Liberal pariah Ralph Nader flirts with new White House run

Is Bush paying Nader to stand again? LOL. As if Bush needed any more help to win.

On a more serious note, third party candidates like him should stand. In my view, politics is at its worst when you only have two principal parties. Then if you are ideologically of one side or other you have no choice (apart from not voting at all) but to vote for that side, regardless of what you think of that side's current policies and leader.

 

Pariah my ass...

He'll run, but he may or may not get the nomination. Greens have been known to nominate "None of the above."

That won't happen here, however. As long as the Democrats a) think they have a God-given right to the left vote, and 2) keep running moderate Republicans like Lieberman and Gephardt, they'll keep getting attacked from the left and the right.

The good news is that I haven't seen too much from "Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)" in awhile. They're hysterical crashing the Republocrats' convention(s).

Direct problem with Ralph is that he's not currently registered with any party. Some state parties (TX, for example) refuse to endorse non-Green candidates for anything. Other Greens who've worked on his campaign find him dreadful to work for/with.

Personally, I'd shove hot needles underneath my fingernails before voting Democrat. I hope he does run.

 

Re: Pariah my ass...

Yeah, Gephardt only supports national healthcare and labor rights, but some liberals don't give a shit about those issues.

As for the Nader-Bush alliance, I don't want to think about it right now.

 

Difference this time is, we've seen the consequences of a Nader vote. He may sweep his immediate family, but when the opponent is George W. Bush, the Democrats have a God-given right to the left vote. Provided they run an actual Democrat, and not a Lieberman.

 

Dan: Love the Galaxy column. "Sexy Goals": brilliant stuff.

However, when the Democrats handed Mr. Bush a blank @#$%ing check to needlessly wage war and to gut civil liberties, and one didn't hear peep one from those quisling sons of bitches about anything until Bush's poll numbers hit 59%, they forfeited that "God-given right".

Furthermore, the consequences of the Nader '00 campaign may very well include registering new voters, giving the Left a candidate, sparking real debate about the merits of the two(ish) party mach-- um system, but they certainly do not include handing GWB the presidency. Al Gore didn't need any help at all for that. Talking about a sitting VP that couldn't even win his own state. Also, there were more Democrats who voted for Bush in FL than voted for Nader. Also, Gore won several states by similarly razor-thin margins, that would have been more than covered by what Buchanan "took" from W.

This whole "democracy" thing seems to throw Democrats. We all have a right to organize ourselves into political parties and run candidates for office. If one party doesn't suit our needs, we have a responsibility to find one that does. Al Gore didn't represent me. Most of the current Dem. field wouldn't represent me (Kucinich maybe. Sharpton maybe). If there are candidates out there that better represent me, I'm going to vote for them.

 

Just wondering...

As someone who considers himself not really a full-blown "liberal" (definitely left of center though), I gotta ask, would some Greens vote for Dean?

Dunno if I would vote for him in the primary, but at least he come across as a guy with definite (liberal) convictions, unlike some of the issue-wafflers plaguing the Democratic Party. Against Iraq from Day 1, big (talk) on environmental issues like Kyoto, universal health care (??? ) etc.

 

Re: Just wondering...

That would be the intelligent route. If Nader had a shred of decency, he'd run in the Democratic primary. He'd be able to raise the same issues, get a considerable amount of exposure, without helping George Bush's candidacy.

 

Re: Re: Just wondering...

In addition, it would give Nader/Greens a say in constructing the Dem platform and potentially a claim on a position in the newly elected Democratic administration (EPA secretary, Sec of Interior, high level positions in both). These appointments, in turn, could show that Greens and Green-affiliated Dems can be effective at governing, which would do far more to boost their political credibility than running a Presidential candidate that draws 3%.

 

The Greens are going to have to nominate someone a whole lot more sexy than Nader if they ever want to maintain that 5% threshold. I voted for him in '00 for the same reasons SoBear mentioned... Gore didn't deserve my vote.

But that's different than saying I'd vote for him again or would even support his running as a third-party candidate for ANY party. The way Nader totally dissapeared and took a bath post-election and pre-9/11 totally pissed me off. Before the war on terror provided a needed distraction, Bush was well on his way to gutting environmental regulations, and had a serious ethics problem with the oil industry, Enron, et. al. In a non-9/11 world Bush would probably have been as embattled a president and Clinton by now. But Nader was nowhere to be found. Wanker. This is a position shared by many the more thougthful members of the progressive/liberal persuasion.

