It seems official. Ralph Nader is going to repeat his irresponsible and self-indulgent presidential run. I am horrified for all the obvious reasons every other Democrat is. It's ironic -- no it's just sad and inexcusable -- that this generation's most prominent critic of corporate privilege handed the presidency to George W. Bush.
Setting this very large grievance aside, there are lots of good reasons to prefer a head-to-head matchup of two candidates to the cacophany made possible by third-parties. We saw in 2000 that even a minor third-party candidate can tilt an election to thwart the views of most voters. From the perspective of democratic process, this was not a tragedy. Of course, Bush's presidency has been disastrous, but no process can fully protect us from that. I would gnash my teeth if John McCain won in similar fashion this year. Yet he would still need to get within a whisker of a true majority to pull this off.
Things easily get wackier and scarier when third parties attracted someone of greater backing and stature. Imagine some parallel universe in which Obama becomes the Democratic nominee and a disaffected Hillary Clinton decides to run as a third-party candidate. (If you prefer, imagine the opposite scenario.) John McCain could conceivably take office with less than 40 percent of the vote. We don't need this kind of stuff.
More fundamentally, third-party candidates raise the probability that a nutcase could someday win the presidency. Imagine that the 1992 election had gone a bit differently, that Ross Perot was a somewhat smoother candidate and that Bill Clinton's candidacy had suffered some serious post-nomination blow. We could have had a genuinely scary figure win the presidency on the basis of an unlimited war chest and the need to reach some threshold below 50% of the popular vote. If third parties become fourth and fifth parties, the dangers magnify. A depressing number of countries provide evidence for this point.
Sanford Levinson's terrific book Our Undemocratic Constitution notes many ways that our constitution and our political traditions aren't perfect. We do dumb things, such as granting Supreme Court justices lifetime rather than 20-year appointments. Watching the sequelae of the Lewinsky scandal and President Bush's sad limp through his final year, the virtues of a parliamentary system seem more compelling than they did ten years ago.
One thing we've done well is to design a system that vets presidential candidates through two stable major parties, and that forces the resulting nominees to compete for the political center. It isn't always pretty. The two parties often screw up. Moreover, the American political center has often been wrong about important things. On balance, however, our nation has profited from the safety-valve created through the two-party system. It's one thing to have independents in Congress and at the state level. When we are talking which human being has the power to send our nation to war and launch nuclear bombs, I like our system uncreative.
If Ralph Nader goes through with it, Democratic operatives will surely work to keep him off the ballot and off of the public stage. They will work under the radar, and might be embarrassed if their efforts are discovered. They shouldn't be. State legislators should do this work openly.
Many voices, one head-to-head choice. That is the best way to pursue American democracy.
{{ What about the people who voted for any of the other 7 presidential candidates on the ballot in Florida in 2000? What about the 12% of registered Democrats who voted for Bush? What about the nearly 50% of registered Democrats in Florida who didn't even bother to vote!}}
Exactly. No Democrats, to my knowledge, have ever provided any substantive response to this. Nader's candidacy was only one variable. Even the exalted Todd Gitlin could only sputter a non sequitur reference to a dog eating one's homework when the subject came up during an interview.
I'd like to see Tim Russert hold up a chart that shows BUSH - GORE - MOOREHEAD or BUSH - GORE - MCREYNOLDS instead of his famously tiresome BUSH - GORE - NADER chart. I once asked David McReynolds (the 1980 & 2000 Socialist Party nominee and quite an American treasure in his own right) via email about Florida and he seemed amused by the whole thing. Obviously the system is ridiculously broken if a Socialist who polls 600 votes holds the key to the presidency. Yet Democrats are deeply silent over the issue of changing this system.
{{ where the hell has your saint Nader been? What has HE been doing for the good of this country? }}
Statements like this reveal a great deal about the people who have been making them over the last few years. Specifically, it reveals that this person doesn't know squat about Ralph Nader and hasn't seen any of his speeches, read any of his books, or looked in on any of the cable news interviews he's done. Just to give one example of what he's been doing, I would refer this person to the D.C. Library Renaissance Project, something Ralph started very much under the radar in order to fix the embarrassing state of the District of Columbia's public library system (thanks for which go to the Democratic Party, by the way). He has been quite successful in not only raising consciousness about this but funds as well. Even Mark Fisher of the Washington Post, no Nader fan he, wrote a remarkable story about this issue in the Post in December 2002 that was astoundingly complimentary of Ralph.
