Losing by Winning

Jon Chait takes on the topic of elections it's better to lose, noting that liberalism would probably have been in much better shape had Gerald Ford been re-elected in 1976 leaving the GOP, rather than Jimmy Carter, saddled with the essentially unsolvable problems of America in the late 1970s:

And the elections that people think don't matter often do. Moderates and liberals widely regarded the 2000 presidential campaign as a snoozer. Apathetic liberals held "shadow conventions" that year to highlight the stultifying timidity of the two major parties. The implicit premise of Ralph Nader's 2000 candidacy was that it was as good a year as any for liberals to make a protest statement and throw the election to a Republican. We now can see that the radicalism of George W. Bush, then half-concealed, along with the rallying effect of Sept. 11 made the 2000 election incredibly consequential.

This consideration of the little-appreciated-at-the-time significance of the 2000 election, however, is the reason why I don't think it ever makes sense to do anything other than try your best to win. The 2000 election turns out to have been incredibly important primarily because of 9/11. The giant external shock created a public expectation of dramatic policy shifts which, of course, made it much easier than it otherwise would have been to implement such shifts and far harder to obstruct or prevent them. Thus, a kind of latent radicalism inside the Bush administration was unleashed in a way it otherwise wouldn't have been. Events, in short, are incredibly important and one of the main things presidents do is respond to them. Meanwhile, it's just not possible to know in advance which four-year periods are the ones that are going to feature dramatic events.

Comments

Matt is exactly spot-on.

Incidentally, this is why I will always despise Ralph Nader, and hold a special contempt in my heart for his 2000 supporters, who together gave us George W. Bush in the name of liberalism. If you really want to start a liberal revival movement, do it from the grassroots (like bloggers are doing now), don't start by playing spoiler in a national election. Sheesh.

Posted by Mr. Noah | December 31, 2006 3:35 PM

I voted for Nader in 2000 (though, as a Seattle resident, my vote didn't technically matter). I have spent the intervening years regretting it, for just the reasons you lay out here, Matt. I assumed we were going to continue on with the basic equilibrium and prosperity of the 90s, and that the time was right for a liberal shake-up.

I could not have been more wrong. I can forgive people who voted for Nader in 2000, but only if they apologize abjectly and repeatedly. People who voted for Nader in 2004 deserve nothing but contempt.

Posted by Realish | December 31, 2006 3:44 PM

Even before 9-11, Bush was making headway on his radical policy goals of wrecking the tax system and pumping up SDI. Which, if I recall right, was pretty much what candidate Bush had said he would do. So -- no offense, Realish -- I think that even the Nader voters of 2000 just weren't paying enough attention.

Posted by Kyle | December 31, 2006 4:06 PM

I could not have been more wrong. I can forgive people who voted for Nader in 2000, but only if they apologize abjectly and repeatedly.

I don't. There were "radical tendencies" inherit in the middle east foreign policy team Gore would have inherited from Clinton every bit as dangerous as Bush's "Team-B" retreads and you probably would have spent the last eight years pinchered between a radicalized conservative movement and the democratic foreign policy establishment. I think the most likely outcome would have been a war in Iran by now as they competed for an Israeli-centric mideast hawk space. That and half the people who think (rightly) that Bush is a war criminal would have been busy playing the awful role relegated to today's warbloggers: apologistics for barbarism.

Posted by Ed Marshall | December 31, 2006 4:08 PM

Of course, 9/11 may not have happened under a different president.

Clinton/Gore had a much more focused response to the kind of threats that the Bush Administration ignored. It is at least possible that a Gore Administration could have disrupted, halted or delayed the attack -- the record strongly implies that a Gore team would probably have tried much harder to do it.

So point taken, but with the caveat that it's hard to separate out events like 9/11 from a key element (e.g. who the CinC was at the time) that may have made the event possible in the first place.

Posted by cvcobb01 | December 31, 2006 4:41 PM

On the other hand, the way the Democrats rolled over for the invasion of Iraq and look like they are going to roll over for air strikes on Iran is enough to make you think that Nader has a point.

Posted by otto | December 31, 2006 4:45 PM

Jon Chait's just got a tic about people who don't operate within the party structure, doesn't he? Now I back up from nobody in my thoroughgoing contempt for Ralph and his little vanity exercise, but it takes deliberate obtuseness with the language to call those Nader followers "apathetic." Even moreso, the Shadow Conventions, which were the first gathering of the forces that Chait finds a bit icky, but that turned out to be rather vital over the past three years. It's TNR level chutzpah to call these people "apathetic."

