Ralph Nader - "Stay Silent and Stay Powerless Against Trump's Tyranny"

[Cirsium]

325. I did mention that

I did mention that that the number of votes that Nader got in both Florida and New Hampshire was more than the vote difference between Al Gore and W in both of those states. I did mention voter suppression.

You did not mention this:

Clinton won Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, New Hampshire and Florida in 1996. 4 years later, Gore lost all of them. That is not because of Nader. That is also not because of Dixiecrats in Florida, as you claim. The loss of those electoral votes dwarfs any Nader effect on the outcome.

Given all of that, why are people still obsessively blaming Nader? I believe it is to avoid facing the truth about the party, and to use Nader's 2000 candidacy as a pretext for beating up on the Left. That is what helps the right wing.

FYI, Nader said many times that there were no differences between Al Gore and W as well as no differences between dems and repugs I watched him do it in tv interviews numerous times.

Nader never said that, but his supporters, opponents, reporters and pundits often characterized his views that way.

Example:

RFK Jr. : "While I admire Mr. Nader's high-minded ideals, his suggestion that there is no difference between Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush is irresponsible."

Nader's response: "I have indicated that there are 'few major differences' between the two parties, not that there is 'no difference between Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush,' as Mr. Kennedy wrote."

Nader did say the following:

"It doesn't matter who is in the White House, Gore or Bush, for the vast majority of government departments and agencies."

"The only difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush is the velocity with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door."

"It's a Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum vote. Both parties are selling our government to big business paymasters. That's a pretty serious similarity."

"Because it's the permanent corporate government that's running the show here ... you can see they're morphing more and more on more and more issues into one corporate party."

I think running a spoiler campaign was a bad idea. But that was a very small part of the 2000 election fiasco. Rather than beating up on Nader and Nader supporters, it would be far more constructive to ask why it is that the Democratic party has struggled so badly against the extreme right wing and been so vulnerable to challenges from the Left.

Beating up on Nader and Nader supporters just makes the problem worse, but I suspect that too many Democrats would rather be right than win, and being right for them means trashing the Left and progressives at every opportunity. That is so self defeating. It is the same mistake the Whigs made in the 1850s. "We are better than the pro-slavery party, and if you criticize us you are helping them." The declining popularity of the Whigs was not because of opposition from the right (the slave power), it was opposition from the Left (Abolition). "It's Fremont's fault that we have Buchanan!" was the cry. The Whigs, while nominally anti-slavery were not an effective opposition force to slavery.

You also fail to make any mention of the illegal felon purge where the cabal of Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris purged more than 50,000 legally registered mostly African-American democrats by wrongly identifying them as felons in order to reduce the number of democrats able to vote in the 2000 election. Finally you fail to note the several hundred thousand Florida votes that sit uncounted in the Florida archives because of the corrupt Rehnquist 5.

You are now arguing against the idea that the Nader candidacy was the determining or even major factor. I agree with you on that.

You're the one who can't seem to handle the ugly truth and hold Nader accountable for his behavior in 2000 that made possible the current nightmare our country is now living.

Good grief. You are giving a lot of people and organizations a pass by pinning the last 25 years on Nader. Even if your contention were true, do you have any idea how weak that is? One third party candidacy 25 years ago was enough to ripple the Democratic party and throw us into a fascist nightmare? Really? That would mean that Nader was right about the weaknesses of the party, not that he was wrong.

The seeds of our destruction are many. The unfolding catastrophe involved many players, and goes way back.