>I don't count on the AnybodyButBush crowd to come out. I already said
>that I wouldn't:
><http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20041025/024552.html>.
>On LBO-talk, the ABB crowd are foolishly blaming voters, rather than
>themselves or their candidate for failing to pursue a pro-working class
>agenda and to win voters over to it.
>Yoshie
Where do you read this? While it has been pointed out that many voters quite foolishly voted against their own self interests much of what I've seen here rightly points out that the Democrats fucked everyone over by picking such a shitty candidate. I am aware that these voters do not think of themselves as voting against their own interests but the fact remains that they have done so. Better to be poor and have no health insurance than to allow gay people to get married? Most people would not consciously agree with that but that is how they voted. The Democrats have again done a shitty job but so have many of the citizens of the US. Unless there is some sort of fraud on a massively unheard of scale people voted to put a lying reactionary sack of shit in office as POTUS. The voters are responsible for Bush winning. Call it blame or responsibility it is the same outcome. The fact that many made that choice is partially attributable to the fact that the Dems did not give many working class people a candidate they could feel good about choosing.
>Besides, objective and subjective obstacles mutually reinforced each
>other. Subjective obstacles made Nader's ballot access efforts very
>difficult, and the spectacle of tough ballot access battles, many of which
>ended in Nader's defeats in courts, became added subjective obstacles even
>in states where Nader clawed onto ballots.
>
>Considering all the hurdles, I'm surprised that Nader managed to receive
>even 393,539 votes, about 15% of his votes in 2000.
What difference would it have made if Nader had been on every ballot and the Dems had never said one negative word about the man? Name one thing that would be different today if that scenario had played out. It's time to let the Nader thing go. Nader is not a factor in anything any more. The dude is irrelevent.
>Team Bush knew how to mobilize their base, using anti-gay ballot
>initiatives, for instance in Ohio. There was no comparable effort on the
>left to use ballot initiatives that have *as galvanizing effects* on
>voters on the left as anti-gay ballot initiatives were on voters on the
>right. Rather, rich liberals spent nearly 1.5 billion dollars convincing
>voters on the left that real issues like the disastrous war on Iraq and
>lack of single-payer universal health care shouldn't be seriously debated,
>that they can't compare Kerry's and Nader's platforms and put pressures on
>Kerry to move to the left and distinguish his party's platform sharply
>from Bush's , etc.
>What the ABB brigade -- i.e., liberals and leftists -- ensured was that
>the issues on which the majority of Americans _are_ with us -- such as
>establishing national health insurance and bringing the troops home --
>won't be debated and voted on, because they wanted to make it a matter of
>simply voting against Bush. Team Bush, however, succeeded in exploiting
>their anti-gay marriage rhetoric -- knowing that the majority of Americans
>are not yet with us on gay marriage -- to mobilize their base and to
>demagogically set us back on another of the issues -- civil unions and
>domestic partnership benefits -- on which the majority of Americans are
>actually already with us but may not know that they are.
>--
>Yoshie
The Dems certainly blew it on the war, there is no doubt in my mind at least that this is true. The health care issue seems more difficult than this though. I believe it would be easy for the GOP to point out that national health car would be expensive, a budget buster, that the Dems either could not pull of or would have to raise taxes to pull off. That would kill it right now in this political climate. The truth or untruth of a GOP claim would have nothing to do with its effectiveness. None of this has anything to do with Nader however. The man is irrelevent.
John Thornton