Posted by Charles Pierce | December 31, 2006 4:50 PM

So -- no offense, Realish -- I think that even the Nader voters of 2000 just weren't paying enough attention.

I agree. The radicalism was there in plain sight for anyone who cared enough to see.

Posted by Mike | December 31, 2006 5:10 PM

Chait is so wrong, and Matt is exactly right. Politics is about leading, about making policy and dealing with difficult situations--inherited or not--whether they are events like 9/11 or ongoing problems like high oil prices or unemployment. If you don't want to deal with tough situations or have to make hard decisions, then don't work in politics. Criminy, you would think that would be obvious to someone who writes about politics.

What really infuriates me is the meta-analysis and meta-reaction employed by Chait here. Instead of strategizing about which elections it is good to win or not, why not spend your energy and thought on crafting better policy? What Chait does here is the absolute triumph of politics over policy--it is the complete abdication of wanting to make policy for purely political reasons.

Wow, Jon Chait has fallen very far very fast. It used to be he was a solid columnist, and now I don't even know if he has a good column for every bad one. Reading him makes me feel like one of the idiots shouting at the Dixis Chicks-"Hey Jon, enough of foreign policy and election strategy. Shut up and write about economic issues."

Posted by Mitch Schindler | December 31, 2006 5:12 PM

Jon Chait seems to have a blind spot for the fact that what politicians do actually has effects other than determining who wins the next election. For example, he notes parenthetically that the expansion in the 1980's was partly due to Paul Volker's success in crushing inflation, but it doesn't occur to him that if Carter hadn't been elected, Volker might not have been appointed head of the Federal Reserve.

On a much bigger scale, he seems oblivious to the prospect that Bush's presidency is causing long term damage to the United States. The 2004 election was important, not because a Kerry victory would help the long term political prospects of the Democratic party (I never thought it would), but because it would have improved the long term prospects of the United States. Listing all the areas in which the Bush presidency has harmed the United States is a project more appropriate for a book than a blog comment, but here are a couple. Bush has undermined America's reputation around the globe, thereby weakening America's ability to be a world leader. Rejecting Bush's reelection bid would have been a good first step towards restoring America's reputation. And do I really need to remind Chait of the plight of New Orleans? Since Chait writes that the 2004 election "barely mattered at all," it appears that I do.

Posted by Kenneth Almquist | December 31, 2006 5:59 PM

enough to make you think that Nader has a point

JFC, are you saying that the conduct of a beleagured minority in the face of serious public pressure means that we're better off with Bush than we would have been with Gore? Anyone who thinks we'd be talking about an invasion of Iraq, much less Iran, had 9/11 happened on Gore's watch isn't paying attention. We'd have gone into Afghanistan, gotten bin Laden, and that would be about it.

Unless we ended up destabilizing Pakistan, in which case . . .

To go back to the main point, you have to have all the same caveats with the late 70s. We have no idea how the Iranian Revolution would have played out with Ford/Kissinger rather than Carter/Vance. My bet would be uglier in the short run, but who can tell. The idea that liberalism would be better off, though, is foolishness at a level no one should pay to read.

Posted by CharleyCarp | December 31, 2006 6:01 PM

On the other hand, the way the Democrats rolled over for the invasion of Iraq and look like they are going to roll over for air strikes on Iran is enough to make you think that Nader has a point.

Why do otherwise smart people confuse what kind of opposition politicians put up and how they govern? If Bush doesn't veto a minimum wage bill next month, can we all just assume that there isn't any real difference between the parties on minimum wage policy? When contemplating the electoral importance, the point isn't style of opposition, but what they would have done in power. Ed Marshall's lunatic fantasies notwithstanding, there's no reason to think a Gore presidency would have done anything like this.

As to the question of how predictable the Bush disaster was at the time, I think it was pretty predictable, although the precise contours of the nightmare were shaped and (and made worse) by 9/11. Both his radicalism and his incompetence were clearly present to anyone looking closely; it was a pretty good bet that one of these tendencies would do some serious damage at some point, even precisely what that damage would be wasn't really knowable at the time.

Posted by djw | December 31, 2006 6:31 PM

I do understand the difference between being in power and being in opposition, but if the Democrats were a different sort of party, i.e. less like the one that Nader objects to more-Howard-Dean, less-Joe-Lieberman, they would in fact have opposed the invasion of Iraq.

Really, if Bush attacks Iran before the next election, and the Democratic candidate for President (Obama, Clinton?) supports that action, would you vote for that Democratic Candidate in 2008? If so, is there any level of enabling Bush's wars which would cause you to stop voting Democrat?

