by hilzoy
“Ralph Nader says he is seriously considering running for president in 2008 because he foresees another Tweedledum-Tweedledee election that offers little real choice to voters. (…)
Nader would have little or no chance of winning the presidency should he run, but he doesn’t need to win to affect the outcome: Many Democrats still blame Nader for draining enough votes away from Al Gore in Florida in 2000 to elect George W. Bush.
And while Nader, 73, realizes he might once again be accused of being a “spoiler” candidate, he says the Democrats could win in 2008, unless they spoil things for themselves. (…)
Nader says that if they don’t implode, the Democrats are very likely to win the presidency and retain control of Congress in 2008.
So why would he run at all?
“What third parties can do is bring young people in, set standards on how to run a presidential election and keep the progressive agenda in front of the people,” he said. “And maybe tweak a candidate here and there in the major parties.””
Ralph Nader: Please go away. Devote your golden years to some new hobby, like ninepins or philately. If you must involve yourself in politics, find some small municipality whose government is in need of reform, and do the hard work of making things better in small, concrete ways. But don’t lecture us on setting standards, or how the two parties are just like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
the posting rules are preventing me from expressing my true feelings on this topic.
help, help, i’m being oppressed.
Hey, the anti-Nader backlash might be just the unifying force you need.
Nader…you must confront Nader. Only then a Jedi will you be.
ugh
What dismayed said.
He will get GOP backing, that’s for sure.
Can we turn him somehow against Liebermann?
“Alternate Universe”??
“Time-Warp” is more like it: what’s old Ralph’s next lecture going to be after he analyzes the state of our politics? A rant about how we have to get the Corvair and the Pinto off the roads?
Let’s see:
Attack Iran if they don’t obey our directions:
Republicans: Hell Yes!
Democrats: Well…we need to keep our
options on the table
Expand the military?
Republicans: Hell Yes! More money! More
troops! More profits!
Democrats: Yes. We need to “help” the
benighted savages, don’t you
know?
Eviscerate the economy in the name of “free trade” and corporate profits?
Republicans: Hell Yes! More money for us!
Democrats: Yes, but we will set up
underfunded government loan
programs so that 52 year olds
can spend three years and
learn a useless new career!
Health Care?
Republicans: Best system in the world!
Democrats: Best system in the world.
But, let’s work with our
buddies in the insurance
industry to set up a
nightmare maze of inadequate
government programs to sorta
address the issues.
Godbothering and Religious Pandering?
Republicans: Separation of church and
state is a liberal myth.
The earth is 6,000 years old.
Bring on armageddon!
Democrats: We need to pander to
religious people! Maybe we
can adopt all of the
Republican programs without
really believing in the
mythology behind them!
That’s the ticket!
Yep. BIGGGGG Differences there. Keep on Thanksralphing because your Party is as useful as the Whigs in 1856.
…like flypaper to crazy.
“…like flypaper to crazy”
Crazy’s ok, but formatting it like poetry? Serious violation of the posting rules there.
Nader/Perot ’08!
Nonsense. Only Nader/The desiccated corpse of Gus Hall can save America in ’08.
Ralph just wants to be loved. Is that so wrong?
I am consistently mystified at people who can actually maintain the delusion that the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans are so trivial that they will support someone whose only measurable effect on the election will be to siphon votes away from the person who, at worst, will be less bad on their pet issues.
It really is a delusion, as are the adamant denials of Naderites that their votes help elect Republicans. No third party candidate in modern American politics has a statistically meaningful chance of being elected President. The people voting for the third-party candidate will necessarily be the people who most closely identify with his positions. Without Nader in the election, nontrivial numbers of his supporters vote for the candidate out of the two major parties closest to their views: for Nader supporters this will, almost without exception, be the Democrat.
This isn’t even debatable. It’s a simple matter of logic, electoral math, and plain common sense. If you care about nearly any given liberal issue, it is a near-certainty that the Democrat in the election will be better on that issue than the Republican. And your ideological purity will be cold comfort when the Republican administration you helped elect starts destroying the issues you care about.
I was going to say, “What dismayed said.”
But then I read Catsy’s comment. Henceforth, I hereby bequeath my “What [person X] said” honors on this thread to Catsy.
I know, I know, what are you going to do with the all that prize money.
I occasionally have this overwhelming desire to punch Ralph Nader in the face.
Back in 2000, I found the anti-Nader sentiment to be highly offensive. Anyone has a right to run for public office, and the idea that someone with new ideas should stifle himself in order to help some favored half of the duopoly defeat the unfavored half seemed really self-centered.
I guess I still feel that way in principle, but I’m not very passionate. What happened? Well, it’s obvious isn’t it? In 2000 I believed that a bland major-party candidate was basically an interchangeable cog in the system. I never imagined that a major-party candidate could actually be orders of magnitude more destructive to our nation than any other major-party candidate.
So kudos to you, Dubya. You’ve certainly gotten me back on the two-party reservation, at least until your stain and that of your party are purged.
It’s not just that Nader ran, it’s that he actively worked to siphon off votes from Gore to ensure a Bush victory.
In the waning days of the the 2000 campaign, instead of working hard in solidly blue states — states where he had the best chance of picking up the most votes to perhaps qualify for federal matching funds — he stumped in swing states. There’s no reason for a third party candidate to care about swing states unless he is actively trying to defeat one of the major party candidates.
Given a choice between Hillary and Nader i’m voting for Nader. The Dems have done nothing to stop this war, or prevent a war with Iran even though they “won” congress. I don’t see why anyone would think they’d end the war (or prevent a war with Iran) if they held the exectutive branch.
I don’t see any of them (dem or GOP) ending the war. Clearly, the few decent candidates; Kucinich, Gravel or Paul won’t get the nod.
Can Nader win? Nope, but unless what I expect to be the lineup changes (i.e., Hillary vs. Romney), Ralph’s the best person so he gets my vote.
You people want to vote for a warmonger because she’s a dem. Great. I won’t.
Given a choice between Hillary and Nader i’m voting for Nader. The Dems have done nothing to stop this war, or prevent a war with Iran even though they “won” congress. I don’t see why anyone would think they’d end the war (or prevent a war with Iran) if they held the exectutive branch.
I don’t see any of them (dem or GOP) ending the war. Clearly, the few decent candidates; Kucinich, Gravel or Paul won’t get the nod.
Can Nader win? Nope, but unless what I expect to be the lineup changes (i.e., Hillary vs. Romney), Ralph’s the best person so he gets my vote.
You people want to vote for a warmonger because she’s a dem. Great. I won’t.
I can’t see how a third party’s going to happen from the top down. The road to multi-partyism is through Congress. I confess to being ignorant of coalition governments in other countries, but I wish we had one here.
I don’t blame Nader or anyone else who runs for President. I also don’t blame him for George W. Bush, who never could have gotten away with the sh8t he and Ch3n3y have without a whole lot of Congressional Republicans getting into office to allow it.
Bollicks.
Clinton is not as likely to start a war with Iran as Romney – or any other GOP candidate save Paul for that matter. Further, Clinton is more likely to be influenced by the rest of the Democratic Party/anti-war public opinion on these matters than a Republican would.
That might not be as self-satisfying a position, but in the real world where people actually die from bombs and stuff, I’ll play the odds.
When you don’t have to actually deal with the consequences of actual wars, or the gutting of social safety net programs/environmental regulations/regulatory oversight, it’s far easier to strike a pious pose.
Bravo. You’re sure better than the rest of us morally compromised folks.
The Dems have done nothing to stop this war, or prevent a war with Iran even though they “won” congress.
This is just silly.
The Dems have actually prevented a war with Iran quite well. As in, we’re not at war with Iran!!!!
Further, the Dems “won” Congress by a slim margin that is incapable of overriding Bush’s veto. If the Naderites had “won” Congress in the same way, they too would not have ended the Iraq war.
If the Naderites had “won” Congress in the same way, they too would not have ended the Iraq war.
I don’t know, they might have actually refused to fund it, which would have ended the war, democrats have this option right now.
I agreed with most of Nader’s criticisms in 2000 and still do (look who was the VP candidate), but the choice isn’t between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but between Bad and Worse.
So I’m voting for Bad. Well, maybe. I don’t live in a swing state, so if Hillary gets the nomination I can indulge myself in a protest vote.
“look who was the VP candidate”
Ok, what about Cheney do you like?
The person who called Hillary Clinton a “Warmonger” has nailed it. She’s another extremely authoritarian personality who is eager to prove how tough she is.
All the current Democratic “mainstream” politicans have the same jones on their back-they need to be “tough.” They need to increase defense spending. They need to babble about our right to bomb and invade and meddle wherever we want (We are “indispensible” after all). It’s a bipartisan consensus.
Is it totally their fault? Not entirely. We have a militarized, brainwashed population that has been trained to accept the bipartisan Exceptionalist mantra that enables us to have hundreds of thousands of troops around the world. It is the imperial consensus. No mainstream politican can come anywhere near to questioning it.
The problem with voting for “Bad” is that it just continues to slide the political landscape further and further to the right. Pretty soon, Pat Buchanan will be running as a “liberal” democrat given your position.
I don’t think there is a way to avoid the destruction and turmoil that we as a nation have earned. So, don’t tell me that voting for Hillary Clinton, of all people, will do very much. Heck, her husband, the last “liberal” gutted welfare, drug us into another questionable war, continued to fund nasties in the Middle East and throughout the world-all the unpleasantness associated with running a particularly ravenous Empire.
As for “craziness” how are my points “crazy.” Saint Barrack himself said that nothing can be taken off the table with respect to Iran if they don’t obey us. He is willing to use nuclear weapons on another country! Why should I support this?
Cheney and Lieberman had sort of a lovefest rather than a debate back in 2000. If Lieberman were trying to make Nader’s Tweedle criticism look accurate he couldn’t have done a better job that night.
I don’t know, they might have actually refused to fund it, which would have ended the war, democrats have this option right now.
There are work-arounds for a determined Executive. Money could be shifted within the Pentagon budget, and he could invite an impeachment fight. Which the Naderites couldn’t win.
Saint Barrack himself said that nothing can be taken off the table with respect to Iran if they don’t obey us. He is willing to use nuclear weapons on another country! Why should I support this?
You know, sometimes a candidate and even a leader must say certain things to maintain a diplomatic front/rhetorical front. Just a thought.
Heck, her husband, the last “liberal” gutted welfare, drug us into another questionable war, continued to fund nasties in the Middle East and throughout the world-all the unpleasantness associated with running a particularly ravenous Empire.
Are you really going to compare the record of Bill Clinton with that of Bush’s as if there was no difference? Really?
Come on.
