Gush vs. Bore, and All That
Why should Scott have all the “trolling Naderite deadenders” fun? From Kurt Eichenwald:
I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.
The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.
But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.
In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.
Thanks Ralph. Appreciate your efforts. I mean, who knew that putting a staggeringly inept man surrounded by frauds, liars, and sociopaths into the White House could lead to bad things?
No, no, no. Look, as any genuinely tough-minded leftist could tell you, there was absolutely no way to know that throwing the 2000 election to a complete dumbshit who governed to the right of the Texas legislature, led a party increasingly dominated by wingnuts and ran on a platform rife with wingnuttery, and let one of the most right-wing members of Congress choose himself as his vice president would have bad consequences. I mean, Joe Klein said that George W. Bush was a moderate, and that should be good enough for anyone.
Bush stole Florida in a conspiracy involving his brother and other state officials.
Why don’t you care?
1)Gee, thanks; I had never noticed this or blogged about it before.
2)To quote myself:
Obviously, it’s hopeless to think that any Nader dead-ender will ever figure out that events might have multiple necessary causes and noting one doesn’t obviate the responsibility of another, but hell, I’m an optimist.
To assign blame so carelessly also indicts the butterfly ballot as a prime mover of history.
Yes, how can one possibly attribute blame to someone who campaigned with the goal of throwing the election to Bush and succeeded. Everything is just random, man.
Were you in college and the ‘Nader Raider’ people really bugged you? Because the actual stealing of an election seems like a much bigger issue than a guy that nets 1.6 percent of the vote.
Not when the theft was only possible because of the spoiler, who certainly didn’t only get 1.6% of the vote for lack of trying.
The Butterfly ballot people were massively incompetent. Katherine Harris and the Brooks Brothers Rioters were deliberately complicit in stealing an election, for the benefit of their own party and all the policies they advocated.
Nader, on the other hand, was deliberately complicit in Bush getting close enough for his friends to steal Florida – that’s deliberately, unlike the people who designed the Butterfly Ballot and the people who didn’t clean out the chad reservoirs – and in order to achieve policy results precisely against those he claimed to espouse, in contrast to the Republicans who at least were honest about the goals for which they dishonestly swung the election.
Yes: Katherine Harris betraying Electoral Democracy is probably worse than Nader betraying Progressive Policies, all things considered. But at least Katherine Harris was honest about the policy outcomes her career was aimed at advancing.
Yes, but Nader was running a campaign, qualified for the office as laid out in the Constitution and engaged in a legal activity.
Knowingly purging black voters from the state rolls under the guise that they were felons, when in fact they were not is a criminal activity. Engaging in mob behavior to prevent votes from being counted is a criminal activity.
There is no moral equivalence to running for President and stealing an election.
Yes, but Nader was running a campaign, qualified for the office as laid out in the Constitution and engaged in a legal activity.
I concede the point — Nader was legally permitted to run for president. When he uses that power to throw the election to the most reactionary president since McKinley, however, he’s responsible for the consequences, even if because of his extreme lack of appeal as a candidate he needed the collaboration of a lot of bad actors to fulfill his goal.
The difference is nobody on the left is holding up Katherine Harris as a paragon of progressive virtue.
The difference is nobody on the left is holding up Katherine Harris as a paragon of progressive virtue.
This. A thread attacking Katherine Harris would get about 3 comments because there’s no actual dispute on this issue. I try to avoid pointing out things that are obvious, and while Rob and I are making an exception here that’s because there are still a bizarre number of Nader apologists dedicated to denying the obvious.
I’m sorry, again, proof? Other than a pretense to what, Shakespearean like powers to discern motive.
This is the guy who made the highways safer, the air cleaner, made work safer, and kept the water drinkable among numberous other positive accomplishments for consumers and workers alike. The absolute fucking outright rage fueled hatred on hear is just insane.
How do you respond to the Barry Burden study that basically blows holes a mile wide in your assertion?
People are abandoning the Democratic party because it offers absolutely no relief for the problems they face. Will you similarly blame Obama and Clinton (TPP and NAFTA respectively) for the rise of fascism in this country in response to the Weimarization like effects those bills produced?
When Obama and Clinton campaign against the more progressive candidate to make sure that the most conservative, pro-war, anti-environment, anti-woman, anti-equality candidate wins?
Yes. I will be equally angry with them, and those who support them.
Until that day of insanity happens, we have Nader and his backers. Absent Nader and those foolish idiots who voted for him instead of Gore, we have a better world. So thank you for your moral purity – a hundred thousand dead Iraqis are right there with me.
Clinton was bombing Iraq weekly and 250K Iraqis died under the sanctions. Hyperbolic moral preening is for fools.
Yeah sing it the recently 10 dead Yemenese (women and children)from an “error.” This is the President who authorizes drone strikes at funerals (we might kill other terrorist whom we define as those we kill).
It’s not moral purity that drives me. It’s the obscenity of the elite proferring a brown skinned man so they could continue to kill other brown people and the Democrats who just look the other way.
“Clinton was bombing Iraq weekly and 250K Iraqis died under the sanctions. Hyperbolic moral preening is for fools.”
Yep. I’d take all this more seriously if the people trolling the Naderites acknowledged the horrors one can lay at the feet of the lesser of two evils, but that would ruin the fun. I agree with lesser of two evil voting and if people argued that case honestly I can’t disagree. Chomsky does this–he spends most of his time documenting the crimes of both Democrats and Republicans, while still saying that the D’s do less harm.
So the invasion of Iraq was no big deal, not really any significant change from what came before.
I sure do remember all of the preening leftists saying that in March 2003. “So what? Invading isn’t really any worse than the sanctions.”
The study that, in fact, shows that Nader did throw the election in Florida? That study? Again, the fact it took “idiosyncratic” circumstances for Nader to achieve his goal is neither here nor there. If Nader doesn’t run, Gore wins.
This is the guy who made the highways safer, the air cleaner, made work safer, and kept the water drinkable among numberous other positive accomplishments
Who knew that every fucking person left of center working on these issues over the last 50 years was really only just Ralph fucking Nader?
But did he make the trains run on time?
There’s a “he made he whites whiter” joke in here, but maybe it’s best saved for Romney.
But, hey, not to be ungracious he did an immense about of good work before 1975. Then he let his massive ego do what it could to destroy his own legacy.
Lots of people do lots of things. In most cases, his organization wrote the legislation and got it passed through Congress.
Scott’s reference to 1975 is interesting, because it’s of course in 1976 that Carter gets elected and starts fucking the working and middle classes over with the beginning of the great neo-liberal experiment in globalization.
A turn to neoliberalism that Nader himself contributed substantially to by actively working to torpedo progressive legislation.
Where “optimist” means “troll”.
Yes, you’ve made plenty of posts about the Bush v Gore travesty. But where are your posts about voting reform? You know, something that could actually help in the future, unlike assigning blame for the past?
And the supreme court. And the plurality voting system. And the forces of gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces.
But the 4 forces and evil bastards are part of nature. And the power of the supreme court is writen into the constitution. So of all the above, plurality voting is the easiest to fix.
Plurality voting is terrible. But Nader knew what the system was, and he didn’t care (because he wanted to throw the election to Bush.) And it’s not like spoiler candidates are an inevitable feature of the American political landscape or anything.
Of course, we should all always just get behind the guy who is slightly less awful than the other more awful guy. Repeat over time and the whole political landscape continues to move to the right. Nice work.
Gore was, of course, substantially “less awful” than Bush on a wide range of issues. And by your logic nobody could have voted for FDR or LBJ in good conscience either. But, hey, keep waiting for
Godotthat candidate who agrees with you about everything and can put together a majority coalition.Yes, anyone saying that Gore was merely “slightly less awful than Bush” in 2012 deserves a level of perpetual mockery that is probably beyond my capabilities to deliver.
Any chance we can get Pierce on this?