Posted by otto | December 31, 2006 7:35 PM

enough to make you think that Nader has a point

In 1844, Whig Henry Clay ran against Democrat James K. Polk. Both candidates supported the institution of slavery. Both were D.C. insiders. But Polk favored starting a war with Mexico to steal their land and establish more slave territory. Clay opposed such a policy.

The abolitionist Liberty Party ran a spoiler candidate named James Birney, who blasted them for their similarities, and their corrupt acquiescence to an evil institution. He swung New York's critical electoral votes into Polk's column.

In the following four years, the Southwest was conquered and untold amounts of blood spilled, in addition to slavery being upheld as a legitimate institution. But of course, under Clay, slavery also would have been upheld as a legitimate institution.

enough to make you think that Birney had a point

Yes, of course Birney had a point. And his candidacy proved another point:

Elections aren't about maintaining the purity of your virgin conscience. If that's your goal, go into social work or some other perfectly legitimate and honorable form of activism. You'll quickly find that even that involves making compromises sometimes. Then you can drop out altogether and find a line of work where you'll never have to deal in shades of grey. But in politics, even if you maintain basically good motives throughout, you have to get your hands dirty sometimes to move things in the direction they need to go.

I'll note that St. Ralph didn't seem to have much problem getting his hands dirty, with some of the people his campaign took money from, or whose signatures he used to get his name on the ballot in some states. It all depends on what the end goal is, doesn't it?

Posted by Chris | December 31, 2006 8:16 PM

Nobody's maintaining the purity of their virgin conscience. Just trying to find a way to stop adding war with Iran to the current war in Iraq. Am hoping to find a Democratic Party way to do that, just not convinced yet that it's possible.

Posted by otto | December 31, 2006 8:23 PM

Actually, if there was an election to lose, that would have been the 2004 election.

The really pivotal election was in 2000. Between 2001 and 2003 Bush had made all the crucial decisions the consequences of which are going to be with us for a long time.

As much as I wanted to see Kerry elected, I don't think that he would have made too much difference. If anything, conservatives would be able to at least pin some of the blame to Democrats instead of having Iraq completely break up in the faces and mar their reputation for a generation.

I also like to say that I thought of this before the 04 election so this is not hindsight.

Posted by Nick Kaufman | December 31, 2006 9:35 PM

As long as the US electoral system is this ridiculous mix of 'first past the post' voting and the 'winner takes all' electoral college you will always be saddled with this dilemma.

Get with the 21st century, America.

Posted by Leinad | December 31, 2006 10:24 PM

Ed Marshall's lunatic fantasies notwithstanding, there's no reason to think a Gore presidency would have done anything like this.

So if you extrapolate Gore's record on say, something nutty like how he voted as a Senator on middle east issues for near a decade and the actions he stood by as V.P for about another decade you should decide based on what exactly that he wouldn't have invaded Iraq? . Have you thought about the climate you would be living in now with Saddam Hussein in power? You did notice everyone who you would want to be seen in the Democratic party with was there in the "Saddam is going to kill us with his Cabinet of Horrors" back in '03 right?

Posted by Ed Marshall | January 1, 2007 1:44 AM

based on what exactly that he wouldn't have invaded Iraq?

1. Understanding that the people who attacked on 9/11 are in Afghanistan/Pakistan.

2. Lack of belief in magical power of removing SH to discredit Islamists (of which a subset is the ability to distinguish one sort of brown person from another, on bases other than solely whether they support US policy).

Nothing more is needed, but if you want a third, how about this:

3. Not starting his administration looking for an excuse to take out SH. (But instead thinking that one of the critical national security issues was dealing with the non-state actor, AQ).

I've said counterfactual history is a fools game, and I meant it. But really, there are fools and there are fools. Inability to distinguish the effect of public feeling on the position of Dem politicians in the fall of 2002 and the spring of 2003 -- feeling intentionally manufactured by the Admin -- drives one pretty far over the edge. Anyone is free to postulate that some combination of rhetoric/action by Dem politicians in the fall of 2002 might have changed the public perception. I've yet to hear anything credible on this score, though; nothing that leads me to think that the result wouldn't just have been greater Dem losses in the 02 midterms.

Posted by CharleyCarp | January 1, 2007 3:22 AM

I do not understand why all of you are wringing your hands so much. Given the demographic trends in the United States, in a few years (2020( the Democrats will be the dominate political party and be able to do whatever it wants. The Republicans will probably not even have enough senators to be able to filibuster in the Senate.

