> I'm still convinced that Bush is a loser, and the race appears to be
> as close as I want it to be
Calculations about exactly how close the November elections will be strike me as a pretty rickety base on which to build a political strategy.
Look, we all agree that (1) Kerry and the Democrats don't represent and won't advance "our" program, in any of the variations represented on this list, but (2) since presidential elections are most Americans' main point of engagement with politics, we need to participate in some way. (This is at least as much a premise for supporting Nader or some other third-party candidate, as for supporting Kerry.)
Many of us also believe that even within the tight constraints of American politics, there are consequental differences between Bush and Kerry -- maybe not on Iraq, but certainly for labor, the environment, etc. But this is not really the key issue.
A lot of us who supported Nader in 1996 and 2000 are against him running this year. Not because we think he threw the race to Bush (he didn't) or even because the differences between a Bush and Gore administrations have turned out to be much larger than we expected. But because Nader failed to deliver on the positive promises of his campaigns.
If you're on the left and you're involved in electoral politics, your goal can't be only or even mainly to affect the outcome, especially at the presidential level. There aren't enough of us, for one thing. Rather, it's to do all the things we expected of the Nader campaigns -- to build organizations, to bring more people into the political process, to shift the debate, to strengthen the progressive wing of the Democrats, to lay the groundwork for a third party that can actually take power. And Nader's contribution in all these areas has been nil.
Some of this is a reflection of Nader the individual. But I think it's also a reflection of the limits of third-party presidential runs as an organizing tool. So what's the alternative?
In my mind, it's to support Kerry, but in a way that builds our own organizations and makes us stronger to oppose him down the road -- i.e., starting one day after he takes office. Random example: There's a huge campaign right now to register a million new voters in Florida, focused on people of color and in conjunction with a ballot initiative to raise the state minimum wage. That's smart. It will help Kerry win, sure. But more importantly, it taps into the huge amount of energy and anger (and money) of the anti-Bush campaign and uses it to bring the prople any future third-party effort will need into the political process.
For the same reason I thought "Marxists for Dean," even if it was mostly a joke, captured the right spirit for approaching the presidental race. Yeah, I want Kerry to win. But that's not the real question. The real question is, how do we use the presidential race to build our own organization(s)? I don't think a third-party run is the answer, at least not this year. And I very emphatically don't think the answer should depend on your current guess about the outcome in November.
Josh