No Difference? Really?
Oh, what a strange two months it has been. John McCain beat Mitt Romney in enough winner-take-all states on Super Tuesday to make his way clear toward the Republican Presidential nomination while the Democratic race plays out like an epic boxing match with neither unable to land the knockout blow. (Interestingly enough, there were also arguments in Michigan by the Obama people that somehow it will disenfranchise voters to have a revote, and that this will not hurt him in Novmber should he be the nominee against McCain, as arguments continue as to whether or not it's even possible at this point for Senator Clinton to catch Senator Obama to win the nomination.) However, one thing that should come as a surprise to no one, is that Ralph Nader (Egomania) is going to make yet another run for President.
By now, anyone with a pulse who has followed American politics over the last decade or so can recite Nader's pitch almost verbatim: the two parties are beholden to special interest money, they are trying to keep him out of the debate, we need more than two options, no difference between the two major parties, etc. However, one thing that has changed between Nader's 2000 run and his 2008 run is the fact that we have seen what happens when one thinks that there really is no difference between the two major parties. Well, let's look at the things that have happened under President George W. Bush and ask whether or not those would have occurred under President Gore.
Taxes and the Budget Deficit President Bush's first major legislative accomplishment was the passage of his $1.35 trillion tax cut which saw nearly 40% of the benefits go to the top 1% of income earners in the United States. Before the passage of this tax cut, I remember arguments that we were actually paying off the national debt too fast. At the time of the 200 Presidential elections, I remember that Vice President Gore talked about paying off all national debt not dedicated to Social Security and Medicare by 2012. Now that we are getting closer and closer to that date, it looks like the national debt will probably double instead.
Economy I will not pretend that many millions of Americans were left behind by the economic boom of the 1990's. However, for the first time in a long time, things were looking up for those at the bottom of the economic totem pole. By the end of the Clinton Administration, real wages (amount non-salaried workers made adjusted to inflation) increased for the first time since 1978. The poverty rate declined steadily every year. There were more millionaires and billionaires created in those eight years than in any other time in our nation's history combined. However, since then, the economic rebound for the working-class has ended, poverty has increased dramatically, the shift of income to the top has only accelerated, and with the collapse of housing and the dollar, one dreads what would be required to get us out of this fiscal mess, which would make what FED Chairman Paul Volcker did to end the inflation of the 1970's and the recession of the early 1980's seem tame in comparison.
Health Care In 1993-94, President Clinton, and then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, attempted to bring about universal health insurance for Americans. As we all know, that plan failed. However, there were other accomplishments during that era, such as the passage of S-CHIP. When President Clinton took office, there were 37 million Americans uninsured, or 14.2% of the total population at the time. By the end of his term in office, that number had risen to 39 million Americans, but it had actually fallen as a percentage of the population to 13.8%. In the past seven years, the number made it to 47 million, and a percentage of the population at 15.7%.
The Environment Considering that Ralph Nader ran on the Green Party ticket in 2000, you would think that Nader and his supporters would have taken some pause at the argument that George W. Bush, the Texas oilman son of a Texas oilman who allowed Houston to overtake Los Angeles as the smog capital of the world in 1999 (A title that was returned to L.A. in the early 2000's), was really no different than the author of Earth in the Balance, the man who held global warming hearings in Congress as early as 1977, succeeded in the fight to clean up nuclear energy disposal in 1978, and was one of the key advocates of the Montreal Accords, which effectively solved the CFC crisis of the 1980's. However, the fact that global warming has gotten worse while Former Vice President Gore went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 shows me that maybe it wasn't about the environment after all.
War in Iraq President Bush made an effort to rally the nation to war in Iraq as early as the "axis of evil" speech during the State of the Union in January 2002. In September of that year, Al Gore stood up and said that there was no reason to go to war with Iraq. In November 2002, when asked about what he would have done differently in the "war on terror" by David Letterman, he replied that he would have kept a force of at least 35,000 in Afghanistan as a peacekeeping effort, something made impossible by the efforts of President Bush to siphon funds to Iraq instead of Afghanistan.
There you have it, on every major issue, things have gotten worse over the last eight years. On every one of those issues, Vice President Gore was right, and Governor Bush was wrong. However, for Ralph Nader, this never mattered. An article posted on Slate one week before the 2000 election tells us all that really mattered to Nader all along:
The article goes on to state Nader's desire to defeat all kinds of Democrats in close states, even liberal heroes such as the late Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) and Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI). So, it was never to pull Democrats to the left; it was to start a movement of the Green Party with Nader as the head of the new left-wing major political party in America.