The real question should be is what will the United States be like with only one dominate political party?

Posted by superdestroyer | January 1, 2007 8:27 AM

And yet, the Dems didn't regain control of Congress until people started doing what the Greens did in 2000- saying the h*ll with the DLC and running non-triangulated candidates.

A lot of this "blame the Greens" stuff just misses the point. 2000 wasn't a 'great year to try a wacky candidate', it was the end of eight years during which Clinton governed like a kindler gentler Republican, providing a running series of cave-ins on issues like gays in the military and Jocelynn Elders that pretty much proved little would come from that Democratic Party.

That "blaming the Greens" is a form of mental illness is illustrated by those who hold the Greens in contempt for their votes, an act far worse than not voting at all. Just how does that work? Or, do you in fact hold the non-voters to be an even lower form of life than the Greens? Condemning, thereby, about a third of your fellow citizens to 'untouchable' status?

Well, good luck with that one. In America we get to vote the way we want, or even refuse to vote at all. One of the Seven Essential Ingredients of a Healthy Democracy. Live with it.

Posted by serial catowner | January 1, 2007 9:26 AM

To Chris re 1844.

The argument for voter integrity.

Either my vote will decide the election or it will not.

If it will, I should vote for my first choice and not a mere lesser of two evils, since whomever I vote for will win.

If it will not, I should vote for my first choice and not a mere lesser of two evils, since my vote won't decide the matter anyway and it's not worth a trip to the polls to vote for the wrong guy. That would make my vote, an insignificant gesture in any case, a lie into the bargain.

Yes, under our stupid first past the post system a 3rd party candidate can split the left, or the right, or the whatever, and bring about the election of a person to whom nearly everybody would have preferred a particular one of the losers.

But that is not something any individual about to cast his own vote in the booth can prevent.

You are perfectly right that had the Nader voters in 2000 gone for Gore, the G-man would have won and very likely the mess in Iraq would never have happened.

In fact, all but the most obtuse or mendacious of the Nader voters would have to agree that in a multitude of ways, not only that way, things would have gone better, or less badly, had Gore won rather than GW.

But just as there was nothing in the world you could do, either in the voting booth or out of it, to cause all the Naderites to skip over RN and vote the lesser evil instead, there was nothing any of the Nader voters could do, either.

I say again, had all the Nader voters gone for Gore then, other things equal, Gore would have won. But you could not bring about that result. Nor could any of them.

Each Nader voter, on his way into the booth, knew full well that the behavior of other voters, including other Nader voters, was totally beyond his control, and would be totally unaffected by his own individual choice in the booth.

Each Nader voter, and each voter of any sort, knew full well, as did you, that he could control only his own vote; and that his decision, in whichever direction, would not shift millions of votes to one candidate or another, but only his own.

See again the argument for voter integrity, above.

I didn’t vote for RN in 2000. But I did in 2004. I voted straight Democrat in 2006 at all levels, and was glad to do so since those candidates really were my first choices. But if RN runs again in 2008 I may vote for him again.

By the way, while we consider second preferences, you might ask yourself why the Democrats keep running candidates so close to the center, thus insuring defections to third party candidates among progressives, when all the polls repeatedly confirm they could do better running further left on all the money issues and on Iraq.

The reason is just what RN and the progressives say it is. The money men who own and operate the Democrat party would rather the Democrats lose to a Republican than win and govern from that far left.

The split-left, Naderite phenomenon driving you nuts? Blame Rahm Emanuel, not Ralph Nader.

Posted by Gaius Sempronius Gracchus | January 1, 2007 9:39 AM

Serial Catowner - "In America we get to vote the way we want, or even refuse to vote at all. One of the Seven Essential Ingredients of a Healthy Democracy. Live with it."

Criticizing those who voted for Nader or those who don't vote is not failing to "live with it." Sure, you have a perfect right not to vote or to vote for stupid vanity candidates. And the rest of us have a perfect right to criticize people who do this. Live with that.

Posted by DanG | January 1, 2007 9:48 AM

And the rest of us have a perfect right to criticize people who do this.

Thank you, commisar.

Posted by Ed Marshall | January 1, 2007 10:01 AM

Re: The idea that liberalism would be better off, though, is foolishness at a level no one should pay to read.

It's hard to see how the economic problems of the late 70s would have been very different had Ford (he of the "WIN" buttons) been reelected. They were due to either forces outside US control (like the oil shocks) or to past mistakes (Johnson's "guns and butter"; Nixon's price controls) If a GOP administration had taken the blame for "malaise" and the like (and for the inevitable energy crisis due to the Iranian upheaval no matter how that played out) does anyone think the nation would have turned right? It's entirely possible it might have turned left instead.