I could cite dozens of other examples. From 2001 to now, both during and outside of election cycles, Ralph Nader has given countless speeches, walked numerous picket lines, started several new organizations, written hundreds of articles and op-ed pieces, given thousands of interviews in all media, and benefitted dozens of Green Party, anti-war, and other fundraising events.
A better question to ask would be: what have YOU been doing over the last few years to walk the walk and not just talk the talk, as RN does day after day, whether the spotlights are on him or not?
Remember, the Republicans were a "third-party" once.
This is AMERICA. Everyone has a right to run. Everyone has a right to try and form a new political party, despite the odds.
I don't have such a short memory that I forget Clintonian DLC-corporate triangulation. They people who really don't want there to be other parties on the right, left or center are the corporate lobbyists who know that with only two parties, it is possible to control and influence both.
We should have direct elections with a runoff if no candidate gets 50% in the first round -- so that citizens can vote for the candidate and party (or non-party) they wish as their first choice rather than settling for the lesser of two evils.
In all of this media feeding-frenzy, the Congressional elections are not mentioned at all: keep it simple for the stupid-plebes; you are electing a Savior. Pick one. Or not.
That, of course, is no way to run a country of more than 320 million people. Public policy cannot long be defined by who has the more (stolen) money with which to bribe Members of Congress.
History tells us that history moves from age to age. Within each age, one country rises to supremacy for a time, then declines into oblivion... essentially, at its own hand. It will be a curious footnote to history that the United States of America rose to great prominence in about 140 years, then vaporized itself, figuratively if not literally, in less than 100 more. Barely a blip on the radar. A curious statement of "what might have been." But history will shake its head at the fact that the American people never understood what they had so-briefly had; did not value it; did not prize it; made no move at all to save it. They stared open-mouthed at the headlights and flicked their little white tails.
We can do two-round runoff voting like France and Brazil or ranked-choice runoff voting like Ireland and Australia.
Not R.Nader.
I like the constitution just fine the way it is, and I really don;t want to live in an official two-party state. That's just one party better than a one-party state.
What's going on now in the Democratic party?
The system is rigged against democracy, as it has granted such huge benefits to corporations that the msm can't be challenged, they love a fight, and that's what they've given Democrats. NO discussion of the many capable Democratic contestants, due to Dem party's screw ups, we're stuck with a divided Dem party causing apparent grass-roots mayhem.
I'd be happy to see Nader and Bloomberg and Hagel force real discussions into the public arena.
It is unfortunate that Nader's run in 2000 had disastrous effects. It did not help that he embarassed himself by claiming there was no difference between the two parties. And now he seems to be driven by a need to not take responsiblity for what he did in 2000. How else to explain the ludicrous argument that people who blame him should be blaming Bush instead. How simple minded does one need to be to think different people can't simultaneously be responsible for their individual contributions.
Today I saw him making the incompatible claims that what he gained was to move Gore to the left, and that the lose was exclusively Gore's fault for not winning Tennessee. Obviously the only way for Gore to win Tennessee would be to move to the center. But then he is reduced to flailing like a 5 year old blaming everyone but himself for the result he contributed to.
But however sad it may be that Nader would embarass himself in this way, it is not justification for stacking the deck against future third party runs which can have a variety of legitimate roles.
And face it, Nader is not likely to match his 2004 numbers this time, and the people who do vote for him are more likely to stay home than vote democratic. After all they have to be people who look at 2000 and say things went pretty well that time, so I think we should try to do it again. It is hard to imagine many potential democratic voters actually thinking that way.
It's one thing to run as an option, it's another to skew the field and confuse the electorate into achieving the opposite result. I want to hear what third and fourth parties have to say, and I would love to hear them all in a debate, but in the end it is up to the VOTERS to stay informed and know who and what they are voting for. They are ultimately to blame for their choices.
As long as third party candidates play fair.
The run-off election should be held on New Years day and the innauguration could be pushed back just a bit if necessary, but I don't know why that would be necessary.