Now, of course, Nader is trying to insist that he wasn't the one who swung the election to Bush after all. (I guess there are only so many donors you can lose because of your real motives before you drop that tune, at least publicly.) Even if it really was the Supreme Court that did it in Florida, let's look at the math. Al Gore "lost" Florida by 537 votes in the 2000 election, swinging the Electoral College to George W. Bush by a margin of 271-267, meaning any one state would have made the difference in giving the election to Gore. There were two states where Bush's margin was exceeded by Nader's vote total: Florida and New Hampshire. In the case of the latter, Gore lost by 7000 voters with Nader receiving 22,000 votes, meaning that in the exit poll question of Nader voters of who they would have voted for with Nader out of the election, Gore, Bush or none of the above, Gore would have had to have beat Bush on that count by a net of 32%. In other words, if every Nader voter would have voted for one or the other, Gore would have had to have been the preferred choice of at least 66% of the voters. It is possible, but not the most likely scenario, so let's ignore it for now and assume that Bush would have won New Hampshire anyway.
Which brings us back to Florida. The official margin was 537. Ralph Nader received 97,419 votes, which makes this scenario much more likely. So, let's go to the exit polls in Florida. The final percentages: vote for Gore, 37%; vote for Bush, 21%; other/not vote, 42%. In other words, a net of 16% of Nader voters that would have certainly gone to Gore, or a total of 15,587 votes for Gore. If you add that to his margin in Florida, he would have won the state by 15,050 votes, and it would have been impossible for the Supreme Court to take that victory away. So, yes, Ralph Nader swung the 2000 election to George W. Bush, which is just what he wanted.
So, to all the Nader supporters out there, was it worth it? How have these last eight years worked for you? I have heard a lot about the things that Nader accomplished as a young man, and they were indeed important. However, I've been unable to find anything that he has accomplished since 1980, when he publicly distanced himself from Nader's Raider Joan Claybrook for taking a job with the Carter Administration. (Public Citizen, the group Nader founded and Claybrook heads, removed his name from their masthead as founder emeritus in 2004, and reminded supporters that Nader had nothing to do with the organization after 1980.) As someone who will have back pain for the rest of my life because of Bush's war, can any of you give me an honest answer as to why I wouldn't be able to get up in the morning most every day without a sharp pain in my back (caused by armor plating that didn't fit, and only arrived after I was in the theater of operations for 264 days) if it would have been Al Gore in the White House? If not, can I at least receive an apology for your act of vanity? As Randi Rhodes told Nader four years ago, "We can't afford you!"
By now, anyone with a pulse who has followed American politics over the last decade or so can recite Nader's pitch almost verbatim: the two parties are beholden to special interest money, they are trying to keep him out of the debate, we need more than two options, no difference between the two major parties, etc. However, one thing that has changed between Nader's 2000 run and his 2008 run is the fact that we have seen what happens when one thinks that there really is no difference between the two major parties. Well, let's look at the things that have happened under President George W. Bush and ask whether or not those would have occurred under President Gore.
Taxes and the Budget Deficit President Bush's first major legislative accomplishment was the passage of his $1.35 trillion tax cut which saw nearly 40% of the benefits go to the top 1% of income earners in the United States. Before the passage of this tax cut, I remember arguments that we were actually paying off the national debt too fast. At the time of the 200 Presidential elections, I remember that Vice President Gore talked about paying off all national debt not dedicated to Social Security and Medicare by 2012. Now that we are getting closer and closer to that date, it looks like the national debt will probably double instead.
Economy I will not pretend that many millions of Americans were left behind by the economic boom of the 1990's. However, for the first time in a long time, things were looking up for those at the bottom of the economic totem pole. By the end of the Clinton Administration, real wages (amount non-salaried workers made adjusted to inflation) increased for the first time since 1978. The poverty rate declined steadily every year. There were more millionaires and billionaires created in those eight years than in any other time in our nation's history combined. However, since then, the economic rebound for the working-class has ended, poverty has increased dramatically, the shift of income to the top has only accelerated, and with the collapse of housing and the dollar, one dreads what would be required to get us out of this fiscal mess, which would make what FED Chairman Paul Volcker did to end the inflation of the 1970's and the recession of the early 1980's seem tame in comparison.
Health Care In 1993-94, President Clinton, and then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, attempted to bring about universal health insurance for Americans. As we all know, that plan failed. However, there were other accomplishments during that era, such as the passage of S-CHIP. When President Clinton took office, there were 37 million Americans uninsured, or 14.2% of the total population at the time. By the end of his term in office, that number had risen to 39 million Americans, but it had actually fallen as a percentage of the population to 13.8%. In the past seven years, the number made it to 47 million, and a percentage of the population at 15.7%.
The Environment Considering that Ralph Nader ran on the Green Party ticket in 2000, you would think that Nader and his supporters would have taken some pause at the argument that George W. Bush, the Texas oilman son of a Texas oilman who allowed Houston to overtake Los Angeles as the smog capital of the world in 1999 (A title that was returned to L.A. in the early 2000's), was really no different than the author of Earth in the Balance, the man who held global warming hearings in Congress as early as 1977, succeeded in the fight to clean up nuclear energy disposal in 1978, and was one of the key advocates of the Montreal Accords, which effectively solved the CFC crisis of the 1980's. However, the fact that global warming has gotten worse while Former Vice President Gore went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 shows me that maybe it wasn't about the environment after all.