If Nader runs again, he wont get 2% of the vote. The only ones who will vote for him are those starry-eyed unreconstructed hippy types who, according to AFP, "still consider the Harvard-educated attorney a hero for his consumer advocacy work of the 1960s and his more recent role in the anti-globalization movement, among other causes."

Hey, the man's a living legend and the God of the consumer rights and open government movement. But that's it. As a politician, he's crap.

As for the GP running a presidential candidate at all. I've said it before and I'll say it again. It's a waste of time, energy and money. ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL. If the GP wants to be a player at the national level, they have to start producing cred at the local and state level first.

 

We've had this discussion at least three times in the past 2-3 months.

Nader's seriousness will depend on who the Dem nominee is. If they throw up Gephardt or Lieberman, Nader will run as hard as he did in '00 because neither of those two come even close to fitting the Greens profile. If it's Dean, Nader will just stand back and not really campaign anywhere. Everyone else is somewhere in the middle.

If the Dems want environmentalists to support them, they have to placate Nader. He's to urban white leftists what Sharpton is to NYC blacks, or Pat Robertson is to the Christian right.

 

Very true.
Nader is turning out to be the Democrat Perot. Gore probably would have won in 2000 if there was no Nader as Bush 1 probably would have in 1992 if there was no Perot.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

 

Can you back up this assertion? Because it's wrong.

Right now I just tired of having to debunk this fantasy every time it pops up. All I'll say is, Clinton ran alot stronger in '96, after Perot lost half of his '92 vote. Completely at odds with the notion that Bush could have turned around a 5% loss if the 19% who voted for Perot had been in play.

 

Do note that in my previous response I was defending the running, rather than the candidate. Ralph. pissed quite a few people off, but his lack of public showing was more the result of his being persona non grata than anything else. He ran into a significant problem of his own making. He a) alienated himself from many of the folks who used to support him by running, and 2) alienated himself from the party he ran with by his arrogance. His first problem, should he decide to run, would be to get the nomination.

And that's where our energies are. High profile candidates raise volunteers (our version of money) and mindshare. But, out of our 180 or so elected officials, 178 are at the municipal or county level, and two are at the state level. Without the national and state-wide races, those folks wouldn't have gotten the support they needed to win. Without local victories, we won't be able to compete in future elections. And we certainly won't be able to lose the winner-takes-all nature of those races that gets us to these discussions.

 

Dan-
You might be interested in taking a look at this study done.

http://web.polmeth.ufl.edu/papers/98/herro98.pdf

I haven't looked at the statistical analysis done of it because I haven't got the time. Would be interesting to know their accuracy as they incorporate abstention as a variable unlike Alvarez and Nagler(1995).

 

Hey! Aaron McGruder liked us in '00. And he's one hep Black cat.

 

No, Gore would've won if Catherine Harris hadn't eliminated 90,000 eligible black voters from Florida's voting lists prior to the election.

As for Nader, I voted for him because I knew Gore would win Illinois anyway and my vote wouldn't help elect Bush. But it might've helped the Greens get to the 5% and might give legs to a third party in future elections.

That said cman is quite correct. All politics are local and I believe that is how the Greens became national parties in Europe, by first winning local municipal elections. We, in the USA, don't have a tradition of more than two parties so it will be more difficult to go at it from this direction without a national push at the same time.

 

Not being a part of the Green Party I have a question for the Greenies on here about their attitude towards Nader today. Would the Green Party even nominate Ralph?

The stated goal of the Green Party in 2000 was 5% nationally in order to qualify for federal matching funds. They hitched their star to a non-Green Party member (Nader) to get them there.

But Nader kind of left them out to dry and decided to run a campaign based on his own ego rather than on gaining the 5% nationally.

For example: In the last month Nader, despite urging from Democrats begging him not to, campaigned in the "swing" states. States where it was too close to call between Gore and Bush. This accomplished two things:

1) Eternally pissed off lefties like myself who lost all respect for Ralph Nader.
2) Significantly reduced the chances of the Green Party gaining 5% because he was competing for a much smaller pool of votes than say in Texas where the results were pretty much pre-ordained and D's would have been willing to vote for Nader (the whole Nader-Trader thing)

SObearCal:

I agree that you have the right to vote for whomever you damn well please. I just think that anyone who voted for Nader in 2000 made a selfish vote. The majority of Nader voters where white middle/upper class could afford the luxury of making a "statement". In fact quite a few probably benefitted from Bush's tax cut. They made a "statement" at the expense of the poor, the environment, the economy etc etc etc.

 

Uh...good point.