I would also point out that a Clinton funded and controlled by DLC interests will have absolutely no need to “listen” to antiwar “elements.” Why should she? You guys will vote for her no matter what she does or says?
Though, rilke, since you’re kind of a HRC fan if I recall correctly, I’ll appease your wrath to this extent–I might donate money to her campaign, since the Republicans most likely will nominate some crazed torture-supporter. But living where I do, I feel no civic duty to vote for her.
Why should she? You guys will vote for her no matter what she does or says?
Good point.
Do you have a link to the primary poll results that show her at 100%?
No?
I don’t know why people bother. There is no penetrating the unreality that hard-core Naderites live in, the ones who are willing to de facto support four more years of the GOP so that they can give an imperfect Democrat the middle finger.
Work on convincing the ones on the margins.
You’re right Catsy.
I guess it just frustrates me because there are tragic real-world effects. I’ve had the opportunity to witness them up close through pro-bono legal work in some rough neighborhoods here in NYC.
People actually suffer by losing important social services, getting sick/injured from unsafe working conditions/food/drugs and having their environment polluted – to name a few.
Think of all the ways that Bush made those situations worse than Bill Clinton. How many millions of people suffered as a result.
But to a Naderite, they’re the same President because Clinton did some bad stuff too and wasn’t perfect.
This smugness is usually the luxury of people that can afford the somewhat expensive pose. For people whose meals depend on whether Gore or Bush gets elected, such moral “clarity” isn’t practical.
Sigh.
I’ll vote for whoever the Dems nominate. Not because of the policies they’ll implement, but because there’s no way they’ll nominate the kind of crypto-fascist judges the GOP base demands. Stacking the Supreme Court has implications far beyond the next election, and the Right has done an excellent job of getting their people onto the court, and making sure they get *young* judges onto the court. The hard right wing of the SC will be there for at least a decade if not longer. The older justices are on the moderate wing of the court (there is no Left left).
“you’re kind of a HRC fan if I recall correctly”
Given that she’s a smart wonky partisan Democrat with WH experience running to the left of Kerry in ’04, I’m a fan of her, but mostly I comment on the topic because some online otherwise-sensible liberals are unreasonably set against her.
He made similar noises in 2004, didn’t he? Actually, did he try to get on the ballot? I can’t even remember. I don’t think this is any sort of serious threat in 2008, it’s just a cry for attention.
I’m the opposite of Donald: I’d vote for Hillary–what’s the point of a protest vote for someone I like less? But I doubt I’ll donate money, because a dollar of mine seems like it will have more effect applied elsewhere (if she were way behind the GOP nominee in fundraising, & spending her campaing $ very wisely, I’d consider it.)
I am not a Naderite. I never voted for the man. I, too, used to believe in the worthless Ass party. Not anymore!
As for the comment about polls showing Hillary at 100%? That comment doesn’t make any sense. I never claimed she was unanimously supported. Just that you Demodrones would support her no matter what she says if she is the candidate. Just like the 26%ers. She could launch a war with China, and you would still be babbling about how “necessary” the war was and how “efficiently” it was being run. Boy, those Rhodes Scholars and New Republic editors know how to run a bombing campaign!
Besides, all of the mainstream candidates have similar views, anyway, so it is effectively 100% in favor of the disastrous consensus.
I will not vote for a candidate who still says he/she would/could use nuclear weapons first on Iran. That is madness.
“I’ll vote for whoever the Dems nominate. Not because of the policies they’ll implement, but because there’s no way they’ll nominate the kind of crypto-fascist judges the GOP base demands.”
finally-a reasonable argument. I’m not sure this is even true, anymore. As the politics moves further to the right, and Democrats abandon Abortion rights issues….?
As for the comment about polls showing Hillary at 100%? That comment doesn’t make any sense. I never claimed she was unanimously supported. Just that you Demodrones would support her no matter what she says if she is the candidate.
It makes sense if you recall that she has to win a primary before she becomes the candidate. In which case, she will not be supported by Democratic primary voters no matter what she says. Hence, the non-100% levels of support.
She could launch a war with China, and you would still be babbling about how “necessary” the war was and how “efficiently” it was being run
Boy, those Rhodes Scholars and New Republic editors know how to run a bombing campaign!
Uh, no. Because who around this site is a fan of the New Republic? Do you have any actual evidence or do you just make misguided sweeping statements?
I will not vote for a candidate who still says he/she would/could use nuclear weapons first on Iran. That is madness.
Did he/she actually say this? Do you have the quotes?
And like I said before: admirable stance from someone who doesn’t rely on government assistance – or the near gutting of the regulatory state. Or someone who doesn’t need health insurance.
You make us all proud. You’re so pure you’re invisible.
Given that Brian, as I had initially thought, isn’t a drive-by, I retract my “crazy” comment, upthread, and apologize.
…isn’t, as I initially thought, a driveby…
But y’all knew what I meant, eh?
finally-a reasonable argument
…he said, with no sense of irony…
I’m glad that Nader gets attention and you don’t. You don’t deserve any. Nader’s a hero.
Brian: it does your arguments no good whatsoever if you make assumptions about the people here based on no evidence at all. This, in particular:
” She could launch a war with China, and you would still be babbling about how “necessary” the war was and how “efficiently” it was being run.”
is just out of line.
Saint Barrack himself said that nothing can be taken off the table with respect to Iran if they don’t obey us. He is willing to use nuclear weapons on another country!
The actual quote I found was While we should take no option, including military action, off the table…
I don’t think that this is a reasonable inference on your part. For example, I don’t think he’d support raping their women and mutilating their children, or blowing up the entire planet- I read ‘nothing can be taken off of the table’ as not ruling out military action to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon, not (bizarrely) as endorsing literally anything as legitimate response.
Your reading is strained at best. Or maybe you’re referring to a different speech. Or maybe you’re thinking of McCain, since all these mainstream pols look the same to you.
As the politics moves further to the right, and Democrats abandon Abortion rights issues….?
This seems incredibly unlikely to me. Abortion rights get more support from younger people than older ones- as time passes, I expect the mainstream will become more pro-choice. Even today I cannot imagine a Democrat winning the presidential primary as a pro-lifer, but the current front-runner for the GOP nomination is pro-choice.
In general, don’t mistake the pendulum of politics from right-to-left-and-back for a straight line pointing off into wingnuttia. (ie will Ayn Rand really be considered left-wing by 2050?)
Besides, all of the mainstream candidates have similar views, anyway, so it is effectively 100% in favor of the disastrous consensus.
This statement has no basis in fact whatsoever. The only way it is supportable is if your basis for comparison is so generalized or abstracted as to be meaningless. (All the candidates like mom and apple pie, and completely ignore grandpa and cherry cobbler! They’re all the same!)
At the end of the day it’s simply a baseless, prima facie false rationalization concocted to allow you to cast a protest vote with a clear conscience.
I have long suspected that “all the candidates are the same/similar/etc” is code for “none of them are in lockstep agreement with my magic sock puppet”. Garbage like this simply reinforces that impression.
rilkefan: some online otherwise-sensible liberals are unreasonably set against her.
I wouldn’t say I’m “unreasonably” set against her. I like her, and, more her campaign, less than Obama, even less than Edwards (Swampland for Shakespeare’s Sister? Really????). Spending eve a second of time on a “theme song”, fercryinoutloud? Yeah, that’s important. Then select a song by a Canadian (that a lot of people just plain hate) that was used to promote Air Canada.
Every move seems to indicate she’s got crappy instincts. And she suffers, by orders of magnitude, in wonkosity and charm, in comparison to Bill.
I’ll vote for her against the Super Double-Plus Toturiffic Rebublislime, but my primary vote is going Obama.
grandpa and cherry cobbler
Not my favorite kind of cobbler. I really wish English would adopt parentheses for logical partitioning.
Catsy continues to score.
[i]This statement has no basis in fact whatsoever. The only way it is supportable is if your basis for comparison is so generalized or abstracted as to be meaningless. (All the candidates like mom and apple pie, and completely ignore grandpa and cherry cobbler! They’re all the same!)[/i]
Hillary, Barrack, and Edwards all believe in a world view that demands the United States have the largest military in history, believe in certain mythical ideas about “free markets” (as long as industries that contribute lots of bucks are not impacted), that believe the United States has the right to demand Iran not have nuclear weapons (while ignoring weapons in the hands of scary terrorist states like Pakistan)-and if they insist, Hillary, Barrack, and john Edwards all demand the right to take military action against Iran. They insist we not only need to keep the current enormous military establishment, they insist that we need to increase the size of said military. All share the delusion that the United States can afford these policies now. Given our trade and current account and government deficits right now, that is close enough to 100% delusion on the biggest issues.
A) Catsy is dominating like Rafa Nadal on clay.
B) If one were to care to do so, I believe Publius’ archives from last summerish have a few rather definitive posts as to why “they’re the same” is complete hogwash.
By way of illustration:
Sam Alito
Browny
the dunce populating the Civil Rights Divisions with “good Americans” (that phrase is so much more charming in the original German…)
Al Gonzalez
Monica Goodling
and one could possibly go on…
Brian: it does your arguments no good whatsoever if you make assumptions about the people here based on no evidence at all. This, in particular:
” She could launch a war with China, and you would still be babbling about how “necessary” the war was and how “efficiently” it was being run.”
is just out of line.
No. It’s not. Bill’s Excellent Serbian adventure, anyone? The Balkan event was sold with similar hyperbole and exageration and sense of virtue. (Slobodan was the worstest, mostest throeat to CIVILLIZATION ever, don’t you know?) (It’s amusing to read the virtuous anti-war comments of Republicans who are now slavering warbots…) The lovely statement by Bill’s UN Rep that the 500,000 Iraqi children killed by a combination of Sadaam and US policy was a “cost we are willing to pay.”
It is bipartisan. Read Blowback and the other Chalmers Johnson books. That will disabuse you of your faith in the Democratic Party. it’s not a matter of purity, it’s a matter of bloodshed. Carter largely started funding what became Al Qaeda. Carter started the interference that became the Central American bloodbath. Carter’s Sec State told the Indonesians that it was ok to slaughter tens of thousands of East Timorese. etc. etc. etc.
Now, admittedly, the level of sheer venality and incompetence exhibited by the current Scary Crawford Caligula’s Cabal transcends anything the Dems did (although….there is always Vietnam to add to the Donkle’s bloodbath statistics). But…there is a lot of blood on their hands, and I am not convinced that Hillary in particular will avoid future foreign adventures.
“I like her, and, more her campaign, less than Obama, even less than Edwards”
Yeah, I’m not arguing against that position, though I have to say that your example of her theme song search seems extremely weak or politically naive to me.
