Nader redux

“Many people lavished hate on Ralph Nader for presumably taking votes away from the Democratic front-runner in the 2000 presidential election,” said Scott Highhouse, who has studied the decoy effect at Bowling Green State University. “Research on the decoy effect suggests that Nader’s presence, rather than taking votes away, probably increased the share of votes for the candidate he most resembled.”

I have said this before, posted it here before, and will say it again.  Ralph Nader seemed to sharpen Al Gore and force him to come to enough of a definition of his candidacy — which had been floundering until the Convention and the unveiling of the, for whatever it was worth or even meant, “People versus the Powerful” theme, thus Nader’s candidacy ended up a net benefit for Gore.  While I suppose what I am saying is that it forced him somewhat leftward to where the votes are, the “left — right” axis is immaterial — if he could have defined himself boldly — or in the case of the Gore candidacy more boldly — in a “centrist” measure, that would have been fine as well.  But Nader forced him somewhere, and without Nader — Gore would not have won the popular vote.  It is not a one or two dimensional electoral map — the populace are divided against themselves, and mobilized in various ways.

I keep hearing, most recently by Eric Alterman on an Air America Radio show — Sam Sedar — last night saying that Liberals and Democratic candidates have been unable to define visions or be , and tend to go into policy details instead of soundbytes of “core values”.  He cited Gore and he cited Kerry.  This is a bit incorrect — true enough for Kerry, but Gore — whatever else he was — settled on “People versus the Powerful”, which connotated some vageuly populist theme — awkwardly but I don’t think a candidate like Gore could have posited anything less awkwardly.  (Vice presidents succeeding presidents look to be in a strange spot of defining themselves against their bosses.  George H W Bush’s call for a “Kinder, Gentler America” raised ruffles from Nancy Reagan — but posited him as a more caring and moderate Reagan with the same nostalgic tinge of America begone.  Al Gore slid awkwardly to something slightly to the left of Clinton, which made as much sense as anything else.)
The disgusting thing is no variety of hypotethical positionings would have much effect on how Gore/Lieberman would have actually governed.  Actually there’s a simple matter in national elections (that would be the presidency) which is that the goal is to fool enough people into thinking that you are where they are at.  I see this weird debate about Clinton’s 1992 election between DLC types and more straight forward Democrats — his “centrist” policies won him the election versus his economic populist message won him the election.  Both, contradictory though they were, are true — look back to the 1992 Clinton campaign and it’s sort of stunning how duplicitious and two-faced Clinton was.  As all politicians are — how did George W Bush win as a moderate beloved by his fundamentalist base?
In summary to untangle a complicated muddle:  Nader came in.  Brought in his constituency of “Blast those two corporate stooge parties” voters.  And some of them decided to vote for the lesser of two evils once the lesser of two evils feignted somewhat their way.  It was enough to offset whatever number of voters who drifted from Gore to Nader, and was then more than offset by the voters who decided, either through smirks or with no sense of irony, that Al Gore is on the Side of the People and not the Powerful and is better experienced in that regard than “Compassionate Conservative” money-bucks Bush, friend of all Corporate Interests.

Link provided by thirdpartywatchblog.

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