Re: As to the question of how predictable the Bush disaster was at the time, I think it was pretty predictable, although the precise contours of the nightmare were shaped and (and made worse) by 9/11.

Somewhat predictable, yes, but most such predictions would also have seen Bush losing reelection in 2004 and certainly not increasing GOP copntrol in Congress in either 2002 and 2004 without the convneinet gioad of 9-11 to use on the voters. As worst a no 9-11 Bush presidency would have been about as bad as his father's single term, and just as quickly repuidated.

Re: Really, if Bush attacks Iran before the next election, and the Democratic candidate for President (Obama, Clinton?) supports that action, would you vote for that Democratic Candidate in 2008?

Yes, becuse they will still be vastly better than any likley GOP candidate on a whole lot of issues. Some people here are making the dangerous mistake of turning foreign policy into a single issue litmus test in much the same way that pro-Life folks do with abortion in the Republican Party.

Re: In the following four years, the Southwest was conquered and untold amounts of blood spilled, in addition to slavery being upheld as a legitimate institution.

The Mexican War was not a particularly bloody war, if only because it was so brief. And the Southwest was likely to detach itself from Mexico at some point anyway as even most of the Hispanic residents were quite fed up with distant and corrupt rule from Mexico City (remember, no railroads or highways connected the region to central Mexico back then) and many even supported the US in the war until they discovered they would be treated as foreigners in their own lands under the Anglos.

Re: Just trying to find a way to stop adding war with Iran to the current war in Iraq.

This is very unlikely to happen since we simply do not have the military forces to do this. Even a faith-based administration cannot conjure men and munitions out of thin air. Why do you think the administration has been such a pussycat on Iran (yes, they have-- compare to the run-up to the Iraq War) allowing Europe and Russia to do most of the heavy lifting, and even turning to the UN?

Posted by JonF | January 1, 2007 10:36 AM

Re. War with Iran:
"This is very unlikely to happen since we simply do not have the military forces to do this. Even a faith-based administration cannot conjure men and munitions out of thin air."

Since we are likely just to bomb them, rather than invade, this constraint does not apply. We certainly have enough cruise missiles etc to drop them on 150 Iranian sites or to enable the Israelis to do likewise.

Posted by otto | January 1, 2007 10:50 AM

And yet, the Dems didn't regain control of Congress until people started doing what the Greens did in 2000- saying the h*ll with the DLC and running non-triangulated candidates.

I live in a world where Dems regained the Senate because Jon Tester and Jim Webb narrowly won their races, something that was only possible because of personal implosions on the other side, in the midst of an ever more unattractive war. I don't know what world you live in.

(I also live in a world where if 20% of Nader voters in Florida had gone Gore, 10% had gone Bush, and 70% had stayed home, much would be different and better. In that same world, if hordes of vanity driven idiots hadn't been all over the place saying that there's no real difference between the two parties, a result like this would have been entirely likely. I'm not saying that we should exile vanity driven idiots. Just that the extent of their vanity and idiocy should have been made clearer at the time, and that the failure to do so is a mistake we're not going to make again. Live with that!)

Posted by CharleyCarp | January 1, 2007 11:09 AM

To Chris re 1844, again.

The argument for voter integrity, advanced above, while defending Nader voters as well as, implicitly, Birney voters, is no defense of Nader or Birney.

There is a legitimate question whether and when it is right to run a minor party candidate on the right side of an issue on which both of the Big Machine candidates are on the wrong side, though one Machine candidate is more wrong than the other, when the minor party candidate is just popular enough to be a spoiler and insure the victory of the Machine candidate who is more wrong.

Is there a case for intentional spoiling?

Personally, I would say so only if the lesser evil whose prospects are being spoiled is still so evil that the difference between him and the greater evil is slight, compared to the difference between both of then and the in-the-right spoiler; and if running a spoiler can reasonably be expected to cause an eventual re-shuffling of the deck, providing better prospects for the in-the-right position in the future.

Now consider the distance between the anti-NATO, anti-Military Industrial Complex, close all our bases and bring everybody back to this hemisphere and radically shrink the military position of RN and his supporters on the one side; and the pro-globalism, pro-interventionist likes of Kerry, Senator Clinton, and the bulk of Democrat officials and leaders on the other.

See the problem?

A question with real bite.

