In 2000, nine out of ten US voters -- i.e., roughly 27 million out of 30 million voters -- who liked the Green Party's program better than the Democratic Party's ended up voting against the Green Party's program, being held back by the Democratic Party's hold on them:
"An analysis of the National Election Study data by Harvard political scientist Barry Burden shows that only 9% of the people who thought Nader was the best candidate actually voted for him [in 2000]. If people had not voted strategically for the lesser evil, Nader would have had over 30 million votes instead of 3 million and might have won the election, especially if he had been allowed in the debates" (Howie Hawkins, "There Never Were Any 'Good Old Days' in The Democratic Party," March 1, 2004, <http://www.gpnys.org/archives/000069.php>).
The natural thing to do in 2003-4 would have been at the very least to try to organize and embolden the 27 million voters to vote for the program they like, rather than the Democratic Party's, especially considering the fact that the Democratic Party's program had objectively gotten worse since 2000, due to Democratic politicians' votes for the Afghanistan War, the Patriot Act, tax cuts for the rich, the Iraq War, etc.
Instead, intellectuals of all sorts -- from Democratic Party ideologues to freelancers like yourself and Tariq Ali (!) even -- have done all they could to get all who voted for the Green Party's program, as well as those who wanted to vote for it but couldn't, in 2000 to vote for pro-war Kerry in 2004, not just in battleground states but also in one-party states, ignoring the content of the Democratic Party's program altogether, let alone comparing it with that of any anti-war candidate on the left. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.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/>