Rank the Presidential candidates

I think that there are some real differences between Huckabee and the likes of Falwell and his camp. He seems closer to the direction that we want on a number of issues. There are many liberal minded Arkansans who, though they didn't vote for Huckabee, did respect his interest in helping minorities, the poor and taking some measures to protect the environment. He has also shown willingness to appoint and take council from leaders on the other side of the aisle (something that the current administration has shamefully lacked.)

I read Dr. Seger's post on Huckabee's interest in changing the constitution and was somewhat bothered by her willingness to exaggerate and insinuate things that Huckabee does not advocate as being a part of his agenda. I think it is one thing to call attention to points in an agenda with which we disagree. It is another to imply that a person has intentions that he or she has not indicated.

It is fair to expose inconsistencies and problems with formulation. For example, if Huckabee's founding premise is that the Bible says that marriage is between one man and one woman and therefore the constitution should be amended so as to align with the Bible, then shouldn't the constitution, under that same line of reasoning, be amended to align with the command that Jesus placed above all others? Shouldn't our constitution require all citizens to love God with all their being?

Huckabee doesn't believe that it should. I imagine that his argument is more nuanced than what I've presented here as well. But my point is that there is a stark difference between pointing out absurd consequences that fall from a premise and implying that those absurd consequences are supported by someone who frames their argument in a certain way. This tactic is one of the favorite among Ann Coulter, Rush, and their crew. I hope that we can do better.

We need to avoid straw man representations of those who disagree with us. They do more harm to our side than to theirs.

David

In reading these posts, one of the things I've noticed is this divide between Nader and the Greens and more mainstream liberal Democrats. I've been reading a lot of books lately on liberal and progressive history, and one of the things that keeps coming up is the relationship between the more radical left and the mainstream left. I think Nader, and Kucinich are important not so much for the votes they garner, but for the ideas they add to the national debate. In the 1930s, the New Deal adopted many of the ideas of the more radical Socialist and Populist movements. The Great Society was influenced by grassroots movements in Civil Rights and fighting poverty. Radicals provide the ideas of change, moderates make the necessary compromises to make those ideas more acceptable to society.

In reading about Nader supporting Edwards and Kucinich supporting Obama, I think it's good. I think the success of Nader and Kucinich will be in influencing Edwards, Obama, Clinton or whoever eventually winds up as the Democratic nominee to adopt more progressive ideas.

Is there anyone who likes Ralph Nader who calls him a saint? I've always seen it being used as a sarcastic epithet. My understanding is that he's difficult and unreasonable, in a very personal way and not just in the politically praiseworthy way heralded by the documentary movie "An Unreasonable Man". And he's terrible on his own organizations' labor relations. No, few would call him a saint.

But what is there to criticize in his making money from investments that he uses to fund his own causes? Though he is said to live a spartan life, even if he doesn't and spends a little on himself, which the article doesn't charge, so what? Criticizing him for making a few million dollars is like criticizing John Edwards for having been a successful trial lawyer, living in a big house, and buying expensive haircuts. As if Edwards can't be legitimate as a critic of corporate misdeeds unless he's poor.

Nader's making money from some of the corporations he targets shows that he hasn't been pulling his punches in order to protect his investments. The article you cited, Frank, details his suit against 3Com, a company he owned stock in. That's the opposite of being corrupt.

I'll give my own personal testimony: my credentials as an anti-corporate campaigner date back to 1975 and the Peoples Bicentennial Commission, one of the first latter-day populist anti-corporate campaigning organizations. I was hired as the sole field person that year, traveling the Midwest as a speaker and organizer for about a year and a half, talking at campuses, churches, Rotary Clubs, and doing a lot of media. My subject was the anti-democratic and anti-Biblical nature of the corporate form itself, and the destructive results of our corporate political economy. As an indicator that I was for real as an anti-corporatist, even if not at all important, I was interviewed by Studs Terkel on his radio show in Chicago and Senator McCarran's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee criticized me as a Marxist who was distorting the Bible.

Yet, I worked as a stock and futures broker for more than 15 years, first on Wall St. between periods of graduate school, and then much later in Illinois in the late 80s and most of the 90s. ("Why" is a long story -- basically it was something I could mess around with at my own speed while recovering from a long illness.) Although I preferred "Socially Responsible Investments", I considered them at best to be "socially less irresponsible". None of them were really "clean". And I speculated for myself and for clients in things like soybeans, gold, oil, and currencies.

Heck, I even bought stock in the infamous Harken Energy after W himself became a director. My thought was that if a Bush is going to make money on something, for once I'll ride along and benefit too. And I made a little. Later the company tanked for a while and Bush was investigated for insider trading, but was cleared because of insufficient evidence.

