CNN Breaking News: Ralph Nader To Run For President

This doesn't bother me at all. Three reasons:

1. Nader will ensure that issues important to Democrats remain a part of the debate, much like Sharpton and Kucinich do now.

2. With Nader on the left and Bush on the right, the Democrat occupies the center by definition. Bush will have a harder time painting the Dem a dangerous liberal while Nader's painting the Dem a dangerous conservative.

3. The only votes Nader gets this time will be from people who would have otherwise stayed home. Anyone who might consider voting Democrat won't be swayed to a Nader vote. The only ones still with Nader wouldn't consider voting Democrat whether he was in or not. And Nader votes from someone who would have otherwise stayed home don't hurt the Democratic nominee.

The next question is whether Bush will get a challenge from the right, because contrary to the Nader candidacy a challenge from the right would hurt Bush. Buchanan just told Keith Olberman he wasn't running "for the simple fact that I don't want to be a fugitive the rest of my life." Anybody else out there? How bout this guy...

http://slate.msn.com/id/2095865/

Forget Nader. Draft Moore.
How Democrats can win back the White House.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Sunday, Feb. 22, 2004, at 11:01 PM PT

More Moore?Ralph Nader is running for president again. The media blitz is underway. So is the backlash. Many news outlets have been quoting a Jan. 29 editorial in The Nation urging Nader not to run. Chatterbox's own view is that if Nader wants to run, that's Nader's business; and if a teeny-tiny number of potential Kerry or Edwards voters pull the lever for Nader, that's their business. It's a free country.

The more urgent question Democrats need to ask is whether former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore will run for president. In a column posted Feb. 22 on The Nation's Web site, John Nichols points out that Nader isn't the potential third-party contender to watch in 2004:

Roy Moore, the Alabama jurist whose fight to display the Ten Commandments on state property drew national attention last year, is being courted by the right-wing Constitution Party as a potential presidential candidate. (The Constitution Party was on the ballot in 41 states in 2000, and retains a solid network of activist supporters nationwide.)

This is, of course, the very scenario Chatterbox fantasized about in his Jan. 19 column, "A Republican Nader?" The fundamentalist whom Chatterbox envisioned running for president (and stealing votes from Bush) was James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family. But Moore would be an even better rabble-rouser. Apparently his possible third-party candidacy is no mere fantasy on the left; at the very worst, it's a fantasy on the left and the right. John Fund wrote about it Feb. 2 in his online column for the Wall Street Journal editorial page:

Last Saturday, Mr. Moore was a featured speaker at the Christian Coalition's "Family and Freedom" rally in Atlanta. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported he was "treated like a rock star, signing autographs and getting thunderous standing ovations." The week before that, Mr. Moore was the speaker at a dinner in Lancaster, Pa., sponsored by the Constitution Party, which has the third-largest number of registered voters in the U.S. ...

During a question-and-answer period, Mr. Moore was asked if he would run for president. "Not right now," he said, noting he is still appealing his dismissal from office for violating a federal court's order to remove the monument from the Alabama Supreme Court building. "I have to wait till all these things are done to decide my future." His friends say he is undecided about whether to run for president or to wait two years and seek Alabama's governorship.

Bush's recess appointment of William H. Pryor to the 11th Circuit, though generally a disaster for liberals, is a great boon in one largely overlooked respect. It has very likely enraged Roy Moore. It was Pryor who, as Alabama's attorney general, helped give Moore the boot when Moore refused to remove his famous monument to the Ten Commandments from his courtroom. (Pryor's conservative detractors say Pryor did it to shore up support for his judgeship in the Senate.)

If Moore does run, there's a lot of potential support for him out there. According to the conservative Washington Times, evangelicals are angry at Bush for failing to act more decisively on the gay marriage issue:

"I am just furious over what's going on in California and over what the president is not doing in California," a prominent evangelical leader confided. "He says he's 'troubled' — he should be outraged. If he's troubled, he should pick up the phone and call [California Republican Gov.] Arnold [Schwarzenegger] and tell him we want action against the rogue mayor who is breaking the law."

A broader list of complaints is laid out by Patrick Johnston, a prominent Ohio evangelist, in an essay titled "Why Christians Should Not Vote for George W. Bush" on the Web site IntellectualConservative.com. According to Johnson, Bush is: Soft on abortion; soft on homosexuality ("He has appointed open homosexuals to high government positions at a rate that makes Bill Clinton look like a homophobe!"); soft on Islam and Shintoism ("He demoralized Korean and Japanese Christians by bowing down at a pagan Shinto shrine in Japan"); soft on the National Endowment for the Arts, which finances "blasphemous" art; soft on federal funding for education (why this is un-Christian is never explained); soft on the assault-weapon ban (ditto); soft on deficit spending (ditto); and so on.

This is an ember that wants fanning.

In the Feb. 21 Weekly Standard, Katherine Mangu-Ward claims that Moore "emphatically denies that he will challenge Bush this year, 'period,' " and that the Constitution party already has a candidate. But Chatterbox does not trust and will not accept Shermanesque statements rendered in paraphrase. As for the candidate the Constitution party has purportedly chosen--one Michael Anthony Peroutka—he is described by Constitution Party President Jim Clymer as merely a "stand-in ... for ballot-access purposes."

Mangu-Ward can't be trusted on the subject of Roy Moore because she so obviously wants him to go away. Moore "might have provided a diverting rhetorical sideshow in a race full of verbal gaffes," she writes, "but would otherwise have been unlikely to make or break the Bush campaign's ongoing efforts to keep conservatives happily in the fold." She even makes fun of his poetry. Judge Moore, are you going to take this from ... a girl? They're laughing at you, Judge. Bill Kristol, Bill Pryor, and Karl Rove are laughing at you. Bet that fair-weather-Christian of a president's laughing at you, too. They might as well be laughing at the Ten Commandments. Are you going to just sit there and let them laugh at the Ten Commandments?

 

Wouldn't that be FUN!!!

Moore in 2004!

 

Also, just from a historical standpoint, indy's don't do as well the second time around. Take Ross Perot for instance, he got 19% of the vote in 1992, and in 96' received only 8%. Don't forget that that is with federal funding as well, which Nader wont have.

The question is , what has George Bush done to win over voters from the left ? Altogether Gore and Nader beat Bush 51 to 49 in 2000. There is no reason for me to believe that anyone who voted for Nader or Gore in 2000 will vote for Bush. Nader may get half of the what he got last time, and that would be enough to put Kerry or Edwards over in places like Florida and New Hampshire, and make the margin of victory even wider in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.

 

This point has been raised elsewhere, but Kucinich is still running and his stands on the issues are the exact same as Nader's on all the issues AFAIK. This completely eliminates Ralph's stated reasons for running until the Democratic primaries are over or Kucinich pulls out.

 

Judy Woodruff of CNN asked him about Kucinich. Nadir had come out awhile back as a supporter. He sort of shrugged it off and, in my opinion, didn't give a direct response.

What killed me, watching her interview, was how he claimed that he wouldn't take votes away from Democrats, but from Republicans. He looked so pathetic and disingenuous that I'm leaning now towards Batman's take. That he won't be a factor. Of course, if the RNC's surrogates pour money into his effort, and he uses it to attack the Democratic nominee as a "tool of the special interests" more than that far bigger tool, Bush, then he could be a problem as far as getting fence-sitters to just stay home. We'll have to see.

 

The other option if Ralph really believes independent voters who did not vote in the last election will rally around those issues ( if he really believes most of his votes come from those 100 million or so voters) is to work to convince some of them to vote in the Democratic primaries for Kucinich.

 

Monday, February 23, 2004
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Governor Dean's statement on Ralph Nader
When I announced last week that I am no longer actively pursuing the presidency, I urged my supporters not to be tempted by any independent or third party candidate. I said I would support the nominee of the Democratic Party, because the bottom line is that we must defeat George W. Bush in November, whatever it takes.

This year, our campaign has made the case that, in order to defeat George W. Bush, the Democratic Party must stand up strong for its principles, not paper over its differences with the most radical Administration in our lifetime. In order to win, the Democratic Party must aggressively expose the ways in which George W. Bush's policies benefit the privileged and the most extreme ideologues.

I will do everything I can to ensure that the 2004 Democratic nominee runs as a true progressive, as a champion of working Americans and their hopes for a better future. I urge my supporters, and all other Americans committed to progressive values and honest government, to stick with us, and stick with the Democratic Party, so our cause can prevail in 2004.

Ralph Nader has made many great contributions to America over 40 years. But if George W. Bush is re-elected, the health, safety, consumer, environmental, and open government provisions Ralph Nader has fought for will be undermined. George Bush's right-wing appointees will still be serving as judges fifty years from now, and our Constitution will be shredded. It will be government by, of, and for, the corporations - exactly what Ralph Nader has struggled against.

Those who truly want America's leaders to stand up to the corporate special interests and build a better country for working people should recognize that, in 2004, a vote for Ralph Nader is, plain and simple, a vote to re-elect George W. Bush. I hope that Ralph Nader will withdraw his candidacy in the best interests of the country we hope to become.

Many of my supporters urged me to run as an independent, but I judged it the wrong thing to do. There is still time for Ralph Nader to stand with those in the Democratic Party who are building a progressive coalition to defeat George W. Bush. But time is running out. We can win only if we are united.
link

 

Dean still has supporters? I thought even the most rabid Deaniacs had already turned to Zogby for their new favorite candidate.

YEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH

 

I don't think Moore would hurt Bush bad at all. Why? Bush already has the Christian moralist right covered. It is fiscal conservatives and non-interventionist conservatives that he has to most worry about losing.

 

Conservatives for Nadar? That groups probably about the same size as r****ds on Death Row for Bush!

Uh, thank you Jon Stewart