John Adams jadams01 at sprynet.com, Thu Nov 4 08:40:40 PST 2004:
>I'd take any politician on the left in Karl Rove's league over any
>given intellectual.
I used the term "intellectuals" in the broadest sense, so both the types of people that Martin and John mentioned are intellectuals in the sense I meant.
In my opinion, there are very few intellectuals -- perhaps none -- on the left in the USA who advocate the sort of pro-working-class political program like Nader's <http://votenader.org/issues/index_home.php>, who are in Nader's league in name recognition, fund-raising capacity, political networks, etc. _and_ are willing to risk all -- including livelihoods -- to run a strong third-party presidential campaign in order to deny the newly elected POTUS, be he a Democrat or Republican, the symbolic power of gaining an illusion of popular consent and legitimacy.
Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and the like would also do in terms of name recognition (though probably not in fund-raising capacity, political networks, etc.), but they are not willing to run, much less to challenge both the Democratic and Republican Parties.
Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com, Thu Nov 4 13:05:37 PST 2004:
>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>I'd take any intellectual on the left in Ralph Nader's league for
>>the purpose of denying the POTUS an illusion of popular consent and
>>legitimacy.
>
>Huh? I missed this. Ralph's 0.3% is going to do this? Or is there
>some alternative universe where the decimal point is two places to
>the left?
One thing that you have to understand before we can discuss electoral politics is that it is not the candidate who builds the party, nor is it he who wins votes. It is active supporters of the political program for which the candidate serves as a spokesman that build and mobilize the base for it and win the winnable outside the base to it.
When asked if "your vote for president was mostly for your candidate or against his opponent," only 25% answered "against his opponent." Kerry's share of the 25% of voters who said they voted against his opponent was 71%. That means the AnybodyButBush brigade -- those who voted for Kerry only to remove Bush from the White House, rather than because they agreed with Kerry on key issues -- was roughly 18% of the popular vote.
The ABB brigade were mainly liberals and leftists who approved of many or all of the planks in Nader/Camejo's platform (many of them either voted for or wanted to vote for Nader/LaDuke but didn't have the courage to do so in 2000); they couldn't convince many voters to their right to vote against Bush by voting for Kerry, but they at least _convinced themselves_ that they should not work or even vote for Nader nor should anyone else.
That explains both Nader's poor showing and Kerry's defeat. If the ABB wouldn't put Nader on ballots, promote the program for which the candidate stood, and vote for it, who would? The ABB brigade did no favor to Kerry either, though: they were not enthusiastic about Kerry and the Democratic Party's program, so they couldn't excite lower-income working-class voters (for whom Kerry's one selling point of "not being Bush" in the literal sense was hardly enough) about it to increase their turnout by 3-4% or more than the results shown in the exit polls; nor could they effectively pitch it to voters to their right (for whom Kerry's one selling point of "not being Bush" was worse than irrelevant).
The moral of the fiasco is that you make a poor salesman if you don't believe in your product. Leftists, many of whom tragically went ABB against their own interests, should promote the program they actually believe in and then choose a candidate to speak for it.
Yoshie