> Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000, but, in 2004, regardless of how
> the recount goes in Ohio, John Kerry lost the popular vote by the 3.5
> million vote margin, even though (or probably because) Gore faced a
> better organized challenge from the left than Kerry did.
>
> The Democratic Party will turn to the right and lose worse in 2006,
> 2008, ad infinitum.
I really don't understand this at all. First of all, how did the DP "legitimate the Bush regime"? It seems to me that the Bush regime legitimated itself, by clearly winning the Electoral College vote (assuming the challenges and recounts currently underway do not reverse that vote, which seems rather unlikely to me). Which is the way presidential elections are legitimated in this country, or the *regular* way it is done, at any rate. The 2000 election was also perfectly legitimate, as far as I can see, because a regular legal process was followed, up to the Supreme Court. Of course, the situation in Florida was highly irregular, and the Gore people royally screwed up their challenge to that mess, but that didn't make the result "illegitimate" in the legal sense. So both election results were equally "legitimate."
If we are using "illegitimate" in some other sense, I'd like to know what that sense is.
Secondly, Kerry did do worse than Gore in the popular vote. There are a lot of explanations for that, including the likely possibilities that both candidates were of less than sterling quality, and Kerry was a worse one than Gore, and that the campaigns were similarly less than perfectly managed, with Kerry's being less well run than Gore's (Newsweek's post mortem was rather devastating, though that mag may not be the best authority, and there has been a lot of trenchant criticism at dailykos and other blogs).
Your explanation seems to be that Nader did better in 2000 than in 2004. I'm probably rather dense about this, but I don't see how that explanation works.
Finally, I guess your political crystal ball must be highly polished and working with tip-top efficiency to be able to give definitive information not only about 2006 and 2008, but all the way to infinity! I've been searching on Amazon, eBay, and everywhere else for a future-predicting device that would work no more than a couple of weeks or months ahead, so I can make a little on the stock markets, but have come up empty-handed. Where did you get yours?
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org _____________________________ "Simply by being human we do not have a common bond. For all we share with all other humans is the same thing we share with all other animals -- the ability to feel pain." -- Richard Rorty