Reply #34: And you have been demonizing him