Not sure Barack will get many Latino votes from this:
Meanwhile the "unreasonable man" still sounds reasonable after all these years:
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I teach Communication Studies (First Amendment, Classical Rhetoric, Civic Engagement, Rhetoric of Rock Music) at UW Oshkosh. Served two terms on Oshkosh City Council. Originally from Brooklyn, NY.
2 comments:
tony
To me, Nadar seems reasonable in his arguments & unreasonable in his actions.
As a Nader voter in 2000, I still believe in what the guy has to say but disagree tremendously as of late with his method for getting there.
In his Meet the Press announcement Nader disputes the notion that he was a "spoiler" for the 2000 election by stating that in Florida, Gore lost by a smaller margin than the number of votes (538) received by any of the independent parties. (Asserting they all must have been spoilers)
Here, Nader seems to insinuate that the Constitution Party, Libertarians or others would have grabbed these votes over Gore (if they hadn't simply stayed home) in Nader's absence.
Yet the fact remains that Nader received 98,000 votes in Florida, many of which came from younger (in my case, first time) voters who were inspired by his message & demographically the majority would have conceivably gone to Gore.
I would reserve for Nader what we Comm majors like to call the Ad Absurdum argument:
Nader's argument seems reasonable on the surface but leads to such an absurd argument-i.e. in his absence the number of Nader voters needed for Gore to win florida would have either stayed home or voted Socialists/Constitution/Libertarian, that his presence in the 2000 election was inconsequential to the net outcome...
Thus through Ad Absurdum we should argue that because of the absurd nature of this assertion, we must assume the opposite to be true... i.e.- Nader's 2000 campaign in Florida did indeed result in a sufficient number of voters that would have otherwise gone to Gore & thus in Nader's 2000 campaign in Florida greatly contributed to (if not resulting in) George Bush winning the state & hence, the National election. (& all dimpled chads aside, if Gore had won by even 20,000 votes in Florida, it would have been far more difficult to contest)
This is where my problem with Nader comes in. Even Nader could reasonably assert that in his absence from the 2000 election, George Bush would not have been elected President & instead our president would have been Al Gore.... who after all of the rhetoric & "evil of two lessers" arguments, could not possibly have been more evil or less lesser than George W. Bush.
Nader, in the meantime continues to act with the best laid intentions & poorest of execution. In the case, Nader again disregards the physical results of his actions in favor of proving a point.
As irony would have it, in the wake of the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Al Gore for environmental activism (one of the central pillars of The Green Party), where Nader's approach to activism instead calls for revolution without the means to achieve, ultimately strengthening those who would be his most reviled enemies by attrition to opponents of his opponents.
In the simplest of terms Nader's actions do not match his words.
The path to overall betterment as a nation would be Ralph Nader as an activist, not a candidate.
Matt,
I too want to believe that Al Gore would have been "less evil" than George Bush. In order to reach that conclusion, however, I have to believe also that the Democrats do not actually believe the policy positions they put forward. Cases in point:
*"Regime change" in Iraq was actually the official position of the Clinton-Gore administration. Did they not really believe it?
*Most of what was in the original Patriot Act legislation was actually based on repressive state policies that were advocated by Janet Reno's Justice Department. Did Clinton/Gore not really endorse those policies?
*The "No Child Left Behind" legislation represented the kind of federal takeover of education that Democrats had been calling for for many years. Did they not really believe in what they were calling for?
*NAFTA, without adequate labor and environmental standards, was advocated for vigorously by Gore in his famous debate with Ross Perot. Did he not really believe in it?
*Gore placed Joe Lieberman, a man who is substantially to the right of John McCain, on the VP ticket. Did he not really believe that Lieberman was the best choice?
*Al Gore's disregard for the First Amendment in the PMRC "record rating" charade of the 1980s was shameful and out of the playbook of the most right wing Republicans. Did he not really believe what he stood for and said?
Other examples could be given, but here's my point: I can buy the argument that Gore would have been a lesser evil, but it sure takes an awful lot of forgiving of policies and posturing to make that argument.
On the "spoiler" issue, Nader frequently cites the study by professor Solon Simmons (son of UWO profs Jim and Joan Simmons) that shows, pretty conclusively in my judgement, that Nader's presence on the ballot actually allowed Gore to CARRY a number of states that he otherwise would not have. Essentially, Simmons shows using a wealth of polling data that Nader brought people to the polls who ended up voting for Gore. In other words, if you take Nader out of the 2000 race, Gore probably loses by a wider margin and the Democrats probably do not make as many gains as they did in the Senate that year.
But I agree with you that Ralph running for President is probably not the best idea this year. Not because he might "spoil" a system that is already rotted to the core, but because a better use of him time and talents would be to organize the young people mobilized by Obama (and to a lesser extent Clinton) into doing things other than electoral work.Ragardless of who wins in November, those youth will be disillusioned before the first year of the first term is over when they see just how hopeless Washington is for anything other than a corporate agenda. The old Ralph Nader of the 60s and 70s was a master of channeling that youth energy into a variety of organizing activities. I think he should do that again.
Thanks for the note!
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