Mon, March 15, 2004

I've been meaning to weigh in on this whole Nader thing (as if there's anyone who reads this site and doesn't already know exactly what I'm thinking on this issue), and I figure now is as good a time as any. Not as good as two weeks ago, mind you, but as good as I'll get for a while to come.

Here's the thing: people who want Nader to run for president are – and this applies to just about any damn thing that I rant about on this site – missing the point. They're way too optimistic about the democratic process and the way that American voters approach it. By and large, voters in this country are so goddamn stupid that it makes me sick. I mean, Californians are pretty smart, and we've got Schwarzenegger, for Christ's sake! I understand the optimism of the Nader supporters, but they fail to grasp a key fact: they are wholly atypical in the amount of care and reasoning that they employ in their political decisions. Most voters don't consider politics with any of that thoughtful deliberation at all. Sometimes, when everyone you talk to or hang out with is well informed, open-minded, and rational, it's easy to forget that you're protected inside a tiny, tiny minority of the population. My friends and family are amazing, and the ones who are voting for Nader – or even Bush – have my unqualified support, because they're making those decisions based on a fair and intelligent evaluation of their options. I may not happen to agree, but they're taking their democratic responsibility seriously, and I have to respect that. But it's foolish to think that "most people" are like them. It's so tempting because we're pretty smart, and all the people we know are pretty smart, and it just seems like anybody else out there who's getting by and making a living and finding the time and energy to drive to a polling place is probably pretty smart, too. It's tempting, but it's absolutely false. Because most of those people are missing the point.

Poor, racist southerners who vote for Bush are missing the point. Whose lives are being most ruined by tax cuts for the wealthy and slashes in military benefits and skyrocketing unemployment? Poor people – especially the Wal-Mart poor, the ones who don't realize they're poor and so they buy Happy Meals and Cinderella 2 DVDs and triple-mortgage the four-bedroom houses they share with their mother-in-law and six kids. But you can believe they're voting for Bush because they miss the point. They make up a huge portion of his largest voting base. They buy into the GOP fear culture and they are scared of gays and minorities and they want their guns, and so they vote for Bush and ignore the rest of the things he stands for. They're not the only ones missing the point, though. NBC is going hog wild with the final season of Friends, and in an attempt to make hay out of something readily available on TBS five nights a week, they're running six "classic" (read: repeat) episodes of Friends as part of the run-up to the finale in May. Who picked which six episodes? Why, voters, of course! The process is slightly different, but the same clueless knuckleheads are the ones in control. (The differences, however subtle, are there; on NBC's poll, you can vote as many times as you want, while in the presidential election, a lot of times even your one vote isn't counted.) And, are they Missing The Point (tm)? You betcha! Episodes #6 and #5, respectively, are the one in which Chandler proposes to Monica and the one in which Brad Pitt comes to Thanksgiving and (surprise!) the writers think it's really funny to make Rachel hate him because (tee! hee!) in real life they're married! Oh, the irony! My point is, these may be seminal Friends episodes. They may memorable Friends episodes. They may even be important Friends episodes. But they are not among the best Friends episodes. The best Friends episodes are ones like "The One With The Embryos", where Monica and Rachel face off in a trivia game against Joey and Chandler and the guys win the girls' apartment. Episodes that are funny, not tearjerky, and episodes that focus on the characters instead of big flashy events like guest stars and weddings. (Okay, the Noah Wyle/George Clooney episode was damn good, even with flashy guest stars.) My point is, people don't think. They just blurt out some dumb answer with no consideration, and they miss the damn point. (As Lewis Black says, instead of giving the vote to more savvy 14-year-olds, let's work on giving it to fewer stupid adults.)

Where was I? My point is, Nader in this election is good for nobody, least of all the people who think it's good for them. It's good for one person in the entire universe, and that's Ralph Nader. (Possibly also George W. Bush.) In 2000, at least it had the potential – however farfetched – to be good for the Green Party. Not this year. They don't want him. He's running Independent, which means there's no greater purpose to his also-ran campaign; he's in it for himself alone. In 2000, the idea of a Nader campaign was still Missing The Point, because it was just a bad year to try to make such a move. But at least there was something to it – had he achieved some magical percentage of popular votes, the Green Party would've achieved official status, which would mean invitations to debates and FEC funds, etc. However, I contend that such a pursuit – while noble – should've been shelved in a year with a close race, and with so much to lose. Had the Republicans done the honorable thing and nominated John McCain, then fine. He's a decent human being, or even a human being, so he's vastly preferable to George W. Bush. But once it was Gore vs. Bush – or even anybody with a modicum of respect for humanity, democracy, fairness, reason, reality, or history vs. Bush – it became really important to focus all energy on defeating Bush, and save entertaining flights of fancy like substantiating the Green Party for a time when such harmless fun wouldn't interfere with a serious enterprise. Now, I understand the argument that Nader is no more to blame than Al Gore. If Gore had mounted a more energetic campaign and motivated more voters and won more states, than the few votes that Nader may or may not have siphoned away from him would've had less impact. True, true. However, history is a panoply of contributory causes. No one thing causes anything. Just because something wasn't the only cause of something else doesn't mean it didn't affect it. Give those extra votes to Gore, and just maybe we wouldn't be in this mess today. (I've seen the argument that apparently some exit poll data indicates that Nader took votes away from Gore and Bush in relatively equal numbers. Ha. First of all, any Nader voter who tells you that in an exit poll is just having some fun at your expense. In fact, he probably voted for Bush and made up the Nader vote. All you have to do is look at the candidates and you know that virtually nobody who voted for Nader would've voted for Bush if Nader hadn't been there.)

