It is perfectly understandable if anyone doesn't think that it is worth their time or money to be campaigning for Nader/Camejo or Cobb/LaMarche or local Green Party campaigns or any other third party campaigns on the left (e.g., the SP), as it is indeed difficult to measure the value of such organizing in the short term.
What ABBNites -- unlike Carl Remick, Joel Wendland, and Charles Brown who are probably more consistent supporters of the Democrats than ABBNites -- have not and most likely will not stop doing is bashing Ralph Nader, unless and until he withdraws from the race. Perhaps, such intense Nader-bashing is justified if it is indeed based upon an equally urgent opposition to four more years of Bush, but, if there is such an urgency, shouldn't it motivate them to give a lot -- in money or time or both -- to at least one Democratic candidate's presidential campaign in particular or the Democratic Party in general?
Several young friends of mine -- one is a recent college graduate, the others, undergraduates -- are pounding the pavement registering voters, and I am impressed with their hard work, and I believe that they will get something out of the experience. A few friends of mine who are retired from their jobs are doing the same.
Several older friends of mine have given quite a bit of their money -- mostly to Dennis Kucinich (who, as I mentioned, appears to be held in greater contempt than Nader -- at least, Nader scares ABBNites, while Kucinich doesn't), a few to Howard Dean. One of them -- a registered nurse who works part-time -- gave as much as $750 to Kucinich! None is rich -- they are just ordinary middle-income working-class folks.
Unlike such Democrats, the LBO-talk ABBN phenomenon is politically perplexing: they hate Nader, they trivialize Kucinich, they drop Dean like a hot potato after one primal scream, they don't think the Green Party goes anywhere, and yet they are not anarchists either. Is there anything that ABBNites think worth doing?
>Doug reports:
>>
>>James Zogby, president of the AAI, calculates these figures indicate
>>a shift of 225,000 likely Arab-American Bush voters to the Democrats
>>in the four battleground states.
>>
>>Only 6 per cent of Muslim Arab-Americans in the latest poll said
>>they wanted to see the president re-elected.
>
>This *alone* in merely four states, is a swing sufficient to
>*double* the Dumbocrats' 2000 plurality. Has anyone claimed a
>countervailing swing among *any* group in favor of the doomed
>Ubu/Dickhead ticket?
>
>Shane Mage
No. Nor have they factored in the Libertarian Party -- check out its ballot access report: <http://www.lp.org/campaigns/ballot/>.
I'll be damned if this year will be the year when the Libertarians make a great leap forward, attracting anti-war votes that have nowhere to go in a lot of states, because the ABBNites on the left have made sure that there won't be as great a challenge to the pro-war candidates from the left. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>