“And she suffers, by orders of magnitude, in wonkosity and charm”
I read that she’s comparably wonky, and of course getting Bill back into the WH as her main adviser is a major plus in my book. No question Edwards and Obama would be much much better at the SotU-speech part of the job, which is certainly an important consideration. I think she’s improving though and would be adequate on this score.
and if they insist, Hillary, Barrack, and john Edwards all demand the right to take military action against Iran.
This is an interesting sentence. Who is ‘they’? If it is the three candidates, you evince a remarkable ability to see the future, which you should utilize by purchasing winning lotto numbers and turning the money over to Nader. If it’s the Iranians, well, that would be novel. But if it is some inchoate public opinion, it seems that the argument boils down to ‘if the candidate has a chance of being elected, they have to be wrong, so you shouldn’t vote for him/her’ IMO, but I think it was done a lot better (and earlier) in Horsefeathers.
Speaking of Chalmers Johnson, I’ve met him several times, and there is no way in hell he thinks that what he writes is an argument for voting for Nader.
I’m typing very rapidly while I am supposed to be working….so….
what I meant was they, the candidates, insist that the United States has the right to dictate to Iran Iran’s defense policies. They all insist that attacking Iran is an option. I disagree vehemently with the possibility of attacking Iran.
I’m not arguing for voting for Nader, either. (He has some scary purist authoritarian tendencies himself). I’m arguing that the Democratic Party has participated from the beginning in a consensus that I increasingly disagree with. I think we cannot afford our little empire anymore, and that said empire increasingly does not benefit most people in this country. It’s been a nice run, but how many more countries do we need to invade (or conduct humanitarian interventions in) to keep up the illusion?
Brian: “is just out of line.
No. It’s not.”
— You were not making an assertion about Clinton’s foreign policy. You were making an assertion about us, and our likely response to a war with China. Trust me: you don’t know us that well.
My apologies. I was generalizing more to the universe of Democratic Party apologists. I don’t know this group all that well (although I am a regular reader)
Nader is irrelevant. I might vote for him because it is safe to do so in my state, but he’s got some mental illness that forces him to run for President every four years. I’d vote for him as a protest against American imperialism, something which the mainstream in both parties has been supporting for as long as I’ve been alive (and then some).
Brian’s 7:04 post about the bipartisan evils of American foreign policy are pretty close to my own views, and those of Chalmers Johnson and (I think) Andrew Bacevich (spelling?), not to mention most of the subscribers to various lefty rags like the Nation and the Progressive, some linguist at MIT, and, it has come to my attention in the last few years, many genuine libertarians. (As opposed to the torture-supporting kinds). I’ve never met Chalmers Johnson and have no idea who he’d vote for, but find it hard to believe he’d be an enthusiastic booster of HRC. But he might well think Nader is a flake. So do I. I also know that no mainstream Democratic candidate for President would be caught dead endorsing Chalmers Johnson’s views. That’s for the fringe candidates like Kucinich, Ron Paul, and Nader.
Um, in case it appears otherwise, I know Paul and Nader aren’t Democrats. But they are fringe. Which is why they are worth listening to on some issues.
I disagree with Paul on nearly everything else, btw, but I’m glad he’s in the Republican debates.
Chalmers was on the stump endorsing Kerry in the last election. Again, I point to Dave Niewert on Paul (there’s more, but that post can get you started)
Yep, despite my liking for his work at antiwar.org, and his speeches at the Republican Debates, Ron Paul has some mighty scary friends. His brand of libertarianism is not mine. (I much prefer the Mutualist stuff).
Good (from a liberal POV) stuff from the Democrats: better CAFE standards.
I repeat that the US voting system that tends to restrict votes to the two most popular candidates, does not serve us.
If we had IRV or one of its variants, people could vote for third candidates and third parties without losing their votes. We would be better off.
So if we had IRC and Nader came in third, most of his votes would then go to the democrat because that’s what his voters would say they wanted to happen. They got to vote for Nader first and somebody else second and maybe a third guy third. If their first choice comes out ahead, then great! If not they still get to vote for their second choice. A vote for Nader doesn’t translate to a vote for the worst candidate. And of course if Nader got more first-choice votes than the democrat, most of them would have Nader for a second choice, and Nader would actually win. As it should be.
It will probably be a long time before we can have IRV in national elections. But democrats can push to have IRV for democratic primaries. If the primaries candidate who actually gets the most support wins the nomination, that’s a *good* thing, right?
As it is, when two candidates have positions that are too close they’re likely to tear each other apart. Because they’re eating out of the same bowl — the same people will tend to like them. And then after a hard primary campaign the winner has alienated the guys who supported the loser’s campaign, and they don’t want to help elect him. With IRV they’re still competing but they aren’t direct competitors. “If you like me, vote for Candidate B second. If I thought he’d do a better job than me I wouldn’t run. But he’s a good Joe and we could do a lot worse than him.” After the primary, for each candidate they can count up the number of ballots that had his name somewhere. If the winner got 85% and the first runner-up got 80%, and the second runner-up got 75%, they don’t exactly feel like losers.
Start pushing for IRV in local and state Democratic nominations, and then individual state national democratic primaries, etc. Someday we can get IRV for national elections, and you won’t have to choose only the second-worst candidate.
I think it was Theresa (or Teresa?) Nielsen-Hayden who said just because you’re on their side doesn’t mean they’re on your side. Chalmers Johnson endorsing Kerry doesn’t mean Kerry would endorse Chalmers Johnson. The Kerry of the Vietnam protest days might. The one in 2004 was still for the Iraq War, as I recall.
Hell, I voted for Kerry.
“IRV or one of its variants”
All of which suffer problems with Arrow’s Theorem iirc.
“The one in 2004 was still for the Iraq War, as I recall.”
I believe that’s incorrect. And certainly a President Kerry would not have taken us to war against Iraq.
…and I am not convinced that Hillary in particular will avoid future foreign adventures.
Neither am I, but that’s not the point. First, vote against her in the primaries. Vote for Kucinich or Gravel or whoever. But then, if she wins, you will face a question – the question:
Would you sooner trust her, or the GOP nominee?
I’ll take her, thank you.
And voting for Nader or abstaining, in a swing state, is a vote for the GOP candidate.
Saying this does not make me or anyone else blind to the shortcomings of the Democratic Party. But, as JT and others have pointed out, we have a two party system.
We must make do with the options available, and pick the best one. Further, we must try to push the Democratic Party toward policies closer to our own. We have had some successes, you know. Feingold, Sanders (I’m claiming him), Leahy, Waxman, etc.
Even regarding foreign policy, there are indeed very real differences. Keep in mind, PNAC was trying to get Bill to invade Iraq for many years. He didn’t. Bush gets elected, and in little over a couple years…whammo.
Which says nothing about the differences in domestic politics which you mostly ignored – other than to make a specious point about abortion rights.
Brian,
Your 6:53pm makes sense- I think we can all agree that all of the major party candidates share certain views (eg the US has the right to prevent an Iranian nuke).
But that doesn’t imply that they are the same- even a committed Marxist or Anarchist ought to be able to see the significant differences between them. Just as anyone ought to be able to see the differences between, say, Stalin and Khrushchev.
The difference between Bush and Gore on one single point- the Iraqi War (if you’ll grant that Gore almost certainly wouldn’t have invaded)- is so significant as to make the argument that they are all the same seem naive.
If you’ll grant that point, then you ought not disparage people for supporting one over the other. Even if you feel it necessary to stand on some principle and not vote for either.
All of which suffer problems with Arrow’s Theorem iirc.
Well, yeah- it’s been proven that none of them can be perfect. But virtually any of the alternative proposals would be better than what we have today. Anything that would break the 2-party stranglehold on the discussion…
Well, no; there’s one perfect voting system – i.e., one that has all of the characteristics considered desireable in Arrow’s Theorem. Unfortunately, it’s the One Man, One Vote (a la Terry Pratchett) system…
I have serious reservations about IRV, in any case; I’d rather see either Approval Voting or a Borda Count-type system implemented. (Either of those would take into account “second choices”, in different ways.)
“Anything that would break the 2-party stranglehold on the discussion…”
Looking forward to the fringe-party stranglehold on progress.
“IRV or one of its variants”
All of which suffer problems with Arrow’s Theorem iirc.
I tried to look at Arrow’s theorem in detail and I got headaches three successive days and gave up. It looks to me like it doesn’t mean anything like the popular descriptions of it say it means.
Some of the pathological cases it says are possible appear to me to be not that bad. And some of them look kind of bad, but they will occur rarely, not every time there’s a third party.
If you try out IRV in your local democratic primaries you can find out whether Arrow’s theorem makes it worse than the mess we have as default.
I have serious reservations about IRV, in any case; I’d rather see either Approval Voting or a Borda Count-type system implemented.
Jim, I’d settle for either of those. I particularly like IRV because anybody can feel like he understands it very very quickly. That’s a crucial advantage. But whichever system we can actually get put in place, as opposed to argue about at great length. Arguing about which one is best translates to an argument to use none of them.
Perhaps we could have a plebiscite to determine which voting system to use. And we list all the systems that have a serious following, and then count the votes according to all the different methods and see which of them disagree. If, as is likely, all the methods agree except the one that considers only first choices, then we have a consensus.
I am more concerned about Bloomberg than about Nader.
Let’s see if I’ve cooled down enough to manage to be civil in disagreement. If not, I will not object to being smacked and sent to my room.
There are some crucial differences in the Democratic and Republican establishments. I’m talking here about the networks of consultants, lobbyists, and so on, who will have more power than I’d like no matter who wins.
First of all, the Democratic one is not committed to the desirability of torture and the abolition of the rule of law around it. Katherine has documented Clinton’s responsibility in setting some awful precedents, but there are still massive differences. Democrats now in key committee positions want to investigate and prosecute, not continue the cover-ups and the evils being covered up.
Second, there is in the Democratic establishment no militaristic faction like PNAC with nearly so much influence. There is the violence-friendly Israeli lobby (counter to the views of both American and Israeli Jews, of course), but nobody who’s pushing for war as the solution to every major and minor foreign policy problem. Not to say that the Democratic establishment is free of warmongers, of course – it isn’t. But no Democratic administration would face so much push or pull for war in lots of places (as opposed to the regrettably high support for a large military-industrlal complex).
Third, the Democratic establishment favors competence in most agencies. Clinton oversaw the emergence of FEMA and the VA as first-class places, and a lot of the people who still made that happen are around. It’s not that nobody wants to cut buddy deals or get their excess profiteering or anything like that, it’s just that they have a history of doing it while actually providing valuable services.
Fourth, while the Democratic establishment often panders badly to various religious constituencies, there is no Democratic equivalent to the Christianist theocratic lobby. There would be no push for creationist literature in national parks, global warming deniers at NASA, and the like. There is no equivalent in the Democratic establishment to the Regents University or Heritage Foundation and their supply of pure ideologues; Democratic ideologues tend to know at least a bit about something else, and to represent a spread of obsessions and interests rather than clustering so tightly.
