Gang Green
The Democrats can cure their Ralph Nader problem by attacking him -- immediately and ferociously.
By Michael Tomasky
Web Exclusive: 7.23.03
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Here they come again. As if the last two and a half years have been some sort of game show with no real consequences for America and the world, the Greens signaled at their national committee meeting this weekend that they have every intention of running a presidential candidate in 2004.
It might be Ralph Nader, they say, or it could be Cynthia McKinney, the former congresswoman from Georgia. But short of a megalomaniac whose tenuous purchase on present-day reality threatens to cancel out every good thing he's done in his life, or a discredited anti-Semite, they'll settle for someone less distinguished. The point is to siphon off Democratic votes unless the Democrats prove themselves pure enough to nominate Dennis Kucinich. This development, as I'll show later, presents a wonderful opportunity for a gutsy Democrat to ferociously and immediately attack Nader. But first some background.
During the 2000 campaign, I used to go to bed wishing that the Christian Coalition were as strategically feebleminded, and as psychologically bent on disruption at any price, as the Greens. That way the CCers would have backed Gary Bauer, the laughably unelectable hard-right family values candidate. Then, once Bauer had been winnowed out of the nominating process, they would have claimed that his defeat showed just how corrupt the Republican Party had become from its incurable need to placate the secular humanists and "banking interests." Then they would have run some nut of their own who'd have made Bauer look like Arthur Vandenburg. Finally, with a few million misguided souls behind them, including at least a couple thousand in Florida, they would have cost George W. Bush the election, no asterisks or question marks. What a wonderful world this would be.
But the Christians are far smarter than these left-wing lions of ideological chastity, and so we are where we are. I'm assuming for the sake of argument that, of Nader's 2.8 million voters in 2000, about half are lost causes -- devoted dialecticians who won't allow facts to pass through the doors of their little theoretical straw huts. But I'm hoping that the other, more rational half exists, and I address my arguments to it.
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