Posted by Gaius Sempronius Gracchus | January 1, 2007 11:19 AM

It's an impossible task to guess what would have been if only...

But for the heck of it, if Gore had won the presidency in 2000, maybe he would have responded to the August 6 memo and other warnings about the impending attack. Maybe the 9/11 plot would have been foiled. Then we likely would not be in Afghanistan and Iraq. Would the electorate rise up and reward Gore and the Dems for averting potential disasters? Probably not. If Gore had been president and rushed aid to New Orleans after the devastation of Katrina, would we get a lot of credit for the speed of response or get criticism for not taking preventative steps by rebuilding the levees? More likely the latter.

I think the only electoral strategy is to try to win, and the 2000 election by any measure will go down as one of the more noteworthy historic events of our times, and without a doubt the country would be better off had Gore taken the White House. That said, I don't think it's a necessary corollary that Gore or the Dems would get credit for all the good they would have done. Not in the world of Washington punditry, which still doesn't seem to understand the difference between Dems and Reps despite the last six years.

Posted by JJF | January 1, 2007 12:01 PM

Now consider the distance between the anti-NATO, anti-Military Industrial Complex, close all our bases and bring everybody back to this hemisphere and radically shrink the military position of RN and his supporters on the one side; and the pro-globalism, pro-interventionist likes of Kerry, Senator Clinton, and the bulk of Democrat officials and leaders on the other.

And now look at the actual events that actually happened in the actual world, thanks in part to Mr. Nader and his supporters.

If you can look at the world today and not see how badly wrong they were, I don't know what to say to you.

Posted by DivGuy | January 1, 2007 12:30 PM

The reason is just what RN and the progressives say it is. The money men who own and operate the Democrat party would rather the Democrats lose to a Republican than win and govern from that far left.

Well, of course they do. America currently has one center-left party and one rightist party.

I would love for a real leftist party to exist which could win. I think there are several ways to work for this end - you can support better leftists in primary campaigns, you can work in issue activism to bring currently leftist sentiments into the political mainstream, you can work at election reforms that allow leftist concerns greater voice in the national debate. These are all perfectly good and laudable actions.

What is not included in that list is voting arrogantly and tragically for general election 3rd-party candidates. As you even acknowledge, voting for Nader had no larger effect than empowering hte American right and helping to bring about the avalanche of injustice that has been the past six years.

There are ways to work for leftism. Leftism is good. The Democratic party stands way, way to my right. But there is a time and a place for idealism, and a time and a place for pragmatism. The voting booth is the ultimate place of pragmatism.

Posted by DivGuy | January 1, 2007 12:38 PM

Each Nader voter, on his way into the booth, knew full well that the behavior of other voters, including other Nader voters, was totally beyond his control, and would be totally unaffected by his own individual choice in the booth.

This argument proves far too much. It is a perfectly fine defense of a vote for George Bush - hell, how were we to know that other people would vote for him! I could even go ad Hitlerum on this one - there's no end to the bad decisions in the voting booth that can be justified by your argument.

Posted by DivGuy | January 1, 2007 12:56 PM

What is not included in that list is voting arrogantly and tragically for general election 3rd-party candidates. As you even acknowledge, voting for Nader had no larger effect than empowering hte American right and helping to bring about the avalanche of injustice that has been the past six years.

My one vote for a non-democratic candidate in a blue lock state nearly seven years ago is the only one people still about and normally it pisses off all the right people. What you would have got out of Gore would have been similar to what Labour got out of Blair: a nasty mess and an intra-party war. I can't think of any way to absolutely guarantee that no one takes you seriously is to take an oath of loyalty to whatever gets churned out of your local, state, or federal democratic primary. It's an invitation to get sold out.

Posted by Ed Marshall | January 1, 2007 1:01 PM

Re: Since we are likely just to bomb them, rather than invade, this constraint does not apply. We certainly have enough cruise missiles etc to drop them on 150 Iranian sites or to enable the Israelis to do likewise.

This would not exactly be a full scale war then, in fact it would be no different than Clinton's sporadic lobbing of missiles into Iraq. The results would probbaly be no different either: nothing remotely useful accomplished (even if you take the Neocon view of things) but also nothing disastrous resulting either.
When people fret about war with Iran I generally assume they (rightly) fear a repetition of the Iraq disaster, but on an even larger scale.

Posted by JonF | January 1, 2007 1:04 PM

I can't think of any way to absolutely guarantee that no one takes you seriously is to take an oath of loyalty to whatever gets churned out of your local, state, or federal democratic primary. It's an invitation to get sold out.