War in Iraq President Bush made an effort to rally the nation to war in Iraq as early as the "axis of evil" speech during the State of the Union in January 2002. In September of that year, Al Gore stood up and said that there was no reason to go to war with Iraq. In November 2002, when asked about what he would have done differently in the "war on terror" by David Letterman, he replied that he would have kept a force of at least 35,000 in Afghanistan as a peacekeeping effort, something made impossible by the efforts of President Bush to siphon funds to Iraq instead of Afghanistan.
There you have it, on every major issue, things have gotten worse over the last eight years. On every one of those issues, Vice President Gore was right, and Governor Bush was wrong. However, for Ralph Nader, this never mattered. An article posted on Slate one week before the 2000 election tells us all that really mattered to Nader all along:
This depraved indifference to Republican rule has made Nader's old liberal friends even more furious. A bunch of intellectuals organized by Sean Wilentz and Todd Gitlin are circulating a much nastier open letter, denouncing Nader's "wrecking-ball campaign--one that betrays the very liberal and progressive values it claims to uphold." But really, the question shouldn't be the one liberals seem to be asking about why Nader is doing what he's doing. The question should be why anyone is surprised. For some time now, Nader has made it perfectly clear that his campaign isn't about trying to pull the Democrats back to the left. Rather, his strategy is the Leninist one of "heightening the contradictions." It's not just that Nader is willing to take a chance of being personally responsible for electing Bush. It's that he's actively trying to elect Bush because he thinks that social conditions in American need to get worse before they can better.
Nader often makes this "the worse, the better" point on the stump in relation to Republicans and the environment. He says that Reagan-era Interior Secretary James Watt was useful because he was a "provocateur" for change, noting that Watt spurred a massive boost in the Sierra Club's membership. More recently, Nader applied the same logic to Bush himself. Here's the Los Angeles Times' account of a speech Nader gave at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., last week: "After lambasting Gore as part of a do-nothing Clinton administration, Nader said, 'If it were a choice between a provocateur and an anesthetizer, I'd rather have a provocateur. It would mobilize us.' "
The article goes on to state Nader's desire to defeat all kinds of Democrats in close states, even liberal heroes such as the late Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) and Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI). So, it was never to pull Democrats to the left; it was to start a movement of the Green Party with Nader as the head of the new left-wing major political party in America.
Now, of course, Nader is trying to insist that he wasn't the one who swung the election to Bush after all. (I guess there are only so many donors you can lose because of your real motives before you drop that tune, at least publicly.) Even if it really was the Supreme Court that did it in Florida, let's look at the math. Al Gore "lost" Florida by 537 votes in the 2000 election, swinging the Electoral College to George W. Bush by a margin of 271-267, meaning any one state would have made the difference in giving the election to Gore. There were two states where Bush's margin was exceeded by Nader's vote total: Florida and New Hampshire. In the case of the latter, Gore lost by 7000 voters with Nader receiving 22,000 votes, meaning that in the exit poll question of Nader voters of who they would have voted for with Nader out of the election, Gore, Bush or none of the above, Gore would have had to have beat Bush on that count by a net of 32%. In other words, if every Nader voter would have voted for one or the other, Gore would have had to have been the preferred choice of at least 66% of the voters. It is possible, but not the most likely scenario, so let's ignore it for now and assume that Bush would have won New Hampshire anyway.
Which brings us back to Florida. The official margin was 537. Ralph Nader received 97,419 votes, which makes this scenario much more likely. So, let's go to the exit polls in Florida. The final percentages: vote for Gore, 37%; vote for Bush, 21%; other/not vote, 42%. In other words, a net of 16% of Nader voters that would have certainly gone to Gore, or a total of 15,587 votes for Gore. If you add that to his margin in Florida, he would have won the state by 15,050 votes, and it would have been impossible for the Supreme Court to take that victory away. So, yes, Ralph Nader swung the 2000 election to George W. Bush, which is just what he wanted.
So, to all the Nader supporters out there, was it worth it? How have these last eight years worked for you? I have heard a lot about the things that Nader accomplished as a young man, and they were indeed important. However, I've been unable to find anything that he has accomplished since 1980, when he publicly distanced himself from Nader's Raider Joan Claybrook for taking a job with the Carter Administration. (Public Citizen, the group Nader founded and Claybrook heads, removed his name from their masthead as founder emeritus in 2004, and reminded supporters that Nader had nothing to do with the organization after 1980.) As someone who will have back pain for the rest of my life because of Bush's war, can any of you give me an honest answer as to why I wouldn't be able to get up in the morning most every day without a sharp pain in my back (caused by armor plating that didn't fit, and only arrived after I was in the theater of operations for 264 days) if it would have been Al Gore in the White House? If not, can I at least receive an apology for your act of vanity? As Randi Rhodes told Nader four years ago, "We can't afford you!"
posted by Albert McStephenson at 6:25 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home