![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
There are some people -- Howard Dean is the first one to spring to mind -- who allow personal aspiration to blind them to the fact that they're doing harm to all the causes they hope to champion. By this time tomorrow we'll know just how much worse Ralph Nader is.
I didn't mind him in 2000. Not simply because he represented an alternative to the two-party system, but because Gore represented the establishment, and Nader at least stood for something -- moving policy even more to the left than the Clinton years did.
However, I don't know that there's any disagreement (among non-Republican circles) that Nader needs to sit down with a hot steaming cup of STFU this time around. It's the end of February in an election year. It's too late to get the Green Party nomination. And if the Democratic primaries taught us anything, it's that the electorate just wants someone who can win in November, even if it is (sigh) John Kerry. If Nader's answering any call-to-arms, it's echoing inside his own skull. The anti-Bush camp can handle absolutely no further division in a country that's already split almost perfectly down the middle.
Even if he does run, I can see the same forces that doomed Dean -- specifically, the idea that only Kerry can beat Bush in November -- to marginalize Nader's impact in the actual polls. But Nader's drain on fundraising, publicity and momentum, even if it is minimal, might be enough to give the Republicans four more years. And he has to know this.
I don't think Nader will run. If he did, it would be an act of almost incomprehensible selfishness and ego. But he'd still be better than Gary Barnett.
I didn't mind him in 2000. Not simply because he represented an alternative to the two-party system, but because Gore represented the establishment, and Nader at least stood for something -- moving policy even more to the left than the Clinton years did.
However, I don't know that there's any disagreement (among non-Republican circles) that Nader needs to sit down with a hot steaming cup of STFU this time around. It's the end of February in an election year. It's too late to get the Green Party nomination. And if the Democratic primaries taught us anything, it's that the electorate just wants someone who can win in November, even if it is (sigh) John Kerry. If Nader's answering any call-to-arms, it's echoing inside his own skull. The anti-Bush camp can handle absolutely no further division in a country that's already split almost perfectly down the middle.
Even if he does run, I can see the same forces that doomed Dean -- specifically, the idea that only Kerry can beat Bush in November -- to marginalize Nader's impact in the actual polls. But Nader's drain on fundraising, publicity and momentum, even if it is minimal, might be enough to give the Republicans four more years. And he has to know this.
I don't think Nader will run. If he did, it would be an act of almost incomprehensible selfishness and ego. But he'd still be better than Gary Barnett.