This is only true insofar as the only available method of political action is voting in general elections.

It's not. There are a huge number of things we can do to work for better leftists coming out of primaries, just a couple of which I enumerated above. You will get sold out to the degree that you didn't get what you wanted in the earlier activist work, and inevitably ideals get sold out and people get hurt. It's tough, but it's politics. And you go back to work after the general election ends.

Posted by DivGuy | January 1, 2007 1:17 PM

Just five figures worth of dead Sudanese out of Clinton's bombings. Nothing disastrous. Yeeeesh.

Posted by Ed Marshall | January 1, 2007 1:18 PM

And, I should add, there are things we can do to change how primaries and even general elections are run, which could conceivably change the election day calculation. But the time to work for those changes is in between elections, not while you're standing in the voting booth.

Posted by DivGuy | January 1, 2007 1:19 PM

"What you would have got out of Gore would have been similar to what Labour got out of Blair: a nasty mess and an intra-party war."
How on earth do you know that?
I'm guessing the reason that your vote for Nader always pisses off the "right people" is because you (a) advertise this vote and (b) seem immensely proud of it. This pisses people off because we've spent the last 6 years living with a group of deranged, evil people in the White House, ruining everything they touch and getting the US stuck in a bloody immoral war.

There are two major parties in the US. This is a fact that is unlikely to change any time soon, and has a negligible chance of changing in the sort of way that the Ed Marshalls of the world would like it to. Given the fact that Nader had no chance of winning and would be entirely unable to govern even if he had won, why would anyone vote for him? My guess is that Nader voters wanted to make a statement.

I made a mistake equal to voting for Nader. I didn't vote. And I am distinctly ashamed of that. I wasn't in a swing state, so my vote didn't personally hand the election to Bush, but a critical mass of people who felt the way I did (disenchanted with the political process, annoyed by the existence of Joe Lieberman) did hand the election to Bush.

There are two possibilities with people who voted for Nader and are proud. Either they continue to labor under a series of magical notions that tell them something bizarre like a Gore presidency would have been twice as war-mongering as Bush, uh, because. Or they know that what their vote was a mistake and are merely incapable of admitting it.

Posted by alex | January 1, 2007 1:36 PM

Re: Since we are likely just to bomb them, rather than invade, this constraint does not apply. We certainly have enough cruise missiles etc to drop them on 150 Iranian sites or to enable the Israelis to do likewise.

"This would not exactly be a full scale war then, in fact it would be no different than Clinton's sporadic lobbing of missiles into Iraq. The results would probbaly be no different either: nothing remotely useful accomplished (even if you take the Neocon view of things) but also nothing disastrous resulting either."

It would be war, when we are currently at peace, just as if the Iranians dropped 150 missiles on the US. It would be a radical change in relations between the two countries, which was not true in relation to US and Iraq since the US was enforcing the ceasefire arrangements at the end of a war between those two countries. The Iranians would be able to strike back and would certainly do so in one form or another. Adding another country to the list of those the US is at war with would be completely disastrous. You shouldn't overly normalise shifting from diplomatic tensions to war.

Posted by otto | January 1, 2007 1:41 PM

There are two possibilities with people who voted for Nader and are proud. Either they continue to labor under a series of magical notions that tell them something bizarre like a Gore presidency would have been twice as war-mongering as Bush

Oh, Christ, I get a non-voter telling me about a theoretical Gore/Lieberman foreign policy stance.

Posted by Ed Marshall | January 1, 2007 1:54 PM

Gore probably would have made better decisions after the fact, thus leading to a better outcome for the country. But I still think, in purely Partisan terms, it may have been better for the Democrats to have lost 2000. I believe the Republicans would have very quickly blamed Clinton/Gore for the 9/11 attacks. When the finger pointing started the Republican allegations went nowhere since it had been a year and a half since the Democrats handed over the keys.

Posted by Don | January 1, 2007 6:18 PM

These threads always fascinate me, possibly because of the premise that you will woo the Nader voter, first by insulting them, and second by threatening them.

Some people don't seem to remember that Bush did not win the election because of the Nader voters, he stole the election. Sure, if that rabbit had had a gun, he would have shot the ass off that hound, but....

And there's a few things people don't seem to remember about Clinton, either. For example, Madeleine Albright saying that if 400,000 Iraqi children had died, it was still worth it. Or Barry McCaffrey as Drug Czar, and the steady rise in marijuana arrests all through the Clinton years. Or Senator Liebermann and his bill to ban dancing, which passed, and has since been used in raids on dances.

