mike larkin wrote:
>Whatever it takes to keep Nader off the ballot in battleground
>states, I'm for it. I'll burn the signature cards myself.
-Hey, that's not fair. U.S. ballot access restrictions suck - they -were designed to impede democracy and grease elite rule. I don't like -Ralph's candidacy, but it's his right to run. If it weren't so hard -to get on the ballot, we wouldn't be facing this dismal choice.
Folks complain about ballot access rules and the two-party monopoly as what keeps third parties out, yet they blithely ignore Louisiana. There are NO PARTISAN PRIMARIES, yet third parties have not made inroads there.
The reason third parties on the left don't make any inroads is that, at least since the Farmer-Labor Party, they've have no serious base beyond the electoral activists. Parties are built on broader social institutions than the party apparatus itself, yet the Greens expect to be taken seriously despite the fact that they don't have any serious associated non-electoral organizations associated with them-- no church networks, no unions, not even a network of neighborhood watch groups.
I'm not necessarily for making qualifying for ballots harder-- although the California governors race in the recall election was hardly an advertisement for easy qualification. But if any party can't make the pretty basic threshholds required under most state laws, they don't have any chance of victory, so they are just playing to be spoilers by definition.
-- Nathan Newman