Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1110 Editor's Choice: 106
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NAFTA was never a good idea
[Read the article: Clinton and Obama's NAFTA showdown]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Afta NAFTA, only da laughta of da grafta," one commentator pithily and all too correctly observed nearly fifteen years ago, on the eve of passage of the mother of all corporate windfalls.
Bill Clinton's support, we were then told, was regretful and even tragic but he believed too much in supporting previously-negotiated agreements to yank the rug out from under the civil servants who had worked so at foundation-building (a principle which turned out not to matter so much when it came to Desert Fox or the Camp David negotiations — but nobody ever lost money betting on pragmatism over principle in the Clinton White House).
So let our would-be leaders twist and squirm over their NAFTA records. Let them be forced to commit publicly their opposition to the exploitative paradigm that NAFTA and its ilk represent. We should be glad that, for once, Americans' memories are long enough to constitute a learning curve. We as a people might even squeak by with a passing grade in Applied Globalism 101.
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If it's such a bad idea now, it will be just as bad an idea after the election
[Read the article: A non-paranoid's guide to superdelegates]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Walter Shapiro clearly takes a dim view of the hand-wringing over the Democratic delegate system, but his argument against it misses what seems the obvious objection to any last-minute calls for messing around with the system mid-election.
What it comes down to is that if unpledged delegates are a bad idea now, they'll be a bad idea a year from now, too, after the general election. That is the time for the Democratic Party to fix its business, if it wants to — not now.
What's frustrating about the outraged opposition of so many Obama supporters is that it's essentially a death-row conversion. All the sturm und drang constitutes nothing more than opportunism.
One has to ask — if the situation between Obama and Clinton were reversed, would the Obama people be raising a hue and cry against the "superdelegates"?
Show me a campaign to eliminate unpledged delegates beginning January 2009 and I'll believe in the sincerity of people who now claim that "the superdelegates" are the greatest threat to democracy since Bush v Gore. Otherwise, as a principled stand, such a view is unworthy of serious consideration.
If back-room caucusing is part of how the 2008 nomination process was set up, then those are the rules and that's how it is. If you aren't happy with it, Democrats, you shouldn't have gone along with it. Next time you might try giving a rat's ass in advance about your political system.
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Beating 2000 to death
[Read the article: Ralph Nader loves John McCain]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]First of all, Gore didn't lose in 2000. He won. Without Greens, without Naderites, without whomever else, Gore won the election. Some readers may need to chew on that slowly for a while before it goes down without choking them. That's fine. Take your time.
Now then. Gore's campaign, having already spiraled dizzingly out of control as his popularity deflated from his early lead, should not have been so utterly unprepared to deal with Bush's post-election ground campaign. Knowing that the race had come down to the wire, Gore surrendered to Fox News without even waiting for verification of the results they were announcing. It was like he wanted to give up. It was sickening, and there is nobody to blame for it but Gore — and, perhaps, the party apparatchiks who helped him down that primrose path.
Gore let himself get outfoxed and outfought. Why, after the very same thing happened to John Kerry in 2004, is there still this urge to blame Nader or the Greens?
If one is going to blame someone other than the candidate and his campaign staff, why not blame the Hispanics? There were more Latino Democrats who defected to the GOP in 2000 than there were Greens in total.
The fact of the matter is that the Democratic party's failures over the past 30 years are part of a consistent pattern of severe institutional dysfunction, of which the 2000 election was, despite the convenient scapegoat, merely yet another example.
Yes, over those three decades Democratic presidential candidates have regularly (1980, 1992, 2000) had to contend with serious third-party challengers. Has anyone in the DNC stopped to wonder why that is?
It's not as if the mere existence of a third party means doom for Democrats. The longer in tooth may recall that early in the 1992 campaign, Ross Perot's supporters could be more or less evenly divided between Democrat-leaning and Republican-leaning independents. By the time the campaign was drawing to a close, only the Republican-leaning ones were left.
Ross Perot's movement turned into a liability for the Republicans entirely because Bill Clinton saw it as an opportunity, and took it, whereas Bush pere did not. Clinton became president in 1992 by giving his own party a (well-deserved) middle finger and campaigning to win, and his embrace and assimilation of independent political sentiments was critical to that strategy.
(It's an immense irony that the post-millennial heir to that very same tradition — Howard Dean — was so lambasted by the Clinton cadre for challenging the party leadership. Plus ca change...)
Most Greens got over Nader after 2000. Why are some Democrats still hanging on?
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Funny....
[Read the article: The audacity of narcissism]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... even though I believe [voting for Nader] cost Al Gore the presidency.
It's funny, the 2000 election that I remember was won by Al Gore in votes, conceded prematurely with staggering stupidity by Al Gore, and then subsequently lost by Al Gore in the investigative, journalistic, and legal battles that followed.
Where is Ralph Nader in any of that? Was Joan Walsh in a different 2000 election than I was? (Perhaps it was the same one that Farhad "Not Proven!" Manjoo was covering.)
When we look at how many Latino Democrats defected to the GOP in 2000, we shake our heads and accuse Gore of failing to reach out to them enough.
But when we look at how many left-wing Democrats defected to the Green Party (a far smaller number, by the way), we shake our fists and accuse them of being responsible for the events that followed.
Which response is more constructive? Which is more likely to win over the disaffected? Which constitutes being doomed to repeat the mistakes of history?