> The message the Dems took from '72 was to nominate
> Jimmy Carter. After every post-Humphrey election,
> the party centrists explained defeat or victory on
> the basis of the party being not centrist enough,
> or satisfactorily centrist, respectively. The media
> faithfully replicate this gospel and it becomes the
> official explanation.
Yes indeed.
> The purported suburban factor
> in polling analysis is also an artifact of this
> bias. The latter is criticized in the new Teixeira-
> Rogers book, and this criticism is reflected in Gore's replacement
> of Mark Penn with Stanley Greenberg.
How so? From what I know of Greenberg its not clear to me that what he is peddling is anything outside of mainstream DLC doctrine.
> As I mentioned
> before, Gore is running left but gives little sign
> of not governing right. So a good Nader vote could
> exert a healthy influence. I'm not quite to the point
> where I think a GOP victory would be a good influence.
>
If Gore loses because of strong showing by Nader, this will send the message that the Dems are in the process of completely losing their core constituency. So if Gore is going to go down, the strongest message is sent by his going down big time. Otherwise, the leadership will be able to maintain the fiction that triangulation remains a viable strategy.
> The ardent lesser-evil-ists among us have yet to explain
> how we get out of the box of choosing among bad alternatives
> indefinitely, except by reference to a bigger, badder labor
> movement of the future. So if we had ham, we could have ham and eggs,
> if we had eggs, as the saying goes.
>
Yes, exactly. I still have not seen even the attempt to provide any such explantion by any of these folks.
John