The line about the political landscape moving to the right is about six years out of date.
So write a post about the alternatives. If you want a primer on the state of the art and of the game, write me: firstname dot lastname at gmail.
there was absolutely no way to know that throwing the 2000 election to a complete dumbshit who governed to the right of the Texas legislature, led a party increasingly dominated by wingnuts and ran on a platform rife with wingnuttery, and let one of the most right-wing members of Congress choose himself as his vice president would have bad consequences.
If one read the New York Times, how would one have known he was all that, back in 2000? I vaguely remember Krugman pointing out some porkies regarding his budget plan, and a whole shitload about silly old Gore.
Perhaps, if one had been reading columns by a woman who’d endured years under Governor Bush and avoided the New York Times like the plague it so quickly became during the Dubya Administration, one might have learned what Dubya was really all about.
I read the NYT. And in 2000 I knew of W as a man who had signed off on more executions thm any other governor and who had public ally mocked a death row appeal for mercy. IOW, I knew him to be a sack of shit.
Look, if Frank Rich says something, that’s it; no informed person can be expected to engage in any further inquiry.
Hell, Rich wasn’t even a good theater critic.
Fair enough. My memory’s not that great, and I was probably not paying as much attention as I would have if I were American, but the death row mention rings a bell.
I’m an obsessive politics reader, so my experience isn’t representative of the general electorate either.
The thing is, you’re actually right; if you read the NY Times except for Krugman, you’d be presented with a land of fantasia in which Gore was the World’s Biggest Liar, George W. Bush was the Man You’d Most Want to Have A Beer With, and there was nothing else of consequence at stake. For some reason, among many people on the left, people like Frank Rich managed to emerge form this with their reputation unscathed.
Except in 2000, Krugman was not there, but the even fore valuable Molly Ivins was. Or is my memory failing me.
Even more, that is. I blame multiple causes for the error.
I blame multiple causes for the error.
FACT CHECK: No event can possibly have more than one cause. –PolitiFact, Naderite edition
Krugman was there in 2000.
You are right. I think I was thinking of his blog, which was later. Or I’ve just fucked up the whole remembering thing.
Frank Rich was unusually good for a prominent mainstream pundit about denouncing Bush in circa 2003 – 2004. This is of course rather faint praise – it’s world’s tallest midget territory, for the most part, Krugman honorably excepted – but it may help to explain why his earlier failings get overlooked.
I love how, even after all this time, you assume that Ralph Nader’s presence MAGICALLY took just enough Gore votes to steal Florida and the election.
Florida, where W.’s brother was governor.
You really think Roger Ailes and Katherine Harris needed Ralph Nader to take Florida?
Seriously, fuck all of you and your never-ending scapegoating.
Didn’t need magic; just the magical thinking of a sufficient number of narcissistic dumbfucks.
This would be a cogent criticism if Nader got a significant amount of votes and clearly gave Bush the election.
He didn’t. He got 2.7 percent nationwide and 1.6 percent in Florida.
Have you met the 1.6 percent? Do you think they’d have broken for Gore in any significant numbers? Do you even think they’d vote?
Oh yeah and BUSH FUCKING STOLE THE ELECTION IN FLORIDA AND ALL YOU CAN TALK ABOUT IS RALPH FUCKING NADER!
*ahem*
Not only is this wrong, but “Nader wanted to throw the election to Bush but was so unpopular he couldn’t” wouldn’t be a compelling defense anyway. Particularly since the inevitable next argument involves assertions that Gore losing various states that Obama lost by 15 points in a Democratic landslide makes Gore the worst campaigner in known human history.
Look, my whole problem with this line of reasoning is that it accepts the whole ‘Republicans are just gonna steal elections, because hey that’s just them, bless their hearts.’
Gore got over half a million more votes than Bush nationwide. Gore got more votes than Bush in Florida.
If Nader hadn’t run and Gore nets 3,000 more votes in Florida, all that means is the Republicans had more votes on the margins to steal. If you don’t believe that the likely outcome still isn’t a Republican stolen election in Florida, than you weren’t paying attention the month after the election.
Bush winning the initial count was crucial to the eventual theft. Can you cite some examples of Republicans stealing electoral college votes in states where Democrats were ahead after the first count? Apparently you weren’t paying attention, but the GOP stole the election not by stuffing ballot boxes but by stopping recounts. That doesn’t work real well when you’re behind.
Again, the Republican theft was bad. But Nader made it possible.
There was a lot of ballot stuffing of absentees after the ‘initial count’. The media story was driven by the calling of the election for Bush by nearly every media organization well before any initial final count was given.
Since Bush-Gore we’ve had the literal shifting of thousands of votes through digital manipulation several times in the Republicans’ favor. Up in Dane County Wisconsin and down in Alabama, and those are the ones we know of.
The media story was driven by the calling of the election for Bush by nearly every media organization well before any initial final count was given.
You are absolutely right! Of course, this is precisely what I’m arguing. If Gore is ahead on election night, he’s president. The reason this didn’t happen was Nader, which seems particularly problematic given that this substantial risk carried with it no possible benefits whatsoever.
If the media never retract their initial calling of Florida for Gore, than maybe he becomes President.
The fact is the corporate media took it as their task after the election to find Democrats to denounce Gore for requesting recounts. If you think a similar task would be undertaken against Repulicans if Gore was up by less than a thousand votes, then I believe you’d be mistaken.
You may well be correct, but because the recounts benefited Gore this wouldn’t have been a major problem.
Once again:
Although, admittedly, I’m still furious about the Supreme Court decision Dole v. Clinton, which proves that Republicans will just steal every election no matter how it comes out anyway.
Right, we should also blame the following dumbass motherfuckers (all of whom have variously commented directly or indirectly on the essential lack of difference between the two parties as regards the fundamental economic effects on those who aren’t Wall Street/corporatist millionaires):
Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Sheldon Wolin, Paul Street, Michael Hudson, Bill Black, Yves Smith, Adolph Reed, Doug Henwood.
And instead listen to the Andrew Sullivan pitch-like hysteria of Scott Lemieux. My god it’s a leftist spouting logic in measured tones, run away, run away !!
The thing I really object to of course, is the fascistic implications of Scott’s thinking. It’s not just Nader’s deceptiveness, it’s the 2.6 percent of the electorate who exercised their fucking right to make a fair choice. At the end of the day, the only conclusion that can be drawn from this stupidity is that Scott fucking hates democracy as much as the Republicans do – putting him somewhere on the scale of Lenin.
Dick.
I can’t blame you for appeals to authority, since the argument that there’s no difference between the two parties is too transparently stupid to bear the slightest actual argument.
I don’t really need authority to see that the result of the Weimarization of the American Republic is. I’m fairly good at figuring out that whether Romney rapes me without a condom or Obama is polite enough to put one on, the end is truly terrifying either way.
Yes I acknowledge, have always acknowledged that there is space between the two parties – the illusion of duopoly would never work without it. That’s something Bernays, Lippman and others understood all too well. If I lived in a swing state, part of my strategy might well be to vote for a Democrat to slow the shift the right down long a little longer in order to leave greater room to build the kind of populist movement necessary to bring pressure to bear on the sociopathic elites who run the place.
But for the moment, Romney will never be as successful at tearing down the social fabric as Clinton was and Obama will be (we got plenty of that intent during the Convention speech).
And your iterations are still largely fact free and referene no authority, your own or anyone else’s.
Different metaphors can’t change the fact that Romney, as documented extensively in this space, is far worse than Obama on a very wide range of issues, and intentionally inflicting suffering on society’s most vulnerable people to indulge in quarter-assed revolutionary fantasies is deeply immoral.
Seriously. I’m sure all the people with pre-existing conditions and no insurance coverage are going to be delighted to hear about how you’re heightening the contradictions while they die of preventible illness.