Okay, so Daschle and Gephardt led us off a cliff, instead of standing up to the war hero. In their admittedly weak defense, they were lied to about Iraq's WMD just like the rest of us. Okay, so we were skeptical, so should they have been.

And in 2001, no one knew that Ashcroft would use 9/11 as a means to turn the US into the Republic of Gilead. Unless one had casually glanced at his record. Okay, never mind.

I'm going to fall back on judicial nominations, then. So far the Democrats have actually shown a backbone on this issue, bless their tiny little hearts. But a Bush election (I nearly typed "re-election" - I wonder if people in the Ford years had trouble remembering the right term, too) would make that extremely problematic, and the stakes would be much higher.

Well, he didn't need to. And it's not unprecedented - Nixon didn't win New York in 1968.

(Okay, trivial aside - I actually called up the Nixon Library (it was a local call) and asked which state he represented in 1968, and they didn't know. So if you want to complain that Nixon won California in 1968, go ahead.)

You could absolutely say, though, that in such a tight election, Gore should not have had to spend so much time trying to convert votes that Bush had absolutely no chance of getting. Although without Nader they would have stayed home...okay, fine.

Those guys were idiots, too.

Okay, but...I *did* vote for Nader last time around (EDIT - trivial aside - and in 1996 against Clinton. Big Dog went ofer in my immediate family, the first time a Democrat has ever been shut out. My brother stayed home, my mom wrote in Donald Duck, and my dad voted Republican for the first time in his life. So there you go, for what that's worth), and I've repented ever since. There is something worse than a Gore Administration would have been, and we've been living through it.

I admit, it would be extremely, extremely difficult for me to vote for a Gephardt or a Lieberman. I wouldn't consider it under any other circumstances. And if they were running against President Bob Dole, then I'd probably vote Republican. Hey, I didn't really like Clinton that much, until I saw his replacement.

A Democratic president will not nominate Scalia as Chief Justice, or lobby for an expanded Patriot Act, or start a war for oil, or any of the literally dozens of things that have turned the world's stomach over the past two years. (Okay, Joe Lieberman might. Why the hell is that guy a Democrat? Did we get him in a trade for some Marxist, pot-smoking anarchist who's been on the GOP injured reserve, or something?) I want to undo and reverse this term, and the most likely way to do that is to vote for Whichever Democrat. Go team.

 

To answer your first question, I don't know. Should there be a contested primary, I probably won't vote for Nader, unless McKinnon is the only alternative. I'd've liked to have seen Medea Benjamin run, or another Californian, but that's not going to happen. Should Kucinich break DNC party ranks and ask for our nomination as an independent (hey, Beckham said he wasn't going anywhere, either), he'd win in a landslide. Many of the concerns about Nader you gave below are also concerns of Greens. His campaigning style is also frustrating. His biggest mistake was in '96, when the party asked him to run hard (like he did in '00), begged him to run hard, but he was quite nearly an LP-esque paper candidate. Then, when he came guns-a-blazing in '00, it was his second straight run. No one runs three elections in a row unless their name is LaRouche.

As to your second: I've never met a wealthy Green in any position in the party. Folks have to foot their own bills to get around the state, and this creates quite a burden on most. If $180 RT Southwest tickets create a hardship, one cannot consider oneself wealthy. About the tax-cuts, I'm doing pretty well relative to most in my party, and I won't see any benefit. Yes, the mostly-white charge certainly holds water, at least in CA, but the middle/upper class does not. If anything, because so bloody many of us are such idealists, we get alot of well-educated people with little money. This is certainly off-topic at this point, but if you want to discuss your question further, please feel free to PM.

 

Son, that paper was over my head, at least as it relates to the topic at hand. I read the first 9 pages and the conclusion, and I have no idea what it had to say about the Perot factor.

And I'm Dave, not Dan. Dan's the fat one.

 

I'm not fat. I'm pleasingly plump.

 

How is this exchange any different from...

Model #1: Miller Beer tastes great!
Model #2: No, it's less filling!

In other words, the fact that Gore was screwed by Harris in Florida doesn't change the fact that he was also screwed by Nader, and in spite of all the shinanigans that went on, Al Gore would have won had Ralph Nader not been in the race (or, better, shortly before election day when it was clear he wouldn't win the election, asked his supporters in swing states to bite the bullet and vote for Gore to avoid a Bush presidency).

 

A wee bit more than flirting now...

I think if he was going to announce that he wasn't running, he wouldn't do it on three different TV shows: (source is one of the myriad of leftist lists to which I subscribe)