Was I "besmirched"? I don't think so. Playing the market was like playing poker. More seriously, people who have some money have to put it somewhere -- and the business as we practiced it was honest and straightforward. I continued my advocacy (the owner of the firm called me "the Red Broker"), and my brokerage background even gave me some extra credibility. Not really liking people who were very wealthy, my own work was very small-townish and low-powered. After I retired from it and moved back east, I transitioned neatly into a part-time retirement job as the staff person for a multi-county Labor-Religion Coalition and continued with the same kind of advocacy and organizing that I'd been involved with for years.

So I say about Ralph Nader, more power to him if he can play the markets successfully and put a good part of the money to socially constructive use. His stock-buying doesn't even directly benefit any of the companies he invests in: it doesn't go to them unless he's buying a company's offering of new stock.

And about Cynthia McKinney. I'd read about that scuffle with the Capitol cop before. It's one of those things that can be spun either way. Since the police had a video of the incident and, from what I could find, never released it, I guess the facts are uncertain. It seems to be clear that he touched her before she touched him. The charge that she assaulted him strikes me as an over-reaction by the cop to what could well have been a simple self-defense reaction.

Anyway, I like her spirit.

There are subtle differences between the parties, but the for the truly progressive agenda we seek, we need to look beyond the established parties. Big money is in control of far too much of politics today. The system is broken and the only way out that I can see is to remove the money. For me, I'm committed to democratic change by supporting a third party, the Greens.

Even if one takes the approach that one out of many factors was THE decisive factor, the conclusion that the Nader vote made the difference in Florida doesn't hold up.

Aside from the fact that about 12% of Florida Democrats voted for Bush (more than 200,000 votes), most of Nader's 97.5 thousand votes came from people who: a) would not have voted at all, in part since many of them were registered by Green Party campaigners; b) who wouldn't have voted for Gore under any circumstances; c) who would have voted for Bush if they hadn't voted for Nader.

Yes, there were Republicans for Nader: "According to exit polling, those who voted for Nader were disproportionately under 30, independent, first time voters, formerly Perot voters, and of no organized religion. In other words, many of his voters did not naturally belong to the Democratic party. In fact, half as many Republicans as Democrats voted for Nader. Six percent of independents and 7% of Perot voters supported Nader while only 2% of Democrats did." [http://prorev.com/green2000.htm]

Nationally, according to exit polls, 62% of Nader's votes came from Republicans, independents, third-party voters and first-time voters. In Florida, CNN ran an exit poll asking how voters would have voted without Nader in the race. Bush would have done better than with Nader running: in this hypothetical race, he got 49% and Gore got only 47%, with 2% not voting.

Most of the potential Nader voters deserted him in the final weeks of the campaign. He had been polling around 6% and one poll had him at 7%. He wound up with only 2.74% of the total vote. Most of the drop-off was by people who then voted for Gore, as the Democrats put a lot of effort into scaring potential Nader voters with visions of them throwing the election to Bush. What was left was a hard-core constituency which was out of Gore's reach.

Even in NY, which is the 2nd most Democratic-voting state in the country, I knew Greens who were too scared to vote for Nader. I had an argument with a locally noted political scientist, a staunch Democrat who runs a local PBS radio station, who insisted one couldn't believe the NYS polls and that it was dangerous to vote Nader. I pointed out that if it were even close in NY, it would be a Bush landslide nationally, so it didn't matter. (Gore took NY by a 60-35% margin, with Nader at 3.6%, less than half of his best polling numbers in the state.)

Nader might have got the 5% vote that the Greens were hoping for, to give us federal matching funds in the future, if he had campaigned at the end to keep his vote up in the "safe" states, rather than going into the battleground states. He wrongly thought he'd get more PR that way, which would build toward the 5%. Instead, he lost a lot of votes in places like NY and Massachusetts because he didn't directly counter-attack against the Democrats' scare campaign.

I mentioned this once before, but I'll repeat it: in "Condorcet balloting", which is a series of head-to-head contests among all the candidates, Nader was the winner. That is, Nader won the Nader v. Bush and Nader v. Gore polls, while Gore won the Gore v. Bush poll. It was the first time ever that a loser was the Condorcet winner.

What beat Nader, the nation's favored candidate, was the two-party structure and money, and the resulting perception that Nader couldn't win. The poll showed that only 9.4% of the voters who favored Nader actually voted for him. 52% voted for Gore and 37.6% voted for Bush. [http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2004w12/msg00172.htm]

I think it's time to drop the scapegoating.