It’s also a real mystery why Nader’s coalition ran the gamut from white college students to white academics. Strange how people upon whom the contradictions will be heightened find heighten-the-contradictions rather less appealing.
Well, you might want to check out all the exemptions from the requiremnt to cover that the Obama administration has granted. Persons with pre-existing conditions might not be in for quite the coverage they thought they were. But, y’know, as long as Obama has the appearance of doing the right thing, you’ve been well and successfully propagandized.
No, it was incredibly bad luck.
But the drunk guy does have a point. Even if you believe, as I do, that the Harris et al fraud wouldn’t have been able to stretch any further than it did, Nader’s FL total was still within the ex ante margin of error between Bush and Gore. Which means, rerun the election without Nader, a butterfly flaps and causes a rainstorm and affects turnout, and Bush could have won anyway. Which makes Nader only something like 42% of History’s Greatest Monster (Among Leftists Who Should Have Known Better If They Weren’t Egotistical Morons, Which Is Totally Unlike Being A Rightist Who Should Know Better If You Weren’t An Evil Sanctimonious Prick).
And 42% of HGM(ALWSHKBITWEMWITUBARWSKBIYWAESP) is scarcely worth 3 trolling blog posts.
You really think Roger Ailes and Katherine Harris needed Ralph Nader to take Florida?
The only reason that the Republicans were able to successfully steal the election is that the news networks all called it for Bush on the night of November 7, based on early exit poll results. That was absolutely crucial, because most Americans went to bed that night thinking that Bush had won. It allowed the Bush campaign to paint Gore as a sore loser who wanted a do-over.
Without Nader in the race, the exit polls don’t go for Bush in Florida. It would then be Bush who looked like the sore loser if he refused to concede, and even Katherine Harris wouldn’t be able to fudge things enough to make the official count show Bush had won.
One thing you’re overlooking is that the Republican Party in 2000 isn’t the same as the Republican Party in 2012, even though it was well on its way. In 2000, they probably wouldn’t have been brazen enough to think they could get away with stealing the presidential election unless it really was within the margin of error, as happened in real life in Florida. In fact, their ability to get away with that was a major factor in pushing them further down the road of lawlessness, since it showed that there were a lot fewer actual restraints on their behavior than had previously been assumed if they were willing to disregard law and precedent.
All this, plus the Republican strategy was predicated on stopping recounts, which (because of the inferior technology in Democratic districts) everyone knew would favor Gore. That doesn’t work from behind.
Yeah, the fact that the margin of victory that SCOTUS awarded to Bush in Florida means that less than a fraction of 1% of the Nader voters in that state instead voting for Gore would have made Gore president is TOTALLY IRRELEVANT!
And in case anybody wants to argue against the figure I cited, it would have taken a total of 538 votes to give Gore more votes than Bush in Florida, which is 0.55% (or just over half of one percent) of the 97,488 Nader votes in that state. But let’s say that instead we get the 38% of them voting for Gore and 25% of them voting for Bush in the absence of Nader on the ballot, and here’s the total number of votes each candidate would have received based on the official count:
Gore: 2,949,298 (Winner by 12,136 votes)
Bush: 2,937,162
Nader made no difference? My friend Mathematics disagrees with you.
The plurality voting system has more failure modes than Hollywood alien invasions. Most of those involve one or more egotistical morons. Somehow, the supply of egotistical morons is rarely short. Shall we continue to blame the morons, or fix the fucking problem already?
I think I’ve probably mentioned approval voting once or twice…
I found myself furiously searching for a “Like” button for your comment.
But Nader is prick, and firebaggers suck, also too.
I have to wonder how many more times TBogg (pbuh) can get away with trolling the firebaggers before Hamsher kicks him out. The firebaggers aren’t known for their sense of humor.
Because the same mindset behind the Nader voters is still alive and well. The US voting system is broken. Everyone knows this. Those of us in countries with less broken systems stare in horror. In the meantime, you work with what you have in the meantime. The absolute clowns who think they get a form of moral purity by refusing to participate deserve nothing but scorn.
“Sure, President Romney just fucked over (women/poor/hispanics/blacks/students) but hey, I voted for the ClownShoes Party, I still have my sense of moral superiority”. Yeah. Fuck those people.
It really is unbelievable how much more energy is spent on the ritualistic Two-Minutes Hate directed at Nader than on voting system reform.
Well, when there’s a credible campaign being run in favor of widespread systematic voting system reform in this country, I suppose that will be a relevant comparison.
http://www.electology.org
Currently several orders of magnitude too small to be “credible”, but it’s a start.
I suppose I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention http://www.fairvote.org too. They are much bigger than the former and are good on PR (proportional representation). But for single-winner systems, their unfortunate obsession with IRV, a system which lets third parties grow a bit but then subjects them to exactly the same spoiler dynamics which have driven Lemieux off the deep end re Nader, dooms them to failure. And it doesn’t help that their most prominent figures are willing to take liberties with the truth in pursuit of IRV.
Oh, I should also mention the Rhode Island Voter Choice Study Commission, a commission of the RI state legislature. Anyone in RI who wants more info on them should write me, firstname dot lastname at gmail.
I find the Campos BMI posts funny, but Scott’s(and now Farley’s) endless punching of a nearly non-existent constituency as the ones that determined Bush would be Dear Leader is just frustrating.
Show us on the chart where Nader touched you.
They ain’t punching a constituency, they punching a bunch of dumfucks and the assholes that exploits them
Yes, how could Rob post about a topic so irrelevant that it immediately caused you to fire up the non-sequitur machine several times to defend St. Ralph. I blame the national obesity epidemic and expansive readings of the commerce clause.
I wonder if they keep getting a recharge at FDL. It’s about all it’s good for anymore. Except for the amusement I get when Jane going off on tech legal rants that don’t appear to be well grounded.
David Dayen posts at FDL.
He still has part of his sanity left, though he’s way too far to Digby’s “the sky is falling” side of things for my taste. The comment section is of course, a swamp. TBogg is starting to spit blood from the other side and the whole thing looks ugly. I probably won’t peruse it again until a month after the election.
And TBogg
Obamacare lets congress force me to eat broccoli and vote for Nader?
Show us on the chart where Nader touched you.
Now that made me laugh. I didn’t think the comedy could get any richer. Farley and Lemieux are taking this baby on the road.
I can show you where he touched 100,000 dead Iraqis.
That funny enough for you?
Not as hilarious as Daschle pushing up the Iraq war vote to October 2002 so Democrats in the Senate could bask in the full glory of being hawkish assholes.
Don’t worry, some said years later that they partially regretted it.
And it might never have happened on the alternate timeline in which Ralph Nader didn’t run for President in 2000, so they’re not really responsible for what went on in this timeline.
The punchline is that a guy who thinks it would be “careless” to attribute causality to someone who unquestionably changed the outcome of a presidential election thinks that American foreign policy is set by 29 members of the opposition party in the Senate. Whose endorsement of a war that was already a fait accompli is entirely without precedent and unexpected. Fascinating.
Still, Scott, the complicity of the Democrats in launching that fiasco was purely, rancidly political, and aimed at maintaining viability in 2004 and going forward. Bad call.
Oh, to be clear, criticize the craven congressional Democrats all you want. let’s just not pretend that this war wasn’t going to happen even if Tom Daschle immolated himself in the well of the Senate.
I agree that every crappy domestic policy of Bush was forseeable before the election, but remember 11 years ago today was not forseeable, and there is no way the neocons would have gotten their war without it. Meanwhile, there will be plenty of people just sitting this one out, to the same effect as a Nader vote, as the creep to the center unfolds over the next 50 days. I considered doing that, but the racist sociopaths who will rule if Romney wins are too unbearable to contemplate.
11 years ago today was not forseeable
Nonsense. It was entirely forseeable and could have been thwarted.