Fifth, and finally for now, the Democratic establishment is much less monolothically committed to media consolidation, and includes some actual supporters of diversity in media access. While it’s a long way from what I would consider really free speech, it’s also much improved on the Republican estabishment’s commitment to the domination of a very few corporate voices.
There are lots of others, all of which are true even while it’s also true that the Democratic establishment sucks a lot from any liberal or progressive viewpoint. The Republican one sucks much, much worse.
I think we have imperialist parties because either Americans want this, or else don’t care very much what harm we may do overseas so long as Americans aren’t hurt. Not true of everyone, obviously, but probably true of a great many. Kerry didn’t make a big issue of torture in 2004 because he didn’t want to be painted as anti-American, not something he should have had to worry about if the vast majority of Americans were strongly anti-torture. There are people like Kucinich and Paul in their respective parties, but the people who get the nomination are people like Clinton and Bush.
Bruce’s comment seems like the best yet. Good enough for me to think we can close this thread down and all go home. Not that anyone else will necessarily agree, except maybe Bruce.
The reason I like Bruce’s comment is that he doesn’t gloss over what’s wrong with the Democrats while still pointing out very good reasons why they are preferable to the Republicans.
Donald, thanks. 🙂
I have despairing moments where I wonder if there’s any real point to supporting any Democrat with much chance of winning, given that I want peace, the rule of law, and social justice. I construct this kind of list as much for my own evaluation as anything. It’s my considered opinion in less despairing moments that while the Republican establishment is a basically unmitigated evil, its Democratic counterpart is a mitigated one, with some actually good points and some more or less neutral ones, and that the gap is wide enough to matter to the country’s well-being.
I’ll second the compliment to Bruce’s comment.
And go another step. Who would Nader appoint to the agencies? To the bench? As ambassadors? What would the criteria be? Guess what, we all know a helluva lot less about this than we do about either of the major parties. And I don’t think this is a strength at all.
We aren’t electing a single person. It’s more like 3,000 people drawn from a pool of, say, 10,000. The pools are largely, but not completely, exclusive. (That is, Holbrooke is in one pool, Rice in another. Some few people are in both). The top guy matters a lot, but a great many among the 3,000 are also very important. We already know many of the top players in each pool, and generally know what members of each pool have in common. Nader or Bloomberg? Not so much. Opportunists, outcasts, cult-of-personality types. Or maybe some from pool A and some from pool B.
Ah, Charley got to the question of the courts before I did. It matters immensely.
Oh, while I’m at it:
Sixth, while the Democratic establishment is far from perfect when it comes to racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like, it for gosh’s sake seldom celebrates its bigotries as triumphs of Americana.
Well done Bruce. Nuff said.
celebrates…bigotries?
You lost me, Bruce.
Slarti, see the thread on “good Americans” for one example right at hand.
Still not getting it, Bruce. Maybe I never will.
Back to Nader, though: my, aren’t people pissed at him for a variety of different reasons?
Off to bed, now. If you respond, Bruce, I’ll have read it, even if I (as is nearly always the case) can’t aknowledge it.
Hm
pissed at him
Slarti, I may or may not get around to rustling up supporting odcumentation, depending on how my depression goes. If I don’t, you may certainly disregard the point as unsupported in your experience. It just depeds on how much I want to go looking for specific kinds of unspleasantness right now.
I’m not asking you to support a point, just wondering what the hell celebrating bigotries means.
I know I said I was going to bed, but I went to the nielsenhaydens main page and am teeterin on commenting on their hurricane season post, which seems possessed of a great misunderstanding of who does what when a hurricane looms. FEMA is not the first responder. Or the second, or third.
And now, really: off to bed.
Holbrooke. Ugh. I agree with your main point, Charleycarp, and for that matter Holbrooke simply has to be better than Rice, but Holbrooke set policy on Indonesia/East Timor during the Carter Administration, which turned out to be the same as the Ford/Kissinger policy of supporting Indonesia as they killed off a large fraction of the Timorese. In the 2000 election he and Wolfowitz prided themselves on their bipartisan effort to keep Indonesian/East Timorese issues out of the campaign. (Source–Joseph Nevins’s book “A Not So Distant Horror”). Our East Timor policy for nearly 25 years was bipartisan realpolitik at its worst.
I suppose there’s a good chance he’s our future Secretary of State.
Still, there’s global warming, environmental issues in general, health care, torture, the courts, and other issues. So it doesn’t change Bruce’s point, which already incorporated the fact that the Democrats aren’t exactly perfect.
Am going to follow Slarti to bed. That doesn’t sound right.
Oh, okay, Slarti. What I mean is that the Republican establishment is much more likely to break out into defenses of discriminatory practice as protecting real Americans from predators set on undermining good stuff. The Democratic establishment is by no means free of bigotries and prejudices, but makes much less policy out of them, and includes people who take discrimination and the protection of vulnerable people seriously along with those happy to make their money in union-busting, defense of discriminatory hires, and the like. There’s nothing much comparable on the Democratic establishment’s side to the Republican promotion of the ignorant, superstitious, violent, and perennially broke offspring of secessionists as guardians of the true American spirit.
Personally I don’t understand why any country would use non-preferential voting for their head of state when there are more than two candidates.
The winner will most likely receive less than 50% of the vote (or, more people will probably vote for someone other than the winner), which strikes me as odd.
If there is preferential voting, whereby voters rank the candidates, then you will always get (after distribution of preferences) a winner with more than 50% of the vote.
So you can have as many candidates as you like, without splitting the vote as happens today.
Slart,
I don’t mean to throw gas on this discussion, but I think, when you have the Ken Mehlman apology to the national NAACP conference for the Republicans use of racially divisive strategies, you might see why some of us from the other side might label some strategies that have been (and arguably are/will be, cf. Tancredo) deployed as celebrating bigotries as “triumphs of Americana”.
Brian: What state are you in?
If you are in California or in Texas, go Nader all the away!
Do the anti-Nader arguments apply to non-swing states?
Am I missing something? Can anyone make an anti-Nader argument for states that are a done deal, one way or the other?
rilkefan: Arrow’s theorem is a reason not to switch to IRV?? Arrow’s theorem knocks down *any reasonable voting system* so failing Arrow’s theorem hardly counts against a voting proposal.
“so failing Arrow’s theorem hardly counts against a voting proposal”
I wasn’t arguing against a voting proposal.
Rilkefan: just about everything besides me, Ara, deciding who should be President suffers from Arrow’s theorem. I don’t grasp your point.
I don’t get why anyone gets their panties in a bunch about Nader. If he can’t sell his agenda, his vote totals won’t impact anyone, as was the case in 2004.
If his agenda sells, it can only be if the Dem veers so far to the right that he becomes the only progressive option.
So Nader’s impact ranges from ‘non-entity’ to ‘progressive motivational impact on the Dem.’ He cannot become a spoiler without the active participation of the Dem who abandons the progressive agenda.
I didn’t vote for Nader in 2000 or 2004. And I’m not a fan of his penchant for moral lecture. But I believe he has earned the right to run repeatedly ad infinatum and no living being is harmed by him doing so.
I think it critical that we maintain our focus on defeating our real enemies and do so by backing the most progressive Dems we can (those who offer agendas closest to our needs).
And I know all about the choice between bad and worst. In 7 of the 9 presidential contests I’ve voted in, those were my choices. And I’ve yet to gain two ‘good’ presidents as a result. I abhor the two party system because of that and would be happy to back a third party longshot if the other two parties can’t move beyond mediocrity.
Most of the Dem candidates this time are at least above ‘mediocre’. If the majority chooses either of the two worst (Biden or Clinton), they must recognize the risk they’re taking with unapologetic rasty-assed liberals like me.
Ara, I believe that Arrow’s Theorem contains a whole collection of sophistries designed to cause confusion, but I was unable to deal with them in a reasonable time because I got so confused about the collective assumptions. But here is one of them:
Suppose that there are 3 candidates, A B and C. Suppose that it turns out that the voters prefer A to B, and they prefer B to C, and they prefer C to A. Then any method you use to choose one will seem unfair. If A wins that’s bad because the voters preferred C. If B wins that’s bad because the voters preferred A. And if C wins that’s bad because the voters preferred B. Therefore every possible voting system is bad.
I regard that as a useless result. Each different voting system will have some rationale for dealing with this pathological case, and you can choose the approach you prefer when you choose a voting system.
IRV says that people’s *first* choice should make a big difference. You eliminate the candidate who gets the least number of first-place votes. If candidate C is everybody’s second choice but nobody’s first choice, then you eliminate him and choose between A and B. Never mind that everybody who voted for A thought C was better than B and everybody who voted for B thought C was better than A. With 3 candidates one of A and B will have a majority for first place.
There are lots of other ways to do it. With 3 candidates you could give each voter 6 votes, and the one they like best gets 3 votes, the second guy gets 2 votes and the third choice gets 1 vote. So if you only want one candidate you can vote A A A and he gets all 6 of your votes, while with A A B he gets 5, A B A he gets 4, with A B B he gets 3 and so does B, etc. This approach lets you tailor your vote very finely. Say there are 5 candidates, should your 5 slots be worth 5 4 3 2 1 or should it instead be 8 5 3 2 1? Each different way you do it will have some argument why it’s the best. I say, choose one and go with it.
I like IRV. Choose your candidate. The one you like best is your choice. If he loses because not enough other people chose him, then your second choice counts. If your candidate is winning then it doesn’t matter which of the losers you like better.
I think this is much better than saying that only your first choice counts and if your guy loses you get no more say in it at all. Too often that leaves people choosing the guy they think is second-worst. That’s a much worse pathological case. Every serious alternative is better, and I will support any of them over what we have now.
I envision the ballot for the US presidential election in the year of the crucifixion bimillenial.
The Unified Armageddon Party (conservative) runs on the Satan/Palpatine ticket, the liberals can’t compromise on a candidate and send in:
Jesus
Jesus H.Christ
Jesus F.Christ (twin of H.)
Jessica Christ
Holy Mary
St.Joseph
the archangels (on 4 different tickets)
the 12 apostles (on 9 different tickets)
the venerable Buddha in 7 incarnations
Haile Selassie
Gandhi
Gandhi’s wife
Ghandhi’s little brother
5 people who look like Gandhi and claim to be the real one.
a dead parrot
Santa Clause
the Easter Bunny
the Tooth Fairy
2 clones for each of the above (and 3 extra for Jesus).
Who do you think would win under the current system?
