The idea is that if you have to claim that people have an obligation to vote for a certain candidate, which is absurd, but nonetheless, if you must, then it is only reasonable that Democrats are more obligated to vote for Gore than would be non-Democrats, e.g. independents, Greens, Republicans, Libertarians, etc.

So then have a look at the Democrats who broke their "obligation" by not voting for Gore. Some few thousand voted Nader. Some hundreds of thousands voted for Bush.

And yet your conclusion is to blame Nader.

It makes no sense. What does make sense is that Nader makes for an easier scapegoat than examining the true reasons for Gore's defeat, which are complex, multitudinous, and fall heavily on the shoulders of Democrats themselves.

Mr. Conason, why do you and many Democrats have so little interest in spoil-proofing elections, which IRV would have done in 2000 (assuming, of course, that most Gore supporters would have ranked Nader higher than Bush)?

I am an enthusiastic Obama fan. When I heard Nader is running this year, my reaction was "Come on! Not this year! Why are you doing this?". Today I heard the interview with Nader and Mat Gonzalez on KQED:

http://www.kqed.org/programs/radio/forum/

I have to admit that afterwards I have nothing but enormous respect for them and what they stand for. I simply don't understand what all the fuss of Nader opponents is about. If you think he's not going to get more than 0.3% of the vote this year, then why are you so angry. This is not 2000, anybody who decides to vote for Nader knows what they are doing and if they consciously decide not to vote for democrats, that's their choice. It's no different than how independents decide to vote, or Libertarians decide not to vote for the Republicans. I personally might vote for Nader only if the polls show that Obama (or Clinton!) is ahead of McCain in California with a comfortable margin in November.

The article itself does not hold up to usual journalistic standards of Salon, I wonder where Greg Greenwald (who I have great respect for) is now to list the many flaws here, or maybe they are not allowed to critique a fellow Salon writer.

Hey Joe -

And I quote, from SF Chronicle 2/29/08:

DeLeon said the Nader-Gonzalez ticket could have an effect on the Democratic nominee, keeping Obama or Clinton from moving as far to the center as either might without a challenger on the left.

"I hear some right-wing commentators describe Obama as a left-wing radical. We just laugh," DeLeon said. "There's a certain function the Nader-Gonzalez ticket can play in reminding people what a real left-wing radical in the American system looks like. In that context, Obama looks more like an acceptable political centrist."

Sincerely,

Hillary Langolf

Kudos to omooex for his letter Salon and Partisan Hackery.

The US political system has failed. The party leadership of Republicans and Democrats are equally corruptive players in betraying the Republic and democracy. The 3 presidential contenders anointed by corporate media are a continuation of this corruption.

This 2 party system stranglehold needs to be destroyed. We have a pushmi-pullyu but we got 2 butts instead of heads so get crap either way. We need representation.

Worrying about Ralph Nader upsetting the outcome of which made man will be president is stupid. All we will get with any of them is more of the same. War profiteering, crimes and mongering, trickle down attrition and do it for the money professional politicians are and will be the status quo.

...not atypically of determined Democrat party tools. Nader waited until Kucinich and Edwards, the two genuine anti-corporate populists, were out before launching his candidacy to keep in the discourse a populist agenda Hillary and her racist supporters and Barack and his sexist supporters would prefer to ignore.

More odious to Nader than the expected bad behavior of Republicans like McCain is the rank betrayal of the rank and file by Democrat party corporate whores like Hillary and Barack, so he concentrates his fire on the Democrats, who have a tradition of telling their conservative minority in government "You must of course vote your convictions" and warning their liberal majority "You must of course vote 'pragnmatically'."

Conason's willful blindness to the substance of Nader's message is not surprising, given his contention expressed in a public forum a few years back that we cannot simple expect principled stands from elected officials, we have to "make" them. He doesn't expect principles or integrity, so he can't see them.

Those people happen to be Republicans. The question voters should ask, though, is not who is nice to Ralph Nader. It is: have the Republicans been nice to me, to my children, to my country, to my planet?

By the way h_lance you are lucid in every one of your posts. Of course there were other reasons for Bush's victory (disenfranchisement of minorities, butterfly ballot, Supreme Court, and Gore's own mistakes), but those other reasons wouldn't have been enough to tip the scales enough to give the White House to Bush. Without Nader's participation in swing states, Gore would have been President, that is obvious and undeniable.

The only positive thing Nader's candidacy has brought is that it has discredited Green Parties throughout the world. It used to be that Green Parties automatically received the environmental vote, including mine. After Gore's Green Party-enabled defeat, it became clear to many that this was not the way to get things done. In California, as in many European countries, the environmental movement has freed itself from any single political party, thereby forcing the major parties to take account of this large bloc of voters. In France, as in California, this has led to more environmental policies than would have been possible if the local Green Party had continued to monopolize the environmental vote.

h_lance hit the nail in the head:

No sincere third party wants to run a candidate if doing so would actually "spoil" the vote on their side of the political spectrum and result in the election of an ideological foe.

Either you believe that Nader is not sincere (Conason, other critics) or that the Democrats are not on the same side of the political spectrum as Nader (Nader and supporters.)

It's that simple.