Sherm,
Regardless of how true that is (which I assume we’ll never really know, now), you’re saying that it was foreseeable by government officials, while Jesse is saying it wasn’t foreseeable by the electorate, which is obviously true.
Then I read his statement out of context. My bad.
But Bush’s fucking up “big-time” should have been foreseeable to the electorate, even if a 9/11 type event was not.
I think some pushback against this is warranted. I certainly didn’t see the attacks of 9/11 coming, obviously, and I was fairly surprised that Al Queda was able to pull off an attack of that scale (although I probably shouldn’t have been). But, if you were paying attention, a major al qaeda terrorist attack on US soil was certainly well within the range of reasonable possibilities going forward for anyone paying attention, given what they’d accomplished in the previous decade.
The complicity of a minority of Democrats. A landslide majority of the Democrats in Congress voted against the AUMF.
You cannot rightly blame “the Democrats” for the Iraq War, the way you can blame “the Republicans” or “the Bush administration” or “the neocons.”
Good point.
endless punching of a nearly non-existent constituency
I guess all those Naderites indignantly posting above are imaginary.
You don’t have to be a Naderite. And if anything most of the animus appears to be on the other side. I realize that will be defended as righteous moral indigation because Nader killed Iraqi babies, and all, but it looks more like lefty-bashing for the fun of it.
In what meaningful sense can a union-busting prick who deliberately threw an election to George W. Bush be considered part of “the left” at this late date?
^ This. I find leftier-than-thou sentiments from dubiously “good” leftists annoying in any case, but it’s downright infuriating in the continued service of defending Ralph Nader’s campaign to elect George W. Bush.
Fuck you all.
And a hearty Santorum to Ralph and his fanboys
Is it possible to not be a Ralph fanboy and still be happy that you didn’t vote for Joe Fucking Lieberman for VP? Is that permitted?
Yes, but then you need to spell it “fanboi.”
Those leftier-than-thou Naderites, with their unproductive and divisive focusing on the past! They must be forever purged from the rolls of the worthy!
Guys: plurality voting is behind that curtain over there, laughing its head off.
Look, when we have instant runoff voting I don’t give a shit if Ralph Nader runs all the vanity campaigns we wants. In 2000, we didn’t, and he made his choices knowing this.
Meanwhile, you have a choice of whether to beat the dead Nader horse, or make a post that would actually inform people about voting reform. It appears your choice so far is clear.
If you change your mind, please write me first, as I offer upthread. I don’t imagine that you think me anything but a blowhard, so I’m not going to try preach you any gospels; but as you seem to think that election reform is synonymous with IRV, you unquestionably have a few things to learn. Or of course you could read Gaming the Vote, by William Poundstone… but writing me is probably less work. (That invitation goes to anyone else reading this comment, too. firstname dot lastname at gmail.)
One thing I could do if you write me is send you a copy of Gaming the Vote. It’s a well-written history of the issue, which I’m happy to promote even though my favorite solutions aren’t even mentioned in the book.
Everything looks like lefty-bashing for the fun of it if you want an excuse to dismiss any criticism of lefties as inappropriate without having to do the heavy lifting of arguing and defending arguments.
Great! Heavy lifting, and not just for the fun of it! So what are we going to accomplish here, once we’ve proved that Nader is an asshole? Nobody currently over the age of 30 is going to fall for that one again? Wow, that’s totally progress from where we were in 2000. So yeah, carry on with the heavy and totally not fun work of posting on a blog.
Discourage the people who might be inclined to indulge in similar irresponsible behavior in the future from doing so. Those who don’t learn history are condemned to repeat it, you know.
Right. Because the John Anderson experience stopped Nader from ever happening.
No, wait. Most Nader voters were under 30 and had never heard of John Anderson.
If you really want to make sure Nader will never happen again, help push to reform the voting system. Hectoring people just doesn’t help.
For those of us who are actually interested in the article about the evil/incompetent/ignorant bush admin’s knowledge or lack thereof re: 9/11, what purpose does it serve to bring this story out now? Can we try them for anything? Can we pass a law saying no one in the Bush family for 7 generations can run for president? Any ideas?
Shaming anyone associated with this disaster so that they will ever show their faces in public again. Bush may be done but retreads and reretreads, particularly the neocons behind the Saddam obsession, continue to be potential members of any future Republican administration. Ironically, Saddam caused more harm to the US than anything he ever attempted simply by being an object of obsession for the right.
Also Bush might still be angling for that stint as commissioner of baseball. And therein lies the real dilemma- if Bush came out in support of instant replay, what is an LGM-reading baseball fan to do?
You know, when we’re going down the list of who can be blamed for Bush becoming president, Bud Selig’s name is one that often is omitted from the list. It shouldn’t be.
After Fay Vincent was kicked out as commissioner of baseball in 1992, Bud Selig took over as “acting” commissioner. He was supposed to be searching for a replacement, and George W. Bush’s name was high on the list. Bush wanted to be baseball commissioner; it’s probably not an exaggeration to say he wanted it more than any other job, including the Presidency. He even put off Texas Republicans asking him to run for governor, because he thought he had the commissionership in the bag and he preferred that. Selig, however, didn’t intend to give up his power to anyone else.
Had Selig relented and let Bush become commissioner (and it probably wouldn’t have been too hard to get the other owners to go along), there would never have been a Bush governorship, much less a presidency. And Selig could have changed his mind at any time between 1992 and about 1998-99, and Bush would probably have jumped at the opportunity.
It’s a sad commentary on baseball ownership, but Bush was actually one of the more reasonable ones. That might have something to do with why he didn’t get it.
Well, yeah, representing a minority viewpoint amongst ownership is not really a good way to go about getting the commissioner’s job after they just fired the last guy for being a boorish moron.
I blame Bart Giamatti for dying.
if Bush came out in support of instant replay, what is an LGM-reading baseball fan to do?
Remember that anything Bush attempts will turn to shit.
Actually, I think this is specifically disallowed in the Constitution, although the language is stilted. That’s what the Constitution calls “Corruption of Blood.”
Well, yeah, it was really rhetorical. It is true that the Bush family puts one in an Old Testament mood, even though the Constitution is somewhat a different tone.
No, this all about Nader.
Also as a former Nader voter who has practically said “maxima mea culpa” numerous times on this very blog, I am getting sick of this All Nader-Bashing, All The Time emphasis. For christ’s sake, enough already.
As someone who was too young to vote for Nader in 2000 and didn’t vote for him in 2004 when I had the chance, I find this is some sort of pro-Democratic Party shibboleth.
One of my biggest gripes about the Democratic Party is they don’t care when the other institutional party literally steals elections from them, but they fight like hell if somebody else comes in and gets 2 out of 100 people to vote for them.
Exactly. It is called policing the left. The liberals do the right-winger’s job for them by bashing anything that emerges outside (and to the left) of the Democratic party. In this case they play fake alternative history with Saint Gore and Satan Nader so as to avoid the wider and deeper institutional patterns at work.
Yes it might be policing the left, but I am unconvinced that brow-beating people works all that well.
I suppose it’s better than actually coming to terms with the fact that Republicans routinely steal elections and have also prosecuted and convicted those simply being guilty of being a successful Democrat(former Alabama governor Siegelman is reporting to prison tomorrow).
Can you blame them? Bourgeois academics are almost always the first to find themselves up against the wall.
Which will be unfortunate for Nader’s supporters, since once you include their students that’s pretty much all of them.
Indeed. Much like when Unions disgrace scabs. It’s silly! I mean, where does solidarity even get you? I prefer my strikes to be open where anyone who thinks “hey, my Union leader is going to cut my pension! I’m just not going to strike to show him that I’d prefer to get paid $1 an hour next year to heighten the contradiction!”
Then they can just be scabs, and that’s cool. Much like voting for Nader.
It’s about being part of the reality-based community. We hippie punchers see everything that you do, and in fact, may be hippies ourselves.