But that's the past anyway! That was a whole different story. What we have today is – Class? Yep. – the present. And in the present there's no Green Party candidate, and there's no chance in any conceivable reality that Nader will win the election. So, why is he running? Well, one way of describing it is "to prove a point." That point is presumably something along the lines of "voters shouldn't have to choose the lesser of two evils" or "the two-party system is increasingly homogenized; both parties are owned by the same wealthy special interests; we need a whole new system." Great points, all, but they miss the larger point. Which is that this is an historic time for our country and not a time to be messing around trying to make grand but futile statements. Who is the intended audience of these points? Both major parties can simply laugh at such a point because if Nader gets more than 3% of the popular vote it'll be a miracle. The American voting public can't possibly comprehend the nuanced logic of the Independent candidacy – if they did, we'd have vastly different elections every time. So, if Nader's candidacy proves a point, it proves it only to himself and those who voted for him – and they all already knew it! In the meantime, he runs the serious risk of splitting the Anybody But Bush vote and quite possibly granting Bush a second term to run wild, this time without having to worry about being held accountable during a re-election campaign at the end of it. Sure, the parties are homogenizing, and sure Kerry is the lesser of two evils. I genuinely dislike the guy. If it were Kerry vs. McCain, I'd vote for Nader or McCain before Kerry. But in this situation, you have your two evils as far apart as you're likely to see. It's not that Kerry is particularly un-evil, it's just that Bush is so very evil. I genuinely fear for the future of the country and the planet if he has another four years. He hasn't affected me personally very much so far – in fact, I've probably made money from his tax cuts – but his actions don't worry me about today or tomorrow. They worry me about the global landscape 15 or 30 years from now – security, economy, environment, and foreign relations. I plan to have children some day, and it's them I'm worried about. (Don't worry, even if Mary-Kate Olsen won't marry me, I can always adopt. I'll be like Burt Reynolds in Cop and a Half.) So, running for president in 2004 to prove a point is a bad idea.

Maybe he's running to keep the other candidates honest. By bringing up issues they don't want to talk about and keeping them in the news cycle. True, once the Democratic National Convention is over, Kucinich and Sharpton will have a hard time filling that role, although they do so far more eloquently than Nader and with ten times the charisma. I think, to the extent he can make his voice heard, that Nader running in order to keep Bush and Kerry from skirting the important issues is a grand idea. Provided he drops out on October 29. Then he has a chance to speak up for what's right, and his polling numbers can show the other two just how many Americans believe the same thing, and maybe it will scare them into being more honest (even just a tiny tad). But after that, he has to go, because otherwise people will vote for him, squandering a valuable opportunity to cancel out a vote for Bush. And that is not a chance that we should be willing to take. The weird thing about Bush is that I can't look at a single policy, initiative, or action of his and see the good intentions behind it. In politics, a lot of debate comes down to wanting to solve the same problems but just having different views of how to do it. With Bush, I can never see what the problem is that he seems to be after. Sure, I occasionally understand what his stated objective is, but that's a different thing. I could see the point of No Child Left Behind, although I thought that it was misguided because it would encourage educators to "teach to the test" which is a great way to improve testing numbers but a terrible way to achieve real learning. But he slashed funding for his own program, there. I can see the point of calling for a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, although I think it's a reprehensible point to pursue. But, with everything else, I'm just baffled. Pulling out of Kyoto? Pre-emptively attacking Iraq? The list of things with no defensible explanation goes on and on. What will he do in an unfettered second term? I would rather not risk finding out.

Maybe Kerry can win on his own this year, and any votes he might lose to Nader won't matter. (I seriously doubt it, because he doesn't have a very inspiring message or personality. If he wins, it'll be a squeaker.) But rather than counting on that and voting for someone else on principle, we should be able to agree that principles are vitally important, but so are priorities. Not having Bush in office another four years is a principle, too, and I think it's a more important one for now. After that's accomplished, bring back the principled attacks on the corrupt two-party system. I'll be right beside you, yelling my loudest. As long as there aren't any giant papier-mâché puppets. Those things freak me out.

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