> Rank-and-file Democrats ought to stop and think about which is really
> in their interest: attack Nader/Camejo, the Green Party, or whatnot
> as "a spoiler," thereby letting the Democratic Party politicians off
> the hook, or point out what the Democratic Party should have been or
> should be doing?
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The Democratic ranks should be doing the latter, but you can surely
understand their feelings about the former.
The Nader/Camejo campaign seems to be yet another example of trying to have the mountain come to Mohammed. Both men are prominent figures and outstanding speakers whose strong views, IMO, would have resonated powerfully inside the Democratic party this year from the primaries through the campaign, especially with the Dean and Kucinich supporters, and way beyond that. I think they could have laid the foundations for the strongest organized left in the party since Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition and probably back to the New Deal. Instead, all their perversely independent foray seems to have earned for them is isolation from, and the emnity of, the people they most need to reach. It makes it easier rather than harder for Kerry and the DLC leadership to distance themselves from the party ranks on Iraq and other issues. It moves Nader and Camejo's goal of replacing the Democratic party with a stronger voice on the left farther away rather than closer.
The fears most commonly cited by some of my friends on the US left are that the two would be "swallowed up" by the DP machine or that it would somehow be a betrayal of their principles to try to build the left inside the party. But they're far more marginalized today, and it should be recalled that both men -- one a lawyer, the other a stockbroker -- are standing on a liberal platform not fundamentally different than that of the Democrats, rather than one calling for the overthrow of capitalism, as the socialists did in invoking principle against participation in a "bourgeois" party. It seems remarkable to me that it's considered principled for Nader to give (good) advice from the sidelines to his liberal co-thinkers on how to change the Democratic party, as he did yesterday in the Washington Post, but somehow unprincipled for him to join and help them effect that change.
MG