We simply choose practical solutions to our problems rather than wishing for a fantasy to materialize.
It’s been two posts in three days, from a dozen or more posts over that time – admittedly one of those posts may yet reach 500 comments, but then no-one is forcing you to read them. And there was another post about the idiocy of Matt Stoller, the comments to which may have mentioned Nader (I don’t recall). And, in recent memory, that’s it. Hardly All Nader All The Time.
There has been much more about Ron Paul anyway.
I do enjoy the fact that no matter how much evidence is presented to the contrary wengler continues to assert that nobody here cares about Republican malfeasance in 2000. My optimism that Naderite dead-enders might ultimately see that events could have more than one cause was probably misplaced.
The 2000 election is always going to be stuck in my mind as the time one party stole an election, started two wars that killed and displaced millions, enriched their buddies and drove the economy into the shitter.
Talking about Nader minimizes that whole ‘stole an election’ thing that was a preview for the shitstorm ahead.
I don’t think you are allowed to start in on paper trails and the security of vote tabulating machines. That’s a little too grassroots, there. Even after what just happened with the election official in Wisconsin.
So, from that standpoint, I def agree with you. Talking about Nader is not as useful as talking about a lot of other things.
Indeed, from what I have seen from afar, no one has been talking about Nader at all, except for this particular subject. Which probably needs to be dropped, already. Agree to disagree, pls? My god this is the debate that will not die! Zombie Debate!!
Um, Scott, I have not noticed many of the people who are trying to argue with you saying that they are planning to vote for a third party in a general election any time soon. As I remember having read through all these threads, there were maybe one or two who said they still think it is an OK idea. The rest just want you to stop attacking us, as we have learned our lesson and are tired of being attacked. Because you are attacking us with the argument that we are still spoilers. And the spoiler here was Nader in 2000, not all of us who ever voted for him and will ever vote again until the end of time.
It’s not only, or even mainly, about Nader voter shaming; what’s done is done. It’s also about the Gush/Bore frame in which the differences between Democrats and Republicans are so trivial as to be meaningless, rather than just disappointingly small but important, in presidential elections. That frame obviously isn’t dead yet, it’s the frame that Nader supporters promoted and relied on, and it richly deserves to be stamped on until it’s faxable.
Thanks for covering my beat!
Nader did irreperable damage to this country, and he is a collosal asshole. If you don’t think so, you haven’t been paying attention. Nader’s statements and actions since 2000 have been disgusting, it is clear to me that Nader was always and only about Nader.
People who should know better still trot out the no difference crap.
This. There was all sorts of thing Nader could have done that would have at least betrayed an interest in actually advancing progressive causes. He did none of them. Running in 2004 as Perot the Poorer should have put the nail in the coffin for everyone.
Hey maybe it would be fun if you guys got stuck on something else timely like Monica Lewinsky or the O.J. Simpson trial.
It would… except that every time there’s a Nader post, several of the regular commenters feel compelled to work through the following cycle:
1. Nader wasn’t trying to throw the election.
2. Okay maybe he was, but his contribution was irrelevant.
3. Okay maybe it was relevant, but Al Gore was fat and lost Tennessee.
4. Okay maybe it was tough to win Tennessee, but who could have known Bush was a bad guy?
5. Okay maybe Bush was a bad guy, but it was all in service of heightening the contradictions and what not and let’s talk about something else.
And maybe it would be fun if prominent lefty sites didn’t publish authors who believed that really, Mitt Romney is a lot more liberal than people think, and that it’s really hard to tell whether Romney or Obama would be worse, and that maybe we should think seriously about Ron Paul because he’s like anti-imperialism and stuff.
And so while I recognize that there will always be stupid, there need not always be a market, on the left, for the kind of idiocy that Ralph Nader represents. I hope for a day in which an apologist for Ralph Nader in a left comment section is as welcome as dogshit in a kiddie pool, but we’re not there yet. And thus it’s worthwhile to write these posts.
You left out my favorite: Barack H. Obama is a damned Republican and a disgrace, but aren’t we lucky because if Dubya hadn’t become President and wrecked the world (which Nader for the purposes only of this sentence is conceded to have made possible), that wonderful progressive B. Hussein Obama could never have become President.
Oh, yes, I think my last post was worthwhile just to get this latest innovation in pathetic Nader apologism. “Without Nader, in 2008 we wouldn’t have gotten a president who is indistinguishable from Paul Ryan and his unconstitutional bailout of the health insurance industry. So there!”
Also, Rob, you’re forgetting the crucial “it is impossible for events to have more than one cause” step.
Are these the same people saying all those things?
Harrumph.
This clearly flows from the General and Special Stollerite Theories of American Presidential Politics.
Once you buy that the 1894 midterms were a victory because FDR was elected in 1932, it’s pretty easy to think that Nader was not only responsible for Obama, but, really, that was his goal all along.
Yves Smith lost her mind, and I believe Elizabeth Warren is hiding it.
That’s a loss I regret. Her blog was so good for so long. Now its at least 50% neo-Naderite bollocks.
Her blog was so good for so long.
It really was. But now she should just move to FDL and get it over with.
Even FDL doesn’t employ Stoller. Or, even better, lambert, the unique leftier-than-thou purity troll who’s also convinced that Hillary Clinton is the second coming of Eugene Debs.
Yes, I remember when i liked Corrente, before the 08 election. Several people just seem to have gone completely nuts.
Oh my god, I actually looked at that site for the first time in months and thought I’d slipped into an alternate universe.
WTF happened to her? It’s like Warren’s foray into mainstream politics obliterated her sanity.
Yves Smith’s sanity, not Warren’s, who despite trailing in a tough campaign still seems quite sane.
And I hope for the day, coming soon, when the Tea Party becomes a rump of old rural whites, the Democrats stop pretending and come out of the closet as the party of Wall Street, and space emerges for an actual labor/left party. Your bashing Nader isn’t about Ralph, but keeping a left from emerging. Silly liberals.
If Nader had actually been about building a left, and not about him stroking his ego, you may have had a point.
In our two-party system (thanks to the evils of plurality voting, etc.), the only way a party to the left of the Democrats becomes a national contender is if it can overpower the major party to the right of the Democrats. Ralph Nader and Jill Stein aren’t about to take the Republican party down from my perspective.
I don’t even understand how Naderites think a third party campaign would work in terms of having “a left” emerge. Let’s assume for a second that Nader’s campaign had actually succeeded (or even been interested!) in building the Green Party into a credible left party in 2012. You’d merely be left with two possible outcomes:
1. The existence of a split left-singular right party dynamic would PERPETUALLY throw elections to Republicans.
2. The Democratic Party would transform into an explicitly centrist party and you’d have three major parties contesting for votes…in which case the awesome new Green Party would need to fold one of the other two parties into a coalition in order to govern in Congress.
But yeah, that unicorn will be along any day now.
I dunno, if not for a third party in the UK the Tories might have been able to go forward with Hooverite economic policies. Wait, what?
At any rate, this is why the “Nader didn’t want to spoil the election, he wanted matching funds” argument makes no sense. That just means he wanted to spoil multiple elections until the leftmost 10% of the country can become a governing coalition.
Ok! That’s me baiting!
Unfortunately, there’s too much wacko stuff in these threads that I don’t feel I can disclaimer enough :) to be useful.
Go ‘way. Baiting.
Er…I didn’t successfully parse that.
But here I am! One point is that aiming for 5% doesn’t force you to spoil forever. You could try to use the threat of spoiling forever to force your way into the to be spoiled party, i.e., function like a mini parliamentary system inside the party. It would be better to do that in a context of a successful history of electing congresspeople and caucusing with the Democrats.
Of course, the problem is that you have to at least hint that you’ll spoil. And that might lead you to think that you need to spoil a bit to prove you’re serious. And that way madness lies. You might consider trying spoiling some races which have marginal effect, but getting that right is really hard. And the more you spoil, the harder it is to build bridges.
