> If sophisticated right-wing ideologues could spend only $92,948 on a
> third-party campaign to the left of the Democratic Party and actually
> succeed in pushing the country to the right, why wouldn't
> sophisticated liberal or left-wing ideologues think of spending the
> same amount of money on a third-party campaign to the right of the
> Republican Party in order to push the country to the left? :-)
Because they don't have the money to waste on such a stupid idea, and they have principles against supporting neo-Nazis.
Seriously speaking, though, I think the important question is not figuring out how to manipulate fringe parties left or right to bank-shot the election results, which is entertaining intellectual sport for people who don't think very deeply about politics, or fantasize about starting a "nice bloody revolution" or beating up O'Reilly and Limbaugh, a la Chuck0, but how to accomplish two tasks:
1) how to generate, focus, and direct the thousand little discontents with the system that are smoldering all over into some sort of large-scale anti-system movement, to which the two major parties (which are the locus of fundamental power in this political system) will have to respond; and
2) how to re-fashion the D. Party into a left-wing capitalist party. Certainly there is no chance of making it a revolutionary party, or even a social democratic party in the European sense. Those who want to work on those projects can go off and chat amongst themselves, but I think these are not likely to bear much fruit in the present circumstances. But at least it might be possible to restore some equilibrium to the political system that actually controls the government -- that is, the two major parties.
Robert Kuttner (http://www.prospect.org/print/V15/2/kuttner-r.html) has pointed out in considerable detail the way in which the GOP, since the Gingrich era, has transformed itself, and continues to transform itself, into a mass, nearly totalitarian, reactionary party which is deliberately seeking to seize total control of the government for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, the DPs have been asleep at the switch all this time, not taking this threat seriously. But there is at least a chance that it can be woken up and its backbone stiffened to fight back this threat. And only the DP, much as we far-lefties would like to deny it, is big enough to fight it effectively.
For those who say that "there isn't a dime's worth of difference" (and every time I see that hackneyed expression, my eyes glaze over and I stop reading), this, I think, is the difference: the GOP will pretty much cement itself into place as the 1,000-year Reich of the U.S. of A. if it gets another four years in the White House, whereas the DP at least has a chance of preventing this.
So, in my mind, the real question about Nader/GP is: is that the way to go to wake up the DP and strengthen its ability to block the totalitarian aims of the GOP? I don't think so, if its actual result in the real world is to re-elect Bush, but if anyone can give a good argument that it will work, I will listen to it.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Belinda: Ay, but you know we must return good for evil. Lady Brute: That may be a mistake in the translation.
-- Sir John Vanbrugh: The Provok’d Wife (1697), I.i.