>
> >
>> The electors of Florida went to Bush. Had Nader not put
>> his narcissistic candidacy forward, the electors of
>> Florida would have gone to Gore.
>
>-from my recall of the numbers, you could say the same of the
>-SWP, but nobody ever blames them for throwing the election
>-to Bush.
>
>Only within the micro numbers that pitched the decision into the courts.
>Without Nader in the race, the Gore totals would have been so decisive that
>the vote would have never been disputed.
>
>With the SWP or such votes, the totals still would have been close enough to
>force the case into the whole Florida legal disaster.
Every Florida voter for Nader made a deliberate choice to vote for a left-wing protest candidate who that voter knew had no chance to carry Florida, and who had been labeled by liberals and the mass media as a "spoiler," rather than vote for Gore. Those voters had a variety of choices: vote for Nader; vote for McReynolds; vote randomly; not vote; vote for Gore; vote for Bush. If Nader had not been on the ballot the other choices would remain. In particular Mc Reynolds, who campaigned on essentially the same issues and proposals as Nader. Since I can conceive of no rational process by which a voter could arrive at a ranking of 1.) Vote for Nader 2.) Vote for Gore 3.) Vote for McReynolds I can likewise conceive of no reason to imagine that the absence of Nader from the race might have increased Gore's actual plurality so much that the Repugs would not have stolen the election anyway ("military ballots" arriving after Election Day and illegally counted with the craven acquiescence of the Demipugs could be multiplied like loaves and fishes).
>One reason I no longer take Green Party arguments seriously is the
>intellectual denial that Nader mattered in the 2000 election. When a
>political trend engages in the level of intellectual self-denial and
>delusion required for these kiinds of arguments, they just can't be taken
>seriously.
>
>Either the Greens justify long-term political gains from throwing the
>election to Bush or they aren't making serious arguments. Since the only
>power of third parties is the threat to play spoiler, they have to justify
>the gains from pulling the trigger on that threat, as Nader did in 2000.
Historic justification takes years, maybe decades. Its form would be the total breakup of the Demipug Party and the emergence of a party combining its relatively leftist sections with Labor and with emergent popular movements to form a political movement expressing and mobilizing the laboring people of this country.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things."
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64