This is the Democrats problem of caring about outcomes and governance in a way that the Republicans don’t. The Republicans were willing to threaten the credit rating of the US. One would have thought that that was something no major, long lived, often successful party would even contemplate doing. Some folks look at this (and the Tea Party primarying) and think, yes! yes! this is how you build a more ideological coherent party with an ideological median more to one’s liking!
But that’s obviously bonkers. First, it only works if you’re willing to tolerate a lot of destruction and suffering. Second, as the example of the tea party shows, it doesn’t ensure success. Being ideological coherent and reckless of consequence allows you to do a lot of bombthrowing, but it also hurts your standing. You lose seats. You seem ever more crazy. Even big institutions which have structurally aligned themselves in your favor (e.g., the media) start to back away.
And, of course, contingent factors play a large role. Without Nader spoiling, Bush doesn’t make it and who knows where things are. (Other than likely much better.)
It would be better to do that in a context of a successful history of electing congresspeople and caucusing with the Democrats.
Right. If Nader or the Greens really wanted to build a party, they would start at the local election level. Apply the lessons of the right-wing but use it for good – start by taking over school boards.
But they don’t do that.
IIRC, the Greens did so some of that. I’m not sure what let them to consider a presidential campaign. That would be really interesting to know!
(did do…yeek) Ok, Wikipedia sez:
Yeah, that’s not good.
It’s not whether it’s good or not – it’s that it’s not true, not in any meaningful sense. Few if any of those “elected Greens” had been elected as Greens. I’m originally from Seattle, which has a nominally nonpartisan City Council. At one point a solid majority of the members acceded to the label of “Green”, though I doubt any ever paid membership dues; certainly, none ever had “Green Party” next to their name on a ballot. Other elected “Greens” ran as Democrats but allowed themselves to be described as “Greens” for the purpose of inclusion in that list of 170 people.
I repeat: few if any of the “elected Greens” ran as “Greens”, and indeed their Green-friendly nonpartisan and Democrat-labeled candidacies were the polar opposite of running a third-party “spoiler” candidacy.
(136, not 170; I remembered the “70″ from the citation, and these end-of-indenting back-and-forths have the reply box at the start of the rally makes it hard to check the last comment)
(One further clarification, as I realized confusion was possible: the Seattle City Councilmembers who acceded to the label of “Green” were asked by the Greens to do so, and if asked about their own partisan identity would almost certainly not have said “Green” – they would identify, if anything, as Democrats)
Er..ok, so it’s less? That’s worse right?
I’m not sure exactly what you’re responding to. My point was that if you were going to use a potentials spoiler threat to get a seat at the table, that it’s better to have infrastructure and relations with those you intend to sit with. So, for example, you get elected (perhaps beating democrats) but you caucus with the Dems. You fight either for long shot seats (e.g., deep Red) or for safe seats (such that you or the Dem wins and since you caucus with them your win doesn’t screw them hard).
I don’t know where they were in 2000, but they clearly aren’t anywhere near a point where adding in a spoiler campaign at any level is a plausible move for getting a seat at the table.
I guess I thought your “not good” was sarcastic – that over a hundred “elected Greens” was a sign they were gaining strength and credibility. This is certainly the spin the Greens place on the number – that the number is indeed quite good. Hence my comment expressing doubt as to the credibility of this number (expanded to three comments by my incoherence).
I do wonder about New York State, one of the few places in the country where a candidate can run on multiple ballot lines in the same contest – you’d think the Greens would be pushing like heck to get people elected on a significantly Green vote there.
No no, no sarcasm. Indeed, I meant it as understatement. 100 congresspeople would be impressive. 100 random positions of no significance is a joke.
Now I’m pretty sure that the Greens were somewhat stronger in 2000, but given that they had no federal and no significant state presence, it’s hard to see that the were prepared for a relatively non-damaging spoiler strategy. IIRC, for the Greens, the presidential election was a lot about coattails as well as future elections…gee that worked out terrific!
Along these lines, I’d like to know what positive effect resulted from voting for Nader, in the minds of the voters who thought that voting for Nader would move the Overton window leftward. It’s been 12 years. Have we seen any evidence that voting Nader helped move politics in a progressive direction? What candidates have come to the fore-front, obviously leaning further left than would be expected because of the 1.6% protest votes in 2000? What legislation has been made more progressive because of it? When will we expect to see those results? About the only positives I can see are ones that came AFTER 8 years of disastrous GOP policies that we are still struggling to clean up.
It was a disaster. No benefits stemmed from it at all.
After the election and in 2002, I kept wondering why Nader didn’t run for Senator of somewhere and try to effect some change that way. He surely could have had a reasonable shot at it in some Northern state. Senators have a ton of power of publicity. He would have had a much much better platform to opposed Bush (and to explose Democratic complicity), etc. etc.
He never did. Not exactly the behavior of someone trying to maximize his positive political effect.
Maybe even the state he lives in. There was work to be done there in 2000.
No.
1. Fix the voting system. (Approval voting and/or Proportional Representation and/or etc.)
2. The left can actually have credible cohesion and organization without getting constantly kneecapped by the Democrats. (Also, too, libertarians and dominionists and whatever on the right. Not that the Republican party has ever dellighted in kicking them the way the Dems love kicking hippies)
3. With a debate that no longer runs the gamut from hard-right to center-right, the center-left party will have a chance. If the Democrats move left to take that position, great. If it’s some new party (with or without the name “Greens”), then great. That part hardly matters.
So we’re at step 1. In order to get voting reform enacted, there has to be a significant coalition of groups who want it. That’s pretty far from being true, right now, but it isn’t impossible; voting reform actually would have concrete win/win benefits for just about anyone but corporate lobbyists. Pretty much the only people now who care about voting reform are third-party activists, many of whom have unrealistic fantasies that as soon as they’re freed from the shackles of plurality they’ll soon take over the world. In reality, of course voting reform wouldn’t make grass roots organizing much easier, it would just mean that successful grassroots organizing could have a bigger, fairer share of power and leverage.
And that’s probably Nader’s worst crime, in my book. His monstrous ego has poisoned the well for voting reform. Two-minute-hates like the recent streak here on LGM show that just the name “Nader” causes more shouting and less listening. So as long as voting reform is seen as something those crazy Naderites want, everyone else will use their zero-sum, plurality-based thinking to assume that therefore it must be bad for non-Naderites.
I don’t know how to solve this one, but I’m currently doing a study on MTurkers’ voting system behavior, and applying to doctorate programs so that I’ll have time to try to figure it out.
And that’s probably Nader’s worst crime, in my book.
Right. Unleashing George W. Bush on the world is nothing compared to reducing the chances of major constitutional voting reforms from .001 % to .0001 %.
Point taken. I guess what I meant was “his worst crime that could still potentially be fixed and so is worth worrying about”.
But you are wrong in one regard. Voting reform requires no major constitutional reforms. In fact, serious reform could bypass the feds altogether and work by interstate compact, like the national popular vote movement. So while your basic point is solid, I think your probabilities are orders of magnitude off.
This is just getting boring. And it’s taking up valuable battleship time.
We haven’t actually had Valuable Battleship Time for quite a while, more’s the pity.
I think the concession was that there are no more battleships.
Valuable Battleship Time ended almost sixty-one years ago.
Valuable Battleship Time ended almost sixty-one years ago.
I don’t know, people were still pretty worried about the Scharnhorst and the Tirpitz until the Royal Navy and RAF destroyed them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Battleship_Yamato
Seriously, this is enormously stupid.
Yes, it is possible that Gore could have prevented 9/11. Not likely, but possible. (Remember, while Bush clearly didn’t take the threat seriously, there was a lot more that needed to be done to prevent 9/11 than take the threat more seriously. Plenty of Al Qaeda attacks occurred during the Clinton Administration.)
