While I'm one of those who watched in dismay as the 2000 election fiasco unfolded, I think it's unreasonable to suggest that someone shouldn't run for president just because they might be a "spoiler". That to me sounds as ridiculous as some suggestions I've read in other Salon forums that Barack Obama should have waited for his "turn" and had no right to run against Hillary Clinton.

Having said that, I would request all those who want the Democratic nominee to win, to please point out to prospective Nader voters what their candidate's flaws are. Taking money and help from people whose principles he supposedly abhors, definitely takes some of the sheen off him.

Also, I'd like to see an article - a real article, not an opinion piece - on what Mr. Nader's contributions have been between his runs for the presidency since the year 2000. Those who would vote for him should at least do that much research - the Wikipedia entry on him, which I looked at, didn't really cover this period except for his runs for office.

"why don't the dems just buy Nader off? Offer him a plum job policy job in the new administration, in return for supporting the dem in November."

You make a strong assumption. You assume that Ralph is rational. I don't think that he is. He is trying to make some kind of deranged point, and is not interested in a sensible idea like yours.

riiiiight. that's funny, and here i thought all this time it was george bush & co. and all those dimwit dem's who voted for the invasion. silly me. You can't spin this one Nader haters, no matter how hard you try.

I work for a democratic administration. If they are representative of most dems across the country, they are as materially mainstream, racist,and hollow as the repugnants. all they care about is winning and beating the other corporate party across the aisle. no policy, no change, no nothing. "just win, keep your job, & don't cause any waves." that's why we're in the mess we're in. and to think you dem lovers fall for the rhetoric each time an election comes around. shame on you and your stupid ass party.

Yes, Nader supporters, Al Gore ran a pretty awful campaign. So did John Kerry.

But I have to carry some hope that even the most ardent Nader supporter must realize that any effort to build a viable Green Party coalition has been set back by at least 2 decades by Nader's NECESSITY to appear on the national stage. How much money has the Green Party spent on his candidacy (much of it coming from the same people who would gleefully dash any type of legislation he would try to push through even as president). How many Green candidates have been shunned in local races because of discontent with Nader's national antics?

Surely you can see that Nader running on Republican donations IS a spoiler run? There's no other reason for it. And the hypocrisy with which he'll accept private funds from Republican millionaires who wouldn't support any of his policies, and yet decry "politics as usual" has been probably the single most destructive factor for the Greens. It incenses me that Nader will accept help from Republican operatives to get his name on the ballot and money in his coffers. Does he really think that they would support his policies? If he does, he's too naive to be president. If he doesn't, he's an egomaniac. Either way, he has only accomplished two things in the last 10 years: He's helped contribute to the mess we're in now. And he's set back the green party's chance of getting anything close to a Congressional Caucus. If he cared about his cause, he'd get back to doing the right thing for it: build a grassroots coalition from the ground up.

Hey reasonable Nader supporters.

I can admit that Gore ran a spineless campaign in 2000 and that most of the present democrats in congress are spineless, why can't you admit that Nader took more votes from democrats than republicans in 2000? That he was indeed a spoiler.

Why is that so hard to admit that he played a small but significant part in getting Bush into office?

Is it admitting that you may be theoretically fallible?

Also, tell me if Ralph Nader has produced or at least designed a car that was safe at any speed? (It is kind of ironic that Nader's hostility to the Corvair helped killed it and any of its smaller car descendants.) Has he created sustainable insurance companies that could deliver affordable health and auto coverages? Has he actually produced anything but criticism?

And could you tell me why some of Nader's supporters takes glee at Gore's loss; you really think we are really better off now with Bush than we would have been with Gore?

said, I believe, the more they professed their innocence the faster we hid our spoons.

The same thing applies to Nader voters. They know they tipped the scale to Bush in Florida in 2000, so they have to come up with lengthy diatribes about how they didn't, because otherwise they couldn't sleep at night.

All the evil that followed, and continues today, then, can reasonably be attributed, at least in part, to their vote.

"why can't you admit that Nader took more votes from democrats than republicans in 2000?"

Because there is no evidence for that. Simple. The idea that Democrats were jumping ship to vote for Nader in a close state like Florida is totally unfounded. Far more Democrats jumped ship to vote for Bush in Florida in 2000, than voted Green.

There's just about as much evidence that more those Democrats who did vote for Nader would have voted for Gore as there is evidence that Nader somehow supports McCain despite working against him and men like him for the past seven years of GWB.

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?