>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>The more Nader/Green bashing, the more power to the the DLC wing of
>>the Democratic Party.
>
>I thought part of the rationale of the Nader/Green (whatever the
>weird relations across the virgule) strategy was to push the Dems to
>the left. Is it working?
>
>Doug
The rationale is not the same as an effect.
Pushing the Democratic Party to the left is not my rationale, nor is it the rationale of the left wing of the Green Party, though in local elections such as the 2003 San Francisco mayoral election, it is certainly possible to argue plausibly that Matt Gonzalez' popularity pushed Gavin Newsom to the left (see <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040216/003928.html>), and pushing the Democratic Party to the left may have been a rationale of tactical, on-again-off-again supporters of some Green candidates (as opposed to the Green Party believers and strategic Green Party supporters, who consistently vote Green and try to build the party).
In any case, the axiom of "the more Nader/Green bashing, the more power to the the DLC wing of the Democratic Party" holds true with regard to the relation between rank-and-file Democrats + those who give "critical support" to Kerry on the left and the DLC Democratic politicians on the right. The DLC wing of the Democratic Party can count on no electoral defection from the Anybody But Bush/Nader crowd, so the former can take the latter for granted and move safely to the right to court undecided centrists everywhere, conservative Southern white Democrats, disaffected socially liberal and fiscally conservative Northern Republicans. The DLC Democrats can also count on the ABB/N crowd in 2008, 2012, and later unless the Republican Party undergoes a revolution and nominates John McCain, Colin Powell, Olympia Snow, Christine Whitman, or some such moderate Republican who doesn't scare the ABB/N crowd, which is an impossibility.
Seth Ackerman sethia at speakeasy.net, Sun Mar 28 10:17:15 PST 2004:
>>Of course it is a stupid idea -- my questions in this thread are
>>entirely Socratic, leading the Anybody But Bush/Nader subscribers
>>to their own conclusion that it is.
>
>How is it a stupid idea? If a rightwinger could siphon votes from
>Bush in close swing states, it could defeat him. That would be a
>blow to the right.
Because sophisticated ideologues, on the left or right, understand that electoral campaigns are more than simple means of getting enough votes for their preferred candidates; because it is impossible to precisely calculate the amount of financial support necessary to make an electoral difference without making the campaign to the right of the Republican Party way too successful (as satirized by Shane Mage, <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040322/006843.html>); and most importantly because it's far more cost-effective to spend the same amount of money on registering politically like-minded voters and getting them to vote for the candidate one prefers than a third-party candidate on the opposite end of the political spectrum (especially given high rates of abstention among those who rank third-party candidates the highest on the scale of preference on either end of the political spectrum).
Republicans who give to a Nader in the hope of pushing the country to the right and Democrats who give to a Buchanan in the hope of pushing the country to the left are mathematically challenged. -- Yoshie
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