But Nader critics discount any arguments based on the long term. Whenever someone notes that a black from a liberal state who opposed a war like Obama couldn’t have been elected President absent what Nader did, this is dismissed as speculative. Whenever someone notes that Nader may have moved the Democratic Party presidential candidates out of the South and somewhat to the left, this is dismissed as speculative.
This is nothing more than “we get to claim all of the alleged negative effects of Nader, but he and his voters don’t get to claim any of the positive effects”. It’s stupid reasoning.
Positive effects?
I’ll spot you Obama if you’ll spot me 100,000 dead Iraqis. I love Obama, but I’d trade him in a second if Gore could have been president on 9/12.
I don’t need to speculate to see the evil Nader caused. Dead bodies are dead bodies. I can speculate about all the OTHER bad stuff that we have thanks to him, but I’ll just stick to those corpses. I’ll deliver those festering, bullet-ridden corpses to wherever you sleep with that under-developed conscience you carry around. Sleep soundly, buddy. I’m sure eventually, decades from now, it will have been worth it.
Kindly explain how Nader forced the Democratic leadership in both houses of Congress to support the Iraq War Resolution.
Kindly explain how the Iraq War, unlike every other war in American history, was a policy initiated by Congress,
As you usually understand (when discussing anything but the Presidency of George W. Bush), presidents don’t make policy in a vacuum.
As I understand and you know I understand in any context but when you’re making ridiculous excuses for Ralph Nader, I in fact understand that presidents have enormous unilateral authority over military (as opposed to domestic) policy.
The only thing I’m disputing in this subthread is the notion that the War on Iraq could not have occurred had Gore been President. The issue really boils down to what would have gone into Gore’s own decisionmaking. In the context of this particular discussion, Nader’s responsibility, Bush’s decisionmaking, and so forth really aren’t relevant.
Gore broke with his own party to support the first Gulf War. Gore indicated during the 2000 campaign a strong interest in more actively supporting the Iraqi domestic opposition in order to oust Saddam Hussein.
All I am arguing here is that the possibility that Gore, as the decider, might have been swayed to attack Iraq following 9/11 is not outside the realm of possibility.
And, again, even had he attacked Iraq, that doesn’t mean that he and Bush were exactly the same or that a Gore presidency (and even a Gore War on Iraq) would not have been better than the Bush Presidency (and the Bush War on Iraq).
I’m really only questioning the notion that Gore as President necessarily meant that there would have been no War on Iraq.
I concede the point that we cannot as an absolute certainty rule out the possibility that Gore would have invaded Iraq after 9/11 (assuming, of course, that 9/11 would have happened — which, as this post reminds us, without Nader it might not have.) But it is overwhelmingly likely, given that Gore opposed it against his own political interests, and given that the public and congressional pressures to invade Iraq you discuss are almost entirely fictitious. The pressure to invade Iraq didn’t come from these sources; it came mostly from various assholes in the Bush administration who wouldn’t have had jobs in a Gore administration.
Please review Article IIof the United States Constitution and come back when you figure out how the Democratic leadership of both houses of Congress can make President Gore fight a war he doesn’t want to fight.
Thanks for playing “I don’t understand how the United States Government works.” You look to be a continuing champion.
Actually, from a strictly Constitutional perspective, Congress, and Congress alone, has the power to declare war (though that would be Article I).
In the real world, of course, Presidents tend to have primary responsibility when it comes to issues of war and peace. But these decisions are not made in a vacuum. Even before 9/11, the political pressure to meet Saddam Hussein with force was enormous.
In the second presidential debate between Bush and Gore in 2000, Gore emphasized that he broke with his party to support the first Gulf War and that he was committed to going beyond the current sanctions regime to push for the ouster of Saddam Hussein (though he certainly didn’t support invasion then).
How would he have responded in a post-9/11 White House to internal and external pressures to go after Saddam Hussein? I don’t honestly know. I think we would have had a better chance to have avoided war with Iraq with Al Gore in the White House. But Al Gore was not George McGovern.
Even before 9/11, the political pressure to meet Saddam Hussein with force was enormous.
And the source of that pressure was THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION. No Bush Administration, no such pressure. This isn’t exactly eleven-dimensional chess.
No, no. Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, et al. didn’t want the war but the immense pressure exerted on them by Tom Daschle left them no choice. Everyone knows that.
It makes sense since the Republicans that actually did all the shit you cite are never held responsibility for anything.
I know I blame the Bavarian People’s Party and their 3.23 percent in the 1932 federal elections for the rise of Hitler. LINK
You don’t actually know anything about German history, do you?
You know who knew a lot about German history? HITLER, that’s who.
And don’t forget that in a previous Nader Bash thread we also got treated to the fantasy that, prior to 2002, Joe Lieberman was a perfectly average progressive Democrat and that, if he had become VP in 2001, he wouldn’t have been any more likely to have become the Democratic Presidential nominee in 2008.
And, somehow, a War on Iraq would have been absolutely unpossible had Gore been President (presumably because the War on Iraq was, in fact, caused entirely by Bush’s BULLY PULPIT, back when such things existed).
Awesome. So you voted for Nader to avoid the inevitable Lieberman/Boxer candidacy of 2008?
Please.
I didn’t vote for Nader in 2000. I couldn’t. I vote in Oklahoma, where Nader was not on the ballot (and where write-ins are illegal). But had I voted for Nader in 2000, it wouldn’t have made any difference whatsoever, as I vote in Oklahoma.
But the larger point is that politics are complicated and the kind of black-and-white counterfactuals that litter these threads are absurd. Gore would have been a much better president than Bush. Had Gore been elected, war with Iraq would have been less likely. But there would have been enormous pressures on President Gore to invade Iraq, both from Congress and from within his own White House (the Vice Presidency wouldn’t have magically prevented Joe Lieberman from being a neocon).
Nader’s presence on the ballot in Florida was a contributing factor to the outcome in 2000 (just as Buchanan’s presence on the ballot in Florida and NM was). In an election that close, as even Scott tends to admit, dozens of things could have gone differently and produced different outcomes.
But what a Gore presidency would have looked like in practice (beyond measurably less bad than Bush) is matter of speculation.
the Vice Presidency wouldn’t have magically prevented Joe Lieberman from being a neocon
Yes, but it does conveniently prevent the vice president from having any authority that the president doesn’t want to give him. Since Gore didn’t like Lieberman and chose him for electoral reasons, this power would have been about as much as a bucket of warm piss.
Although, in fairness, I must agree that the section of John Nance Garner means that it would have been immoral to vote for FDR.
I’m not making the case that Lieberman’s presence on the ticket made voting for Gore “immoral.”
I am saying that, in the counterfactual world in which Gore is inaugurated as President in January 2001, the fact that Joe Lieberman would have been inaugurated as VP is, in fact, significant.
And the fact that Dick “Dick” Cheney actually was inaugurated as VP is, in fact, a whole lot more significant.
So in your version, Gore outsources foreign policy to Lieberman as thoroughly as Bush did with Cheney. I’m not buying it.
Not only did Cheney represent the consensus among the powerful people in the administration in a way Lieberman wouldn’t have, Lieberman (who Gore didn’t like) was chosen for electoral reasons, while Cheney was picked for reasons of governance. It’s not remotely comparable.
in fact, caused entirely by Bush’s BULLY PULPIT
This is profoundly embarrassing strawman-building you can’t possibly believe. Yes, clearly, if you believe that the president can’t force Congress to pass domestic policies it doesn’t want to pass, then you must also deny the ability of the president to use his actual powers over the military to initiate wars. Obama only bombed Libya because Harry Reid told him to.
The Iraq War was not the result of congressional pressure. It just wasn’t. You’re letting your Nader apologism compel you to argue complete nonsense.
Scott, I’m certainly not arguing that Congress pressured Bush into invading Iraq. The Bush administration was, of course, the prime mover.