Face it, all this 'vote the party ticket' talk means that in NO you would have been voting for Ray Nagin, or William Jefferson. Would they have taken a break from their canoodling so they could do a little Canuteling and hold back the flood? One of the great imponderables of history, no doubt....

Perhaps the most charming conceit is the thought that if that idiot Bush hadn't messed things up, we would still be number one. How, exactly, did you think the age of the military-industrial complex would end? My dad, a man of few words, did have on thing he wanted me to remember- "No matter how big and tough you get, there's always going to be somebody bigger and tougher than you".

He also taught me never to ask a man how he voted.

Posted by serial catowner | January 1, 2007 7:34 PM

Re: It would be war, when we are currently at peace, just as if the Iranians dropped 150 missiles on the US

Have you actually read anything from the conservative side about this? They are well aware that dropping a few bombs would be worse than useless and they insultingly refer to that sort of strategy with Iran as neo-Clintonism. They want a full fledged invasion with Mullahs toppled and god knows what put in its place. And since that's not possible given current constraints (and at least some of the neo-cons realize it) I supsect nothing at will be done other than the current round of muttered tough-talk accompanied by a general fobbing off of the problem onto the Europeans and the Russians.
Moreover on the political side the GOP has just had its nose rubbed in the unpoularity of its foreign policy. The GOP is not stupid. It will do nothing to worsen its repute with the voters on that front in the next two yaers.

Posted by JonF | January 1, 2007 8:59 PM

Among other things, I wrote Each Nader voter, on his way into the booth, knew full well that the behavior of other voters, including other Nader voters, was totally beyond his control, and would be totally unaffected by his own individual choice in the booth.

DivGuy wrote in specific reference to that one bit, This argument proves far too much. It is a perfectly fine defense of a vote for George Bush - hell, how were we to know that other people would vote for him! I could even go ad Hitlerum on this one - there's no end to the bad decisions in the voting booth that can be justified by your argument.

To which I reply:

Well, I hope not, but if that's your view you're stuck with it. Because the one sentence of what I wrote that you responded to is not only true, but boringly evident to anyone who doesn't believe in voodoo. And likely most who do.

Why does this comment gizmo collect your email address and then not use it?

Posted by Gaius | January 1, 2007 9:33 PM

Of course one doesn't expect to win over hard-core Nader supporters by pointing out the scale of their self-delusion, or extent of the harm it's caused, any more than one hopes to win over hard-core right-wingers by telling the truth about their addictions. The point is containment: stopping people who haven't already had the kool-aid from thinking that it's all just harmless good fun.

It doesn't matter, of course, if there are a few cranks out there, just so long as they don't get another chance to f*ck up the entire world.

Posted by CharleyCarp | January 2, 2007 12:25 AM

This is very true, and it can affect personal lives in more than just the obvious ways.

Example?

Had Al Gore been president I would now be in the military (or if I hadn't made the cut, known I'd tried).

Posted by MNPundit | January 2, 2007 5:29 AM

Speaking of Lieberman . . .

How often are progressives told that the third party route just plays into the hands of the right and they need to behave like responsible Democrat adults, pushing their views and their agenda within the party but then, when the candidates are selected, putting differences aside and supporting the duly chosen Democrat for office?

All the time, huh?

And Lieberman? The whole troop of establishment, globo-interventionist Democrat leadership who refused to support Lamont? Are they the responsible adults who play by the proper rules, fair and square?

And don't even let me get started on Democrat sabotage of Nader and Green ballot access. Or fraudulent counts that undercounted Nader and Green votes. Democrats lecturing Nader voters on responsible, adult, and mature political fair play? Phooey.

And how much of a rush have the Democrats ever been in to reform our stupid electoral system, junk the Electoral College, and adopt proportional representation, or instant runoff, or preference order voting, or NOTA?

Those reforms would go far to enhancing democracy in America and doing away with this whole split-left problem. Everybody knows it. The Democrats won't help make it happen because they don't want it to happen.

They like the joint monopoly on power they have with the GOP in our Duopoly.

Vote splitting a problem for the Democrats? Well, they made the bed, they and their GOP compadres . . .

Posted by Gaius | January 2, 2007 8:55 AM

Oh, I forget. Democrats accuse Greens and progressives of being pawns of the GOP like Santorum, helping them undermine the Democrat candidate.

But didn't the entire Democrat establishment join forces with the GOP, openly and publicly, to elect Lieberman and intentionally defeat the duly chosen Democrat candidate?

Posted by Gaius | January 2, 2007 9:00 AM