Your arguement only seems to prove the futility of voting. As you point out, third party platforms have many problems. But voting for Gore is a vote for an enemy - he isn't that much better then Bush. The whole system is a big sham and by participating in it you implicitly approve of it. If voting could change anything it'd be illegal - no matter who you vote for a conservative will win. While Capitalism exists the government will be under the control of the rich, so why not acknowledge this fact and stop pretending it's some kind of democracy? The majority of the proletariat don't participate in this sham, so why are you?
From: "Nathan Newman" <nathan.newman at yale.edu>
>
> Your logic would be convincing if there was not a simple way to run left
> campaigns that avoid the spoiler problem - namely run in the Democratic
> primary. All the arguments even for losing campaigns apply to such
> primary campaigns - from "expanding the debate" to energizing non-voters.
> In fact, the evidence is Jesse Jackson's campaigns which had that exact
> result, leading to massive voter gains especially in the South, helped
> create the political threat that defeated Robert Bork, and expanded the
> Congressional Black Caucus through expanded voter participation in black
> communities.
>
> Your argument for threatening to vote third party as a threat to keep Dems
> paying attention to our issues is no different from the always existing
> threat not to show up to vote or just vote for the Republican candidate
> (as some urged back in 1968 and even 1972 as a protest against the Dems).
> It adds no positive power beyond the tools of not voting or voting for the
> enemy - in fact it has the exact same effect.
>
> What I don't get about the third party fundamentalists and even "critical
> supporters" like yourself is the obsession with the general election to
> almost complete lack of involvement in primary campaigns. What bothers me
> is that all the organizational energy of Green or other third party
> activists goes only to those general election campaigns, while bypassing
> the real opportunity to elect people in the primary. If Nader had run in
> the Democratic primary, I would not only have voted for him, I would have
> been out there campaigning for him. As would a hell of a lot of other
> people. That would have really reshaped the debate in the Democratic
> Party and in the country, since it might have even threatened Gore for the
> nomination since he would not have had the same solid labor support
> against Nader's trade position.
>
> Everyone points to Eugene Debs as an example of successful third party
> politics, but the difference then was that the primary elections were
> closed to leftists and was the classic era of the smoked filled room. The
> only way to impact the choice of nominee without direct primaries was
> through the threat of running candidates in the general election. As the
> parties have been more and more opened to direct participation in the
> primaries, it has become much more effective to run at the primary level
> to directly influence the party choices.
>
> It is not as if Nader is the only serious left-supported third party
> candidate to run for President since Debs - we've had La Follette, Henry
> Wallace, Dick Gregory, Eldridge Cleaver and Barry Commoner plus a constant
> stream of socialist candidates of various stripes. It is not as if any of
> them had any really large political impact, except maybe the negative
> aspect of helping to split the labor movement in the case of the Wallace
> campaign.
>
> I know, you will say IF labor and other liberal/progressive groups
> supported Nader, his campaign would be different, but the point is that
> they are not seriously supporting him. And they are not supporting him
> because Dubya and his Supreme Court appointments and his willingness to
> sign any crap promoted by Trent Lott is too dangerous.
>
> So my question is: where were Nader and the Greens in the primary when
> they could have gotten the support of a lot of folks like myself?
-- Joe R. Golowka joegolowka at earthlink.net Anarchist FAQ - http://www.infoshop.org/faq
"According to the libertarian litany, if an industry or an institution is making a profit, it is satisfying "wants" whose origins and content are deliberately disregarded. But what we want, what we are capable of wanting is relative to the forms of social organization. People "want" fast food because they have to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food doesn't taste much better anyway, because the nuclear family (for the dwindling minority who have even that to go home to) is too small and too stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking and eating -- and so forth. It is only people who can't get what they want who resign themselves to want more of what they can get. Since we cannot be friends and lovers, we wail for more candy." - Bob Black