My guess is: Satan/Palpatine beating Santa and the dead parrot by a small margin of votes cast by people mistaking Palpatine for Liebermann, all the other votes would be split under the more resonable candidates (Satan would also cheat and additionally arrange secret financing for the dead parrot campaign). He would probably lose, if there were 1 or 2 others running against him as nominal conservatives (e.g. Judas or the Boston Strangler*).
*both probably not pro-choice or accomplices of Tinky Winky
before anyone complains: yes, I mistyped names.
Thanks, Bruce. I’m still not sure how what you typed can be fit into “celebrating bigotries”, but at least now I have a notion of what you intended to say.
No, I still don’t get how that phrasing fits in any way, lj. Bruce was talking about how the Democratic establishment celebrates its bigotries. I mean, I can see how it might celebrate the bigotries of the Republican establishment (for sure, that’s reciprocated many times over), but to me, what Bruce said parses as Democrats celebrate their own bigotries…as good things.
Which, after his elaboration, admittedly doesn’t fit with the intended meaning.
And, by the way, if we can come up with an Idle Toad party and put anyone who’s non-loathesome up as candidate, count me in.
I took it as ‘it for gosh’s sake seldom celebrates its bigotries as triumphs of Americana’ [but jeez, the Republican party seems to celebrate them all the time]
Just taking my own reading, so Bruce shouldn’t be blamed, but when the Dems gloss over don’t ask, don’t tell, when they deal with outsourcing in a protectionist manner, when they, when they vote to keep afloat industries that are not internationally competitive and succeed, they are presenting bigotries things that have to be done to keep American America. But generally, when Dems do this, they are embarassed enough to not crow about it, whereas the Republicans will argue for a Double Gitmo, or a fence around America and not look the least bit embarassed about proposing these things. That’s how I took it.
Sure, Republicans tend to spackle over their flaws, rather than admit to them and repair them. So, to an extent, do Democrats. There’s a lot of defensive behavior to go around, and Republicans do seem to have garnered the lion’s share of it.
Regarding the fence, though, I’ve been having an email exchange with a guy who’s fairly conservative, yet a) sends out regular emails when the latest global warming science is published, and b) is all for the border fence.
So, go figure. Underneath the spackle, we are all different.
If you are in California or in Texas, go Nader all the away!
fie on Nader, fie!
if it’s looking like NC is a lock either way (and it probably will be solid R), i’ll probably vote Libertarian. i was pretty impressed by Steve Kubby’s Pledge – can you imagine any of the leading Dems signing something like that ?
Hillary, Barrack, and Edwards all believe in [stuff]. […] Given our trade and current account and government deficits right now, that is close enough to 100% delusion on the biggest issues.
Even granting the accuracy of your characterizations of their positions–which I do only for the sake of making this point–if that’s the case, why not perform a little electoral algebra?
Anyone who’s graduated high school can perform the following:
x + 4 = 7
x + 4 – 4 = 7 – 4
x = 3
To translate this into politics, if all of the candidates with any chance whatsoever of winning have, in your eyes, effectively identical views on issues A B and C, then it logically follows that the solution to identifying the differences between them lies in subtracting that which they have in common and comparing issues X Y and Z. The issues you identified are important, but they are not the only important issues that exist. Nor does a bad outcome for those issues render all of the other issues on the table meaningless.
I understand that to you, Nader might have a substantially different position on one of those issues where the other candidates, in your eyes, are indistinguishable. I understand that this might cause you to want to vote for him, because his position is desirable.
The problem with this is that Nader has no statistically meaningful chance of ever being elected president. His position, which you like, will never be enacted by him. Regardless of the outcome of the primaries, burn this one thing into your mind, as it is a certainty to five nines: the person who takes office as President in 2009 will be either the Republican or the Democrat. Those are your choices. If you actually care about the outcome, figure out who is less bad, and vote for them. If they’re identical on a given issue, find the issues where they differ and base your decision on that. The outcome has, as pointed out in various ways upthread, ramifications far beyond saber rattling with Iran or how long we stay in Iraq.
The way the system is currently set up, casting your vote for anyone else denies you an affirmative choice in who becomes the next president. The only effect you will have on the landscape will be in denying your vote to whichever of the two is less bad, and correspondingly helping the worse of the two get elected.
Anyone who is, after considering all of that, still capable of throwing every other important issue in America under the bus for the sake of what amounts to a spite vote is either politically ignorant or selfishly amoral.
“Anyone who is, after considering all of that, still capable of throwing every other important issue in America under the bus for the sake of what amounts to a spite vote is either politically ignorant or selfishly amoral.”
Having observed these sorts of arguments since 2000 about half a googolplex number of times (like everyone else around here), I’ve come to the conclusion that you win friends and influence people a little more effectively by leaving out these final flourishes, tempting as they may be. (I’ll have to remember that myself next time I’m arguing against ultimate evil.)
I agreed with your post. The one problem that I still have is how are we supposed to get the Democrats to become better on issues A, B, and C where they agree with the Republicans. Naderite challenges don’t seem to be the answer.
I suppose the solution is to change the country’s mind and hope the candidates follow (though I’m not sure that’s guaranteed either.) Sounds simple enough.
Thank you, LJ, I couldn’t at the moment remember enough details to get that link.
Bruce, just to be clear: I wasn’t disputing your point or even questioning its validity, so much as trying to understand what the point was to begin with.
If I came off as argumentative, quarrelsome, or even the slightest bit grouchy, that wasn’t my intent.
Slarti, you misread me. I quote. 🙂
Sixth, while the Democratic establishment is far from perfect when it comes to racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like, it for gosh’s sake seldom celebrates its bigotries as triumphs of Americana.
Stripping out clauses and breaking up complex sentences: “The Democratic establishment is far from perfect on bigotry. But it seldom celebrates its bigotries as triumphs of Americana.”
By implied contrast, then, the Republican establishment does, and Liberal Japonicus linked to a Republican operative identifying situations in which folks like him have celebrated various bigotries as triumphs of Americana. The Democrats have their moments of trying to act like they believe in Heartland Uber Alles and such, but it’s much rarer on that side.
Hope this helps.
Dang. Yes, it does. My apologies for the axle-wrapping; I got it completely wrong.
No problem! I’m aware of writing more floridly than I need to – it’s sort of a security blanket thing, when problems elsewhere have me down, and they do. So going back to see where misunderstanding might have come in bothers me not at all. On with the disagreement, or whatever. 🙂
Posted by: Jim Parish | June 21, 2007 at 09:39 PM
Well, no; there’s one perfect voting system – i.e., one that has all of the characteristics considered desireable in Arrow’s Theorem. Unfortunately, it’s the One Man, One Vote (a la Terry Pratchett) system…
So you’re the guy with the bumper sticker that reads: “Don’t blame me, I voted for Vetinari”?
I just want to thank Donald Johnson, not for the first time, for channeling my thoughts so exactly that there’s no need for me to wade into this recurring back-and-forth.
I’d honestly thought we had a chance at closing the School of the Americas (now WHISC), but once again, we’re six votes shy. Democrats whose vote or failure to vote deeply disappoints: Abercrombie, Perlmutter, Sestak, Murphy, Rangel (didn’t vote), Jefferson (hell, man, if you don’t have the decency to resign at least do the right thing in casting floor votes), Loretta Sanchez (not voting), Marty Meehan (not voting), Clyburn…
SOA used to be the U.S. military’s main involvement in torture — training Latin American militaries in it, along with a whole national-security-state mindset. Just because it’s now fallen behind our open policy for U.S. troops doesn’t mean it’s not so bad anymore and should continue. Ecuador, Argentina, Costa Rica, and Venezuela have pulled their troops from the school, so it’s more than ever a massive direct training of Colombia’s military. The results don’t speak well…
But gosh, we sure do look tough with netroots-backed “Fighting Dems” like Murphy and Sestak, eh?
The way the system is currently set up, casting your vote for anyone else denies you an affirmative choice in who becomes the next president. The only effect you will have on the landscape will be in denying your vote to whichever of the two is less bad, and correspondingly helping the worse of the two get elected.
This is currently true. I don’t understand how people can quote it and not want to do something about it.
The system is broken. It’s been broken for a very long time. And people keep saying “Don’t try to get anything good out of this system, just settle for something less than the very worst that can happen.”.
After awhile wouldn’t that start sounding like “I want the system to be broken because I like getting the second-worst outcome.”?
This is currently true. I don’t understand how people can quote it and not want to do something about it.
I do want to do something about that. I’d love to see an alternative system in place that makes third-party candidates, and voting for them, a viable choice. I have consistently voted for candidates who advocate potential alternatives like IRV.
But I’m not talking about what I’d like the system to be, I’m talking about what the system is right now, and how to vote in a way that isn’t an irresponsible waste of franchise within the current system as it exists.
You will not change the current system with protest votes. You will simply ensure that you, who want to change the system, have no say in who gets elected.
There are a lot of ways to pursue real change in society, but very few effective ways. The leading figures of the Civil Rights Movement knew something about making change happen. One of my favorite things about Barack Obama is that, as a guy who comes from a background in community organizing, he knows something about how to make change happen in the real world. It’s not just about, for example, giving a nice speech and then the public magically coalesces around your position. Persuasion is part of it, but it’s also about connections, identifying and applying pressure to the levers of power, and a bunch of other things. Rosa Parks wasn’t just some random tired woman, after all.
One method that’s completely ineffective in terms of effectuating real change is showing up every two or four years at the polls and voting for some quixotic candidate to “send a message” to the major parties. Nader’s followers, whether they intended to throw the election to Bush or not, did their utmost to deploy this “send a message” strategy in 2000. It didn’t come close to working; if anything, John Kerry ran an even more cautious campaign in 2004 than Al Gore had. You barely saw a trace of any populist themes or Nader’s anti-corporate message.
The only thing that came from supporting Nader, aside from 8 years of Bush, was a lot of anger and resentment towards Nader from rank-and-file Dems. No matter how much you might have liked the Dems to say “wow, failing to reach out to those voters cost us the election, we need to try and bring them back into the fold,” it simply didn’t happen, and that’s a critical piece of empirical evidence that some people still don’t manage to consider.
If you’re an unabashed liberal, if you believe in progressive policies, if you think the Dems are far too corporatist and centrist, voting for Nader is still completely ineffective as a means of accomplishing real change. I don’t pretend to have all the answers myself, but all you have to do is look at history to know that one doesn’t work.
Steve–Agreed about the complete failure of the Nader approach. I don’t know enough to judge the rest of what you say, but it sounds reasonable.
Ara: “I don’t grasp your point.”
I was responding to someone saying, voting system X has flaw f, let’s use Y or Z. My point was that Y has flaw f’ and Z has flaw f”. I was responding to the argument not the systems, which have complex side effects I have no experience in judging.
