Ralph Nader has never been a member of the Green Party.

In 2004, he dropped out of the race for the Green Party's nomination, then he tried to get the Green Party to endorse his independent candidacy. Understandably uninterested in backing a candidate who had no interest in building the party (and, not coincidentally, disagreed with the party on a number of our core issues) the Green Party decided instead to run one of our own, David Cobb. Cobb was very open about pursuing a "smart-states strategy" that focused on solidly red and solidly blue states. He did so in part because he understood that there was a real difference between Kerry and Bush, however inadequate the pro-war Massachusetts Senator was.

Of course, the Naderites accused the Green Party of doing a secret deal with the Democrats. Without an iota of evidence this lie has been repeated for over four years now. And it's repeated yet again upthread:

In 2004, the Green Party made an agreement with the Democrats to not run anyone seriously.

Bullshit.

Nader has turned himself into an almost entirely irrelevant political joke. I say "almost entirely irrelevant" because I believe that while he has lost the capacity to further damage the Democratic Party, he and his supporters can still do further damage to the Greens.

At any rate, I'd recommend that Democrats simply ignore his 2008 campaign. It's what Nader deserves. But if you insist on obsessively denouncing Nader, kindly leave the Green Party out of it!

I don't know if you read my earlier post, but here's the salient point again.

I'm a liberal. For the first 25 years of my voting life I voted Democrat. But I'm a liberal first and, with the ascension of the DLC, I had to break ranks with the Democratic party.

As I said in my previous post, politics in this country have been moving to the right for a long time now. One of the main reasons for that movement is that liberals make no demands on Democratic candidates. The Democratic Party knows this. It's precisely what allowed Clinton to run as a triangulator. He knew he could take liberal votes for granted, so he ran a tough on crime, tough on national security campaign. (And by the way, that strategy has always failed. Clinton never got a majority of votes and during his tenure in office, Dems lost their majorities in the House, Senate and of governorships.) As long as liberals offer Democrats their votes, money and activism and demand nothing in return, we give them no possible reason to do anything for us. Why would they? So politics moves ever rightward and Democrats somehow conclude that Ralph Nader is at fault. He's not; people who claim to be liberals but who vote for any and every Democrat on the ticket regardless of their politics are.

My position is pragmatic. Liberals need to force Democrats to govern in a more liberal way. If we don't, who will?

Again, the Christian Right is far smarter than liberals. They know that, by withholding their votes, money and activism, the Republican candidate may lose this time, but next time they'll get their issues paid attention to. That's why they have more stroke with the Reps than liberals do with the Dems.

Maybe that's the way you like it, but count me out. Any time the Dems start paying attention to liberal issues, they can have me back, but not until then.

At this point I think it is safe to say Ralph Nader seems aggressively intent on destroying his own posthumous rep. And politricks being what they are it is obvious why the Repugs would support his continued self-immolation- even when it is clear he won’t draw as many votes as he did in 2004. He draws votes from the Democrats. But more importantly, in publicly airing his positions he shows the Democrats up as being Weaker Republicans rather than a true opposition party. And why wouldn’t Nader accept McCain’s support? It is probably the only support he’s gonna get- since clearly most of you who agree with him hold him responsible for Bush- so being used this way is a small price to pay for a bully pulpit. There is a bit of the Don Quixote in Nader, but if he is clinically insane, so is Kucinich. And Edwards for that matter. And most liberal Democrats are as morally bankrupt as the Busheviks make them out to be.

Nader wouldn’t have ever been a factor in national politics if 1) he hadn’t have made a good name for himself as a public advocate at a time when it wouldn’t have even occurred to most people, and 2) if the Democrats hadn’t moved so far to the right they no longer represented those of us who don’t accept the neo-con vision of where the political center lies. It wasn’t Nader’s fault Gore lost in 2000. It was the Gore’s own fault. Gore didn’t have the eye of the tiger Bush did, nor did he sufficiently distinguish himself from the Repugs. Given what has happened since it is easy to see how much of a difference there probably would have been had Gore become president- but 20-20 hindsight is always perfect, no?

I voted for Nader in 2000. Many try to make me feel bad about it, but I live on the west coast in a state that Gore won by 2.5 million votes, and this was settled by the time I voted. I still feel good about my vote, and I’m only sorry more left coasters didn’t vote for him because Nader was and is trying to tell you something: If you won’t stand up for and fight for your own beliefs you get whatever they give you.

Any third party is a bucket full of crazy. It will always be made up of malcontents, fringe loons, extremists and idiots.

Robert Franklin -

My position is pragmatic. Liberals need to force Democrats to govern in a more liberal way. If we don't, who will?

I really very strongly agree with you in spirit.

But what you have to keep in mind is that electing Republicans leads to much more overt physical, pragmatic harm to literally millions of people, than electing current Democrats.

It's closing in on 5000 Americans, not counting the many times more Iraqis, dead, just dead in Iraq. That doesn't count the unbelievable toll on the wounded or psychologically traumatized.

The economy is in a predictable shambles. The effects of that on struggling people are enormous.

There are so many more examples of direct human suffering caused, not by the absence of "liberal" policies, but by the direct application of harmful, ideologically rigid "conservative" policies, that I wouldn't be able to run down the list in 10,000 words, let alone 1000. I've mentioned only two that are rather unequivocally linked to Bush policies.

So a strategy of "forcing the Democrats to pay attention" by abandoning the country to Republicans just can't be used.

What can we do?

1) Try to build grass roots support for progressive policies; force them into the public discourse. This has been happening very nicely for universal access to health care, full equal rights for gays, and questions about the death penalty, just to name a few.

2) Become part of the Democratic party. Help it to win. Then point out your contribution. Of course, right wing Christians took that route, and gained little from the Republicans. But there's a huge difference - many progressive policies are popular in polls, constitutionally valid, useful, not excessively divisive, and sustainable. And progressives believe sincerely in them, unlike "amend the constitution to force the Ten Commandments into court rooms" types who don't even know what the Ten Commandments are.

In my opinion, it is clear that progressives have to work with the Democratic party because defensive voting against Republicans is, for the time being, absolutely necessary. It was a terrible, terrible mistake for this country to elect George W. Bush. Any Democrat - and I mean any - would have been far less of a disaster. Bill Clinton was extremely conservative by Democrat standards and was massively less harmful than George W. Bush. (Anyone who denies this in the name of ideological or moral purity is truly being silly.)

If virtually every extremist of every flavor on the right has united in a single party, and they have, we have no choice, for the time being, but to advance progressive policies through the instrument of the one party strong enough to oppose them. To do otherwise is merely to cede "four more years" or "forty more years" to whacked out authoritarian right wing ideologues. By the time you've built up your third party, if you ever do, it may very well be too late to matter.

The Democratic party has many truly progressive members in strong positions; Russ Feingold is an obvious example, just off the top of my head. I see constant complaints about things like the fact that only 60% of Democratic senators voted against telecom immunity. Well, 0% of Republicans voted against it. There are things called primaries. It is better to have a sane conservative Democrat than a wingnut (there are clearly relevant differences), from areas that are currently too conservative to elect a liberal Democrat. There is plenty that progressives can do without "spoiling" elections and sending wingnuts to Washington.