, you want online publications from 1917 Russia? Be glad there’s anything at all, tovarishch), has Lenin quoting *Plekhanov * as saying it, in denouncing the Kadeti. So maybe there’s an argument with the attributers for you, if you can find one to argue back.
Now, to put that in a 21st-century perspective, doesn’t the course you advocate amount to exactly that for the US? Given that no one but Kerry can defeat Bush (and it’s a fact), how is a refusal to support Kerry not going to help Bush win? Your refusal to compromise those principles you uphold so fervently is admirable to a point, but not when its real result is to make the world less what you want.
This constant lament by ideologues like you and Lib, and there are certainly others on this very board, that your ideology, whatever it is, would be embraced by the “masses” if not for your party’s political bumbling is just childish as all hell, frankly. It’s the inability of your ideologies to withstand contact with reality that is the cause of their perpetual fringe status. You instead denounce those who *have * accepted the challenge of trying to make the real world better, who have recognized that partial success is better than no success, which is better than contributing to making things worse. Partial success, obtained via effort and compromise, is almost always the only kind of success there is - yet you sit back and scoff. Your precious, carefully-nurtured ideological purity, nursed in whatever hothouse it lives and cannot survive outside, is worse than useless. You’re no better than anyone who complains that they don’t want to just vote for the lesser evil - as if having the greater evil succeed is somehow acceptable to them. You are really not part of any solution, but you’re certainly part of many of the problems. And the rest of us have a right to resent that from you.
Amen, pantom.
I’m another one who grew up during 'Nam and watched while all those body bags were shipped home. One of 'em belonged to me and mine, and several others came home as walking wounded. Of course even then–though it took a while–we had a real press that took unflinching coverage of war as an obligation. Real people die, gruesomely and too soon, and they leave real people behind to mourn. The stakes and reasons must balance the costs.
And lest the Righties go ballistic, my father–a proud WWII volunteer Army Master Sgt. and lifelong, hardcore Republican–offered to drive draft age guys to Canada during 'Nam. He served honorably and very proudly in a hellish war as a citizen soldier, and stayed in an extra year in Japan because he could help rebuild. The reasons for fighting at all were clear, and do were the plans to rebuild.
Principles last, but anybody who thinks they’re easy to apply is a fool. Presidents are powerful exectives, and sometimes even real leaders, but they ain’t just symbols. Nobody could possibly embody a “perfect” forumla on all the issues for even a simple majority. Politics is the ultimate art of compromise and canniness. Ya pick the one who tend most toward the outlook you favor AND has the best possibility of compromising, forcing, schmoozing, finessing that viewpoint home.
That’s reality and it’s a bitch. It’s also the only game that matters in the long run. Otherwise you’re throwing away your vote–voice–for the dubious satisfaction of pitching a snit.
Compromise is itself an ideology, particularly the way you’ve described it, as a means to effect political resolution. Noncoercion is a principle, not an ideology. Free people pursuing their own happiness in their own way is not exactly foreign to what the Founders had in mind — government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed, and whatnot.
Given that few of the blowhards ever keep their campaign promises, that they have built unassailable political machines that have given us one more choice than voters had in the Soviet Union, and that one of them will win no matter what — it seems to me that voting for them is throwing your vote away, just like spitting into a hurricane. They’ve already used the system to insure themselves more than 90% of the vote. They don’t need mine.
Except in 2000 it was 25% right, 25% ‘left’, and 50% ‘neither, thanks’. If the best you Democrat supporters can do is keep repeating “Kerry isn’t Bush”, then it’s no wonder you can’t get half the voting population out.
Right, because staying home on Election Day necessarily translates into staying home the other three years and 364 days. There is more - much more - to political activism than pulling a ballot lever once every other year or so.
As for your silly little analogy, we can look at the situation two ways. Either I don’t think I’m unwittingly doing Pat Robertson’s bidding and I am, or Pat Robertson thinks I’m unwittingly doing his bidding and I’m not. How come I’m the one who has to end up with an illusion in my own political power? Why are my reasons the ones that have no external validity?