Look most members of both parties applauded the invasion/occupation of Iraq.
Many candidates of either party still seem to insist it was 1) the right decision done wrong or 2) the wrong decision, but now we need to make it work. Few admit it was insane and the best thing for the US is to pull out soon as possible. This despite the fact that most americans (and Iraqis) want us out “now.”
The Dems CAN end the war by cutting the funding. The Dems can prevent Bush from attacking Iran by passing a resolution that Bush must wait until congress declares war on Iran before he attacks. That resolution was put forward and was killed by the Dems and the GOP.
The Dems did fully support a recent resolution, one that’s a shot across the bow of Iran, and one that reads an awful lot like the sort of resolutions issued agaisnt Saddam prior to our unwarrented attack.
Two congressmen voted against this most recent resolution, yep, that’s right Paul and Kucinich.
This business about: “well the Dems are bad but slightly less warmongering than the GOP” doesn’t work for me. In Weimer 1931 given a choice to support the Commies or the National Socialists, i’d said “Neither, thank you.”
I strongly believe HRC will NOT bring the troops home. I strongly believe Romney will NOT bring the troops home. I strongly believe the chances either will bomb Iran are high. I refuse to vote for either of them, even if one is less blood-thirsty than the other.
I love this mantra “voting for Nader means you support the GOP candidate.” That’s the sort of nonsense i had to hear in Feb 2003 “If you don’t support the invasion of Iraq, you’re a Saddam supporter.”
Nice try… but no. I refuse to vote for someone i consider a warmonger. End of it.
Sorry for the second post in a row. As a follow-up, here’s a link to the recent resolution you can cut and paste if interested. Beat those war drums.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=hc110-21
Sorry for the second post in a row. As a follow-up, here’s a link to the recent resolution you can cut and paste if interested. Beat those war drums.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=hc110-21
I strongly believe HRC will NOT bring the troops home. I strongly believe Romney will NOT bring the troops home. I strongly believe the chances either will bomb Iran are high. I refuse to vote for either of them, even if one is less blood-thirsty than the other.
That’s a powerful argument.
If we had IRV in democratic primaries, maybe Clinton wouldn’t have it sewn up and you wouldn’t be faced with that choice.
“I strongly believe HRC will NOT bring the troops home. I strongly believe Romney will NOT bring the troops home. I strongly believe the chances either will bomb Iran are high. I refuse to vote for either of them, even if one is less blood-thirsty than the other.”
“That’s a powerful argument.”
It’s a powerful argument for painting potatoes purple.
Look most members of both parties applauded the invasion/occupation of Iraq.
Categorically false. This is true for Republicans. Most Democrats were skeptical, but cowed into voting for the AUMF. And even if true, it has no bearing on the multitude of other issues on which Democrats and Republicans differ vastly.
Many candidates of either party still seem to insist it was 1) the right decision done wrong or 2) the wrong decision, but now we need to make it work.
False. As for 1), HRC comes the closest to being accurate, but even then it’s a fairly cartoonish version of her position. As for 2), it’s the simple truth. The debate is over how to make it work, and when to get out, and on that point the candidates have wildly divergent opinions. There are no simple answers to Iraq. Speaking as someone who wants us out now, even if we wanted to cut Iraq completely loose, it would take months to safely withdraw all of our troops and materiel. Simplifying the problem the way you have is utterly unserious.
The Dems CAN end the war by cutting the funding. The Dems can prevent Bush from attacking Iran by passing a resolution that Bush must wait until congress declares war on Iran before he attacks.
You may recall the part in civics class where they discussed the legislative process. In this process, the President can choose to veto whatever legislation he chooses. Even with all Democrats and Independents in the House and Senate voting to cut funding, we lack a veto-proof majority.
So the short answer to this is no, the Democrats /can’t/ end the war by cutting the funding. The votes aren’t there. They can refuse to pass a spending bill at all, but aside from being electoral suicide, this really /would/ put our troops at risk and have all sorts of unintended and unsavory consequences.
Likewise, the Dems can most certainly pass an Iran resolution like the one you describe. However, it will have no legal force whatsoever. If Bush wants to attack Iran, he will attack Iran. The War Powers Resolution requires the President to “consult” with Congress before attacking, but does not require their authorization until 60 days after the beginning of hostilities.
This business about: “well the Dems are bad but slightly less warmongering than the GOP” doesn’t work for me. In Weimer 1931 given a choice to support the Commies or the National Socialists, i’d said “Neither, thank you.”
And in 1931, your decision to not make a choice would have placed a portion of the blame for WWII and the Holocaust squarely on your shoulders. Given the opportunity to choose the lesser of two evils, you abdicated and allowed the greater of the two to happen. Congratulations on your moral purity.
You can choose to opt out of making a meaningful decision between the candidates, but you cannot opt out of the consequences of your non-choice.
I love this mantra “voting for Nader means you support the GOP candidate.”
It’s not a mantra, it’s math.
Nice try… but no. I refuse to vote for someone i consider a warmonger. End of it.
Then you’ll be happy to know that Edwards and Obama are, in certainty, not warmongers. Hillary isn’t either, but I can see a colorable argument being made that she’s not sufficiently anti-war. If you seriously think Edwards and Obama, of all people, are warmongers, you’ve completely lost all sense of perspective.
What you are refusing to do is consider that any difference between the candidates other than their thoughts on Iraq and Iran matter to the future of the country or world. You are also ignoring the vast gulf of difference between the candidates on the issues important to you, and trivializing those differences to a cartoonish level. That’s not principle, it’s petulance.
Rilkefan, no.
If he believes that the democrat is about as likely to continue the occupation and attack iran as the republican — very likely in either case — then it makes very good sense not to vote for either of them.
The more votes the winner gets, the more people will think he has a mandate.
If they’re both unacceptable then it makes no sense to choose the second-worst alternative. It makes far more sense in that case to find a place to emigrate to.
When your rapists say “Sign this consent form that makes it look like it isn’t rape and in return we’ll only go anal 3 times and the last time we’ll use lubricant” it’s legitimate to refuse to sign. It might go harder on you, but at least you haven’t agreed to it.
Hankest: Not all of them supported the war resolution. Not all of those who did, did so with equal enthusiasm. Not all still do. Some, like Edards, have explicitly admitted to yielding to pressure from people they’re now no longer submitting to. Some are now seeking to repeal the resolution (including, let us note, Hillary Clinton, who otherwise shows far more war enthusiasm than I approve of).
There were no good reasons for Congresspeople to support the resolution in August 2002. They had access to enough information to make it clear how bad and dishonest the administration’s case was. But there were understandable bad reasons, and not everyone who failed at that particular moment in the face of a really serious pressure for war from almost all sides has remained a pure failure.
You are, basically, making the same moral error as the Bush administration does when it comes to torture. They say “Any connection to Al Qaeda means the person’s completely guilty and deserves everything they get”, which leads to actually ailing and torturing chauffeurs and janitors and asserting the right to jail and torture little old ladies in Switzerland who think they’re donating to Arab literacy efforts. You’re saying that a representative who is ever affected on a major issue in a bad way by the society around them is a failure. You have a standard there that literally can’t be satisfied by anything but the simultaneous removal of every officeholder, every advisor, and every lobbyist. I think it’s thoroughly foolish to wish for that, or act as though it’s obtainable by something short of the destruction of Washington DC (at which point power would pass not to the hands of the designated masses but to the seniormost survivors of the existing culture, anyway). If you will not recognize who’s three steps and climbing, you add your dead weight to those who are five steps down and trying to drag everyone down with them.
I like perfection. I’m in favor of the first moment of creation and of heaven. But in between we don’t get them. A standard that doesn’t let you work with real people is a standard that makes you part of the problem. We must aim for the best and highest, and we must start with those who are at least trying to head up too, or at least aren’t so enthusiastic about the drive down and might be persuaded to join us.
“If he believes that the democrat is about as likely to continue the occupation and attack iran as the republican” then he’s too silly to converse with – but in fact he is making that argument “even if one is less blood-thirsty than the other”.
“Many candidates of either party still seem to insist it was 1) the right decision done wrong or 2) the wrong decision, but now we need to make it work.”
“False. As for 1), HRC comes the closest to being accurate, but even then it’s a fairly cartoonish version of her position.”
Of course at the time of the AUMF she said it would be a bad idea to invade based on the claims Bush etc were making, and after the invasion she said it had set a bad precedent, so it’s a pretty cartoony cartoon.
Of COURSE congress can cut funding, if that means sending bills to the president which he will veto, so be it. Do it.
If that means issuing a law that “sunsets” the Iraq authorization (Public Law 107-243) do it.
Of COURSE congress can assert it’s constitutional responsibility by insisting it will require Bush to get a Declaration of War before attacking Iran. Do it.
The DEMS have done nothing to prove they will resist the call for war against Iran. They have done nothing to get the troops home as soon as possible.
My voting for Nader does not give a vote to the GOP, as that assumes i’d vote for the Dems if not Nader, which is not the case. I’d vote for neither party at this point.
What would make me vote for a major party? Well when the lead candidate from that party states consistently and clearly that the troops will be brought home from Iraq and the permanent bases currently being constructed will be abandoned. With a time frame.
I will need them to indicate clearly that US navy carriers will be brought home from the Gulf. And that they will have open diplomatic relations with Iran.
I will need them to stop rattling swords against Iran – a good start would be by refusing to support idiotic resolutions (like the one they supported (except Kucinich and Paul) just the other day).
Until any of that happens, i don’t believe them at all. And therefore I will not vote for them.
I fully understand most of you are in the “lesser of two evils” camp. That’s your decision, live with it, i’ll live with mine.
“I’d vote for neither party at this point.”
Those potatoes won’t paint themselves.
rilkefan,
Did you do that yourself? I’m impressed.
Here’s something that will make most of your heads explode. I’d be less surprised if someone like McCain ended this war than HRC.
Just like Nixon had the resume to go to China, or Ike had the rep. to end the Korean conflict without a win, and without being called weak on communism, McCain can get us out of Iraq without being called “cowardly” or “weak on defense.”
I’m not voting for McCain nor do i support him in any way, i’m just further pointing out why i think it delusional to assume a Democrat will end the war more quickly than a Republican.
Neither camp is ready to admit defeat and leave, and the party in power has most to lose by doing so.
“Did you do that yourself? I’m impressed.”
Did I what? Oops, I didn’t wake the baby, but he’s crying.
I’m not voting for McCain nor do i support him in any way, i’m just further pointing out why i think it delusional to assume a Democrat will end the war more quickly than a Republican.
