>Another aspect of the film that the critics have missed is the
>emotion underlying that anger: guilt. For there is one crucial
>political figure who is conspicuously missing from the film: Ralph
>Nader, whom Moore (as we all know) passionately supported in the
>2000 election. I was there at the big Madison Square Garden Nader
>Rally in October 2000, where I heard Moore gleefully tell 10,000
>cheering people that there was no difference between Al Gore and
>George W. Bush. ("They're the same guy!" he crowed.) So it's quite a
>shock to see F9/11 begin with a fantasy sequence in which Al Gore is
>seen standing onstage during a victory celebration in Florida with
>Ben Affleck, Stevie Wonder and "that Taxi Driver guy" (DeNiro),
>while Moore wonders in voiceover if the last three terrible years
>were just a dream. Then he swiftly recounts the story of the stolen
>election. The naive or misinformed would undoubtedly assume that he
>had always believed that an Al Gore Presidency would be the best of
>all possible worlds.
>
>The reason for this bizarre change of mind is simple: after the Bush
>"selection," Moore completely bought into the Democratic lie that
>"Nader elected Bush" (which is, of course, logically inconsistent
>with Moore's position that the election was stolen by Bush).
>Consequently, he has put as much distance between himself and Ralph
>as possible. He has even suggested that he only campaigned for Nader
>as some kind of personal favor. And ever since, he's been busy
>getting in touch with his Inner Democrat.
That's not necessarily the mechanism. In 2000, I thought Bush was pretty much like his father, and that the differences between that sort of Republican and Gore, while greater than zero, weren't great enough to miss the opportunity to try to build an independent party/movement. Two things happened - W turned out to be much much worse, and the party/movement-building never came to pass. I don't believe Nader's the reason Gore "lost" (though of course he won); the election was Gore's to lose, and he did because of his own weaknesses. But you can still reject the "not a dime's worth of difference" analysis in 2004 without getting in touch with your inner Democrat.
Doug