What I am saying is that there would have been intense pressure on Gore to do so, as well. And Gore’s rather hawkish proclivities as a Senator (and Presidential candidate in 2000) suggest that he might have responded to these pressures rather different as President than he did as a private citizen (who was, after all, evaluating a war that would be conducted by the monumentally incompetent administration of George W. Bush).
as well
But the problem here is that this “immense pressure” from Congress or the public to invade Iraq after 9/11 did not, in fact, exist. Afghanistan is a different story, but I’ve never claimed Gore wouldn’t have invaded Afghanistan.
Certainly there was no pressure from the public. But as far back as the 1990s, there was pressure from some foreign policy elites to get tougher with Iraq, which in part led the Clinton administration to ramp up its pressure on Iraq. The public was absolutely not on board, which itself became a problem for the Clinton administration, which began, not terribly successfully, to make the case for a future invasion of Iraq. (Here‘s a NYT article from 1998 about this.) And this was all before 9/11 provided additional (irrational) fodder for those looking for an excuse to go after Saddam Hussein.
But on the other hand, going after OBL and Afghanistan would provide a great excuse for not caring much about Saddam Hussein.
Precisely. And we know that Gore thought it was a terrible idea.
Yeah, with a more sensible president, 9/11 would have made an invasion of Iraq much less likely. And if you assume that Gore somehow decided to go after Iraq anyway, preposterous as that may be, he would have fought the war and its aftermath competently, in contrast to Bush, and we (and the Iraqis) would still be much better off.
Well, no. I haven’t seen anyone dismiss this as silly. Asinine, yes. Hypocritical, yes. Dumb, I’ll grant you. But not silly.
Look: no Bush, no Iraq war. No Bush, no President Obama, at least not one running on his antiwar credibility. So, yes, sure. We have Bush’s victory to thank for Obama’s election.
But remember: you people who defend Nader are the same people who don’t think having Obama in office is worth anything, so it’s hardly credible when you ask people to join you in celebrating his election. In particular, the Naderites and the Firebaggers insist they’d rather have had nothing pass than have the PPACA.
And Bush didn’t just make it possible for Obama to get elected – he also destroyed American credibility abroad, blew a massive hole in our federal finances to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, and was aggressively against regulation of the financial sector, even by the standards of a Washington consensus in which the Democrats weren’t exactly covering themselves with even a fig leaf’s worth of glory. Among other disastrous legacies he left,of course.
So: if you insist on defending the installation of President George W Bush on the grounds that it made President Obama possible, please don’t expect a respectful, a tolerant, or even a civil response. But be reassured: I for one won’t say your claim is silly.
PS On second thought: yeah, little bit silly.
Er, whoops, somehow I misremembered as I was writing, and substituted “silly” for “speculative”. Please make the appropriate mental edits in reading my comments above, and ignore the postscript.
Whenever someone notes that a black from a liberal state who opposed a war like Obama couldn’t have been elected President absent what Nader did, this is dismissed as speculative
It’s dismissed because the speculation doesn’t make any fucking sense. Northerners from liberal states were Democratic candidates in 1984 and 1988. There is no logical reason whatsoever why if Gore won he would have had to have been followed by another southerner, which would be nearly impossible because Southern Democrats are a dying breed.
And, of course, there’s the additional problem, which is that Obama is only marginally more liberal than Gore, and according to most Naderites he’s indistinguishable from Paul Ryan. Anyway, the idea that the difference between Gore and Obama is worth all of the damage of the Bush administration is absurd.
In 2012 there is no such thing as a Naderite. They simply don’t exist. They barely existed in 2000.
Ralph Nader got 2.74 percent of the popular vote in 2000, 0.38 percent in 2004 and 0.56 percent in 2008(yeah not only did he run in 2008, he got more votes than in 2004).
You might as well be yelling at clouds.
There are a hell of a lot of clouds showing up in these threads in that case. It must be that new-fangled cloud computing thing.
In 2012 there is no such thing as a Naderite.
They’re still around, though they may not be supporting Nader right now. They’re the ones claiming that Romney isn’t really far to the right of Obama, and that for reasons of moral purity, they can’t support Obama.
Or, in Stoller’s case, is paid by Salon to argue that Romney is actually secretly more liberal than Obama, and bills opposed by each and every Republican in Congress represent Republican Party.
It is true that among most people Nader’s strategy has been discredited. I am to do what little I can to keep it that way, and as these threads demonstrate there will alas be no shortage of apologists distorting the record the next time an onanistic third party spoiler campaign gains steam.
Those goalposts must be moving at relativistic speed now.
“Yes, it is possible that Gore could have prevented 9/11. Not likely, but possible. (Remember, while Bush clearly didn’t take the threat seriously, there was a lot more that needed to be done to prevent 9/11 than take the threat more seriously. Plenty of Al Qaeda attacks occurred during the Clinton Administration.)”
Yes, exactly. Because AQ was able to pull of a half dozen or so relatively small margin, crude terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kenya…it’s obviously next to impossible to think that an administration that was taking the threat seriously would have had even odds to prevent a 9/11 scale attack inside the U.S. proper.
Somehow I am surprised that the Naderites don’t understand Al Qaeda any better than they understand U.S. political systems.
If you read the 911 report there were a lot of opportunities to detect and spoil the attack based on stuff that was discovered but not known by the right people. More resources are exactly what was called for and exactly what Bush and his team refused to provide.
And people wonder why I’m a nihilist. Chee-ziz.
I think using an article like that for the purpose of trolling your readership is somewhat fucking petty.
On steroids!!!!
But, Nader!
I’m so old I remember you saying interesting things, instead of making drive-bys about how some post does not meet your standards. It used to be about the Simpsons quotes, man.
But what if the by needed to be driven?
[...] world’s most accomplished liar Ari Fleischer to show up to reveal what the pushback against Eichenwald’s new book will be. Namely, they’re going to go with the line that assessing an administration’s [...]
Lets hope that the lesson has been learned that a progressive candidate with a decent following should attempt to influence the democratic party by running to the left of the establishment candidates in the primary and should not torpedo the democratic party in the national election by running as a third-party candidate with zero chance of winning. Any progressive candidate who chooses the latter course reveals him or herself as a narcissistic asshole rather than a movement candidate and should be shunned for doing so. I voted for Nader in 2000 because I could as a New York resident and wanted to help the green party reach the 5% threshold, but I felt at the time that progressive causes would have been better served by a primary run, and I can’t dispute that his campaign was a substantial factor in Bush’s election. Compare the influence of Ron Paul’s primary runs on the electorate with the influence of Nader’s green party runs. Unfortunately, there is no comparison.
1000x this. Why a left candidate ever feels like they should run in the general instead of the primary, I will never understand, except for reasons of ego and spite. The problems with plurality voting are greatly minimized as long as the left is not populated with assholes and morons.
I’m with you until you say plurality voting will ever be OK. It’s not just that it has the blood of 100,000 dead Iraqi children on its horns. It also is the essential root cause of annoying trolling Nader posts on LGM.
(Yes, I’m actually enough of an asshole to seriously juxtapose those two things. But at least I’m self-aware enough to do it in a semi-jokey way.)
Ralph Nader made Mark Teixeira slide into first, costing the Yankees (the tying run in) Saturday’s game.
You’re right about Nader – 100% right – but that’s hardly the most relevant tack to take.
Hmm…unwarranted focus on Saddam Hussein, decision to ignore al Qaeda, baseless theory that they were working together, intelligence officials warning the political leadership that the theory made no sense, the political leadership ignoring their advice…it all sounds strangely familiar.
[...] this whole thing was completely unnecessary. [...]
[...] addthis_share = [];}I’ve mostly sat out the recent rehashing of the Nader Wars here. Like Rob and Scott, I have grown deeply critical of Ralph Nader and his 2000 presidential campaign. But I [...]