Now that is delusional. McCain, the most passionate and consistent supporter of the continuation and escalation of the Iraq War in the Senate? By this logic, Diane Feinstein has the resume to come out in favor of repealing Roe v. Wade and banning abortion. The notion is beyond ridicule.
One last comment on this, and then I’m done.
Hankest, if you want to end the war in Iraq, and avoid war with Iran, the rational choice is to cast a vote that will help do that. There is no electoral math that gives Nader, Paul, or Kucinich an arguable shot at winning a primary, let alone the general election. Therefore while their opinions are closest to yours, they are irrelevant to the equation. You’re well aware of this.
You write with great passion about how much you want to end/avoid these wars. Frankly, I don’t buy it. If you actually cared about reducing the likelihood of these wars, you’d be looking closely at the major party candidates and their positions on the matter, and would vote for whichever one was less likely to warmonger. If you actually cared about avoiding war more than you cared about “sending a message”, you’d cast a vote that matters.
That’s not what you’re doing. You’re making superficial generalizations about the candidates’ positions, many of which are objectively false and demonstrate a staggering lack of interest in educating yourself about those issues. You show no evidence of actually being interested in the truth of the matter, or in affecting the outcome of the election in any way, preferring instead to voluntarily abdicate your civic responsibility in favor of giving the candidates the finger.
That’s your right. But having the right to do a thing doesn’t make it any less stupid, or your claims of how much you care about avoiding war any less hollow.
I agree, as I do most of the time, with what Bruce Baugh and Donald Johnson have said about this, and in 2008 I’ll vote for whoever the Democratic nominee is- but Hilary Clinton’s Iraq plan is truly awful, from what I know of it, and I can’t entirely blame anyone who feels that they can’t stomach voting for her. In essence, her plan seems to promise a permanent if reduced occupation- the New Republic, hardly a bastion of Naderites, has an article describing it here.
That said, she’s still better than anyone the Republicans can put up, if nothing more than that. And that, alas, will have to be enough, because the thought of President Giuliani is too horrible to contemplate.
“the New Republic, hardly a bastion of Naderites”
They have a history of contrarian, anti-liberal articles in general and anti-HRC propaganda in particular, though.
They have a history of contrarian, anti-liberal articles in general and anti-HRC propaganda in particular, though.
Indeed.
(That said, Judis is usually on the side of the angels.)
Right on, Catsy.
A louis wan cat: Yeah, exactly. And there’s another consideration. TPM Cafe reported not too long ago about how lobbyists are having a harder time in many congressional offices – they can’t just come in with their laundry lists, they have to actually make a case for their stuff. We can safely assume that not all the newly resistant congresspeople are suddenly pure of heart and public of will. It’s just that they’re aware of other constituencies who actually have influence them along with the business lobbyists. Any Democratic victor will feel that pressure too, and also see the rejection of various Republican influence peddlers. That’s part of the reason to vote for them: to be part of the pressure.
And I can certainly say with a straight face that although I think Hillary is the worst of the major Democratic candidates, she is better than any of the Republican candidates, and would be less harm and more good to the republic. I’ll fight her as long as viable alternatives exist in the campaign and primary season, but if she gets the nomination, she’ll get my vote, unhappy as I’d be about it.
Huh. My post seems to have been eaten. Anyway, in brief: to answer a question raised upthread, Arrow’s Theorem doesn’t apply to IRV since it doesn’t have IIA (Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives). And while rilkefan is correct to note that IRV, like any other voting system, is flawed, I think this misses the fundamental point: the trick isn’t to find a flawless voting system, it’s to find one in which the flaws are as liminal — or at least as rare — as possible. In that sense, I think IRV (or Condorcet, or preference voting) is preferable to the current system.
On the other hand, a crucial part of any voting system is not just mathematical legitimacy but political legitimacy: the people need to believe that it’s a fair system. In that sense, I’m not sure IRV is preferable, at least for national elections in the US. We’re too accustomed to there being only one true way to determine the winner of an election that, warts and all, I think we’re going to have to accept it for now.
“it’s to find one in which the flaws are as liminal — or at least as rare — as possible”
So of course the question is, what’s the prior (by which I guess I mean expected distribution of distributions of voting results)? Or even, what’s the function to evaluate to decide what system is best for a given distribution of distributions?
Well, actually, there never was a choice in Weimar between the Fascists and the Stalinists. There was, however the Social Democrats. The parliamentary party of the SDs had voted unanimously for extending the Kaiser credit for the Great War until Liebknecht alone, more alone than Kucinich or Paul could ever dream of, broke with party discipline. After the war, he was murdered by Freikorps, led by a Social Democrat.
In the Weimar Republic, the Communists held that there was no difference between the Social Democrats and the Fascists. This led them to refuse support to the Social Democrats, leading to the Fascist take over, and the concentration camp, aimed at Social Democrat, Communist, Christian, Jew…
There’s probably a lesson there, something about pride, about purity and impotence, but you’d have to find it yourself.
And the SPD was the only major party to vote against the Enablement Act (the communist parliamentarians were already removed). It was actually the vote of the (catholic) Centrists that gave Hitler the necessary majority
rilkefan: Well, of course. There’s never going to be an objective determination of a “correct” voting system, only one which delivers our expectations as best it can. That’s really the issue: what are our expectations? What do we as a people want from a voting system? What do we as a people not want from a voting system? IMO, the system we have doesn’t deliver upon our collective expectations for systemic reasons and I’d therefore posit another system as a possibility; that said, it’s entirely possible that I’m wrong, or that people say one thing but mean another, or that we are not yet careful what we wish for, or whatever.
Or even, what’s the function to evaluate to decide what system is best for a given distribution of distributions?
The more important question is, how do you persuade voters the system is fair?
The current system is dramaticly unfair because third-candidate voters must throw their votes away. They are left with a devil’s choice. “Would you rather be boiled in oil or macerated from the toes up?” “Neither one, I want to sit in a pleasant garden and drink iced tea.” “Unless you choose boiling or maceration you get no choice at all. Which do you want?”
It leaves voters doing perverse calculations. I would not be surprised if it turned out that in many states more voters would prefer a particular libertarian candidate than would prefer the particular republican candidate they are offered. But most of them vote republican because they think the others will.
When there are only two candidate then it doesn’t matter which system you use, they should all get the same result. When there are more than two candidates the current system is *bad*.
Most alternatives let you vote for more than one candidate if more than one is acceptable to you. And then they maximise the chance that the winner actually is acceptable to a majority of voters. They can’t guarantee that because there may not be any candidate who is acceptable to a majority.
The current system does not collect that data so there is no way to tell whether the winner is acceptable to a majority. The largest faction wins. (For president we have the electoral college intervening too, but this isn’t just about presidents.)
There are lots of voting systems which are considerably better than what we have. I say, we’ve had a bad system for 200+ years. Pick whichever one the public goes for easiest and use it, and we can perhaps decide on an even better one over the next 200 years.
The different systems do get different results. With IRV, a candidate who’s everybody’s second choice and nobody’s first choice can’t win, but with Condorcet he will win unless another candidate has an absolute majority. As it turned out, in 1860 the vote split 4 ways and Lincoln won with <40% of the popular vote and the civil war was on. If we had had a good voting system based on Condorcet, might we have found a compromise candidate and avoided the war, maybe eventually doing away with slavery without the bloodshed? It's possible, and IRV wouldn't have done it. But then, sometimes we really don't want the bland guy that nobody finds that offensive but nobody really wants.
It's hard to judge voting systems by predicted results because the subtle results are hard to predict. Better to pick a system that people think is fair. What I really like about IRV is that I can sit down over beers and explain it, and within 5 minutes or so all but 1 guy will agree that it's fair and what we have isn't fair. I can't do that with Condorcet.
Supporting Nader in a solid blue state nonetheless lends legitimacy to a very dangerous fiction. It is not harmless, and plays very poorly in human, rather than literalist-autist circles.
The idea, expressed above, that supporting Nader is not somehow supporting Republicans is seriously deluded. You have a close race between Not-All-That-Good (for arguments sake) and Catastrophic. You can’t handle the first, so you cast your vote for Chimeric. Guess what — Catastropic wins. And spare us all the whining about how one vote doesn’t matter, or Not-All-That-Good isn’t entitled to, or didn’t earn, those votes. The only question facing people in the adult world is whether you want Not-All-That-Good or Catastrophic.
No thinking person can reasonably postulate that among the nearly 100k people who voted Nader in Florida in 2000, had Nader not been on the ballot, Gore would have won by more than 1,000. (Go ahead, assume that 50k of those people stay home in disgust — Gore still beats Bush in a landslide among the rest). And those 100k people voted as they did because, inter alia, (a) Nader was on the ballot and (b) ‘progressive’ people in blue states kept up a Gore bashing campaign.
Look, if someone really wants to pursue a Nach Hitler, Uns policy, that’s an item on the menu. Just don’t go around acting as if you bear no responsibility for what happens in the interim.
Too many negatives: Gore would not have won (as in, you can’t say he would not have won Florida handily had Nader not been on the ballot).
Charley, I don’t want to sound cynical, but why do you think that Gore might have carried florida under any circumstances with Jeb Bush governing florida?
That aside, I hate to keep seeing the argument that third-candidate voters should not vote for third candidates, with no mention that the system is broken and must be fixed.
This gives the impression that you want to use the broken system to help your candidate. And of course it works out that way sometimes. Votes for Perot helped Clinton win.
Sure, by the perverse rules, votes for Nader and Perot were thrown away and helped Clinton and Bush win. We have to fix the system.
J Thomas: Yes, we need to fixing voting in America. Badly. We also have to salvage the tattered remnants of constitutional government, if that’s possible. I’m not sure it is, to be honest – my nightmares include a strong dose of thinking that either 2000 or 2004 was the point of no return. And in normal circumstances I’d regard the modern Democratic Party as a mediocre excuse for a center-conservative party and go looking for some real liberals.
But here we are.
Doing anything to weaken the Democrats’ chances in 2008 will not fix voting in America. Nor, I think, is there any credible argument that the Democrats are less of a threat to the survival of the rule of law in America than the Republicans, this time around.
What we need is for someone to take the people who want to undermine the Democrats’ electoral chances in 2008 and get them working on voting reform now, and keep them at it until changes are made. It’s probably the work of a generation, starting with municipal, county, and state shifts, surviving the court challenges to those, demonstrating the good results (which I believe there would be to almost any of the alternatives I hear talked about), and finally pushing for national changes.
We need this to happen alongside use of the existing system to mitigate current harms and forestall future ones, not instead of it. Tossing the country to the Republican machine again in 2008 will not lead to ballot improvements. The election of a Democrat even as undesirable as Hillary won’t, either, but the latter may (may, I emphasize) protect enough of the rule of law to allow for honest efforts at systemic change wherever a critical mass can be organized throughout the country, while no feasible Republican candidate would allow such a thing to stand. Look at how the Republicans have in fact used the federal power to squash state choices they disapprove of.
