I think it deserves it's own thread: Gore won the election

[Jim Lane]

45. What DOES matter is that Bush became President. That meaning of who "won" is important.

Yes, on DU and elsewhere, there is a belief that, take your pick of phrasings: Gore won, Gore/Lieberman won, the election was stolen, Bush stole the election, the Supreme Court stole the election, it was a usurpation, it was a coup, it was the death of American democracy, or whatever. Those Iraqis, Americans, and others who died violent deaths as a result of it are beyond caring how we describe it. What mattered to them was that Bush became President.

A century from now, when people are reading and writing (or getting information beamed to and from their cerebral implants) about this period of American history, it will be recorded that Bush became President. There will be detailed accounts of what happened as a result of his becoming President. In some contexts, but not all, there will be a passing reference to his having lost the popular vote. In a very few contexts, there will be a reference to the dispute about who "won" the election in the DU sense, and/or to the effect of Nader's candidacy.

And if you're on Jeopardy! in 2114, and the answer is "He won the 2000 presidential election," the correct response will be: "Who was George W. Bush?"

The good news is that there's one other fact that matters. From 2000 to 2004, Nader's share of the vote collapsed. One could spend days on DU reading Naderites' posts about Katherine Harris and Gore lost Tennessee and all the rest of the points made in response to any criticism of Nader -- but the vast majority of Nader's voters in 2000 concluded, after four years of Bush, that they had been wrong. Nader and other Green Party candidates have never again come anywhere close to his 2000 vote total.

I only wish Nader would have the intellectual honesty to admit that he grievously erred in 2000 when he stated or implied that there was no significant difference between Gore and Bush.

By the way, to forestall one of the Naderites' favorite memes, I am not saying that Nader had no right to run. Under our system, it is clear that he had a legal right to run. It is equally clear that Republican governors and state legislators who've refused Medicaid expansion in their states had a legal right to do so, and that Republicans in Congress who blocked the extension of unemployment benefits had a legal right to do so. It is also clear that I have a right to denounce people's bad decisions even when those people acted within their rights.