I’m not at all sure why people keep acting as though the immediate electoral choice and the overall evolution fo the voting system are the same question. They’re not. This morning my mother is taking medication for a condition, and next week she’s having a treatment in a series intended to remove the need for further medication. The medicine is not the therapy; the therapy is not the medicine. Why is this so hard?
Gah, need caffeine. That should be an argument that the Democrats are more of a threat than the Republicans. I was preparing for a double negative, backed out of it, didn’t fix it all the way. Oops.
Not believing that there are fundamental differences between the two major parties is the luxury of a middle-class Caucasian upbringing. How well did Nader bring out the black vote? Ask an African American if the Dems and the Reps are two sides of the same coin. They’ll tell you.
I voted for Nader in 2000. While I felt good about my “protest vote” at the time, I really regret it now. It’s going to take exponentially more years to fix the damage done to our nation than it did to break it in the first place.
I too am disappointed that the Dems are not doing what we told them that we wanted them to do last November, but the one that that we cannot afford to do is allow our government to be led by another Republican after the next election.
Bruce, I agree with you right down the line. However, third-candidate voters tend to feel insulted to hear the “you have to vote for my bad candidate instead of your good candidate or a catastrophe will happen”. How many third-candidate voters have never heard that before? And they didn’t agree with it last time or they wouldn’t still be third-candidate voters.
At the very least, tell them “I know the system is broken and I’ll work with you to fix it, and *in the meantime* please vote for my bad candidate instead of your good candidate”.
If you would prefer to have Bush over Gore, or Guliani/Romney over Obama/Clinton, that’s a choice you get to make. Don’t dress it up as if you’re going to change either the voting system, or the lives of anyone in America, or the world, for anything but the worse. None of those things is accomplished in the least by your casting your protest vote.
If you have some specific constitutional amendment you think you can get the requisite support for, then lets hear the proposal, and let’s also hear why you think that the vast majority of people who are more or less content with one party or the other ought to go for it.
J: To be honest, I don’t have much time for people’s feelings getting hurt because they want to accomplish an aim through means that go nowhere near. Being told “It doesn’t work that way” isn’t an insult, any more than being told “Don’t touch the third rail” is.
I do, however, agree that offering a genuine voting reform effort to sign onto along with saying “That won’t do what you want” would be a big improvement.
“The election of a Democrat even as undesirable as Hillary won’t, either, but the latter may (may, I emphasize) protect enough of the rule of law”
The election of a smart wonky woman with a long history of devotion to progressive causes (if mostly ones of less interest to Naderites like child services and reproductive rights) may (may, I emphasize) lead those with wildly unrealistic ideas about what’s achievable in this country to realize that actively supporting liberal Democrats and whatever Democrat is available is the only way to be useful (aside from the really hard work of electing people on the left to local govt in e.g. SF and making the case for their ideas). Of course Hillary may (may, I emphasize) be the Beast of the Apocalypse.
M Moriconi, let me tell you a conspiracy theory.
Let’s suppose that a cabal of rich people looked at the oil situation, and they figured out that in 20 years or less we’re going to have very expensive energy. And they figured out that this will inevitably result in the USA getting a third-world income structure — a lot of poor people, a small middle class, and a tiny apex of rich people.
And let’s suppose they decided to try to get a smooth transition. A thing like that could result in a whole lot of violence. Our reserves and national guard tend to be solid middle-class people, armed and dangerous. So, smooth transition. Get the ship to sink on a completely even keel.
So the middle class stretches slowly into poverty, with nothing specific to revolt against. They see that their pensions are not secure. Lots of them trust their retirements to the value of their homes, which they hope to sell when they retire. heh heh. Lots of poor immigrants and illegal immigrants to take the worst poorest-paying jobs and put pressure on averybody else’s wages. People who aren’t loyal to anything in particular that’s here.
We get more of the population imprisoned. 2.2 million in 2005, out of a total workforce of 151 million. Increasing around 3% per year. 7%+ in federal prisons.
It all fits together, although of course conspiracy theories tend to go that way — when you start with the conclusion and look for things that fit then pieces pop up that do fit. So for example those military reserves that are being destroyed by the war as functional organisations, are precisely the armed, trained guys who might become a problem.
Suppose that the problem is not republicans. Suppose the problem is a cabal who happen to control the republican party and the media. How much good would it do to beat the republicans in an election? I guess how much good that would do would depend partly on how much control they had of the democratic party too. And that isn’t something we’d know ahead of time. I notice that I don’t know anybody who particularly likes Clinton as a candidate. They mostly say they’d support her because the alternative is so much worse. I meet republicans who’re eager to have Clinton as a candidate because they think she’d be easy to beat. Of course the people I meet aren’t representative, but does Clinton actually have a dedicated following? Or is it that she has money behind her and the media says she’s ahead? Again, if I was running the secret cabal I’d be glad to have two candidates that nobody particularly likes, that nobody has high expectations of. Then one of them gets elected and does my bidding and the public is all dispirited but doesn’t know who to blame. If I was even a lowly member of such a cabal I’d hate to see things fall apart in a way that got us another FDR.
This theory seems to me to fit a lot of the available information. But I don’t see an easy quick way to test it, and I don’t see what to do about it if it’s true. Except — the biggest thing that might stop it would be if somebody could find a large source of cheap energy. Then we could have a lot of prosperity using it, and chances are the hypothetical cabal would prefer to have a happy prosperous middle class than to own just another third-world nation, if they thought that choice was available.
But as things get tighter, I can see the GOP get used up and consequently a lot more opportunity for democratic legislators to make money by selling out. The worse things get the bigger the rewards for selling out and the bigger the punishments for not selling out. Just being against the GOP might not be much help at all.
If you have some specific constitutional amendment you think you can get the requisite support for, then lets hear the proposal, and let’s also hear why you think that the vast majority of people who are more or less content with one party or the other ought to go for it.
“Article 1:
Section 4. The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators.”
It looks to me like no constitutional amendment is needed for congress. The individual states can choose unless congress passes a law that says they can’t. In that case congress can pass a law that says they will.
Presidential elections are harder. Article II Section 1 says how to make the electoral college. It doesn’t say much about how the electors are chosen but it describes a weird way to do an election with electoral votes. Then Amendment 12 and Amendment 20 modify it, largely saying what to do if the peculiar electoral college vote does not actually succeed in choosing a president.
So it looks like that *would* require a constitutional amendment. I haven’t met anybody who actually *approves* of the way the electoral college does things, but most people currently lack a burning desire to change it right now. However, the Perot voters and the Nader voters and the Badnarik voters should provide a core of support. And democrats who’re upset at Nader and republicans who’re upset at Perot should fill out the ranks some.
All it needs is money and media attention.
In practical terms, J, I think you’ll need to demonstrate the value of alternative voting systems to a skeptical, ill-trained public – which is why I talked earlier about doing it at state and lower levels. I think it’s something that will likely succeed, if it does, coming up at the feds from below.
Bruce, yes, I agree.
And each locality it gets tried provides a new opportunity for the media to do a hatchet-job claiming it had some awful result. But if I’m right that awful results will tend to be in short supply, the media might have to settle for parading Arrow’s Theorem and explaining that whatever system gets used isn’t the best possible system and we shouldn’t make any changes until we decide which one is the very best.
Oh, expecting the stupidst from the media is sensible right now. What I really mean to say here is just that it’s probably not anything that any presidential candidate who may actually matter is likely to endorse, and their lack of endorsement shouldn’t be an obstacle to supporting them now and pressing somewhere else for practical experiments in voting reform. The antibiotic is not the physical therapy, and so on.
Talking about “alternate universe”:
‘Matthews on Clinton “being surrounded by women”: “[D]oes that make a case” for or against her as commander in chief?’
JT, you also have to remember that our current system of voting — one winner per seat, one vote per person — isn’t just simple to understand, it also has a very long pedigree. If you want people to abandon it, you’re going to have to convince them that it will produce a better result, every time. This I see as an insurmountable obstacle for you.
I can’t imagine any set of circumstances in which I would have preferred Nader to Gore in 2000. Why would I want a system that might bring about that result? And if it wouldn’t potentially bring about that result, what’s the point of the whole exercise? If you think it allows Gore to beat Bush, well, we already have that system. And it failed (inter alia) because enough people thought it more important that Bush win and they get their vanity slaked than that Gore win.
Charley, you are correct that the current system is very easy to understand and it has a lot of precedent.
Beyond that, I don’t need to convince you. I only need to convince an overwhelming majority of voters.
I will point out that with IRV Gore and Kerry would have had the advantage of the Nader votes. On the other hand, Bush senior and Dole would have had the advantage of most of the Perot votes.
So if you want a voting system that will maximise the chance that your preferred candidate will be elected, well, you just never know.
But IRV is far better at representing the wishes of the voters, whatever it is they want.
I only need to convince an overwhelming majority of voters.
This is true, but also an overwhelming majority of state legislators.
I consider both tasks to be completely hopeless, and thus as solutions to the problem of 3d party vanity candidates giving us the worse of the main party candidates (which is, I’m sure, how a sane Bush voter felt in 1992), voting reform of this type is as relevant as the finer points of the constitution of the United Federation of Planets.
It’s true that there has, once, been a very significant constitutional change of the structural variety, that resulted from grassroots, anti-elite sentiment. Popular election of senators, though, was easy to understand and better matched the traditions of the people.
Speaking of alternate universes, how about today’s Post article on Cheney?
Speaking of alternate universes, how about today’s Post article on Cheney?
I’ve only gone through the first four paragraphs and it’s stunning.
Concerning Cheney, Sullivan is playing this big time. Apparently the media’s fear of backlash from Cheney is being overcome by its fear of what Cheney can do in the future.
What do you all think about the idea of IRV or variants in multi-candidate primaries?
That has much more appeal to me than in general elections, since primaries really are a way for a party to explore its members’ preferences and to come up with the candidate that would most effectively unite them for the general.
If I understand Cheney’s claims, it would mean that a president could detain people who had been pardoned by a previous president.
That has possibilities that ought to get a whole lot of publicity.
Nell, I agree. IRV in primaries ought to have advantages for the party that does it, and I expect it would be far easier to make it legal.
Reading these two articles has just confirmed my thoughts on what sort of treatment would be too good for Bush, Cheney, et. al.
Gravel kucinich paul nader perot carter [conyers?] united for truth elicit fear smear blacklist.
Honesty compassion intelligence guts.
No more extortion blackmail bribery division.
They’ve all run off with the verbs.
On the internet, everyone knows when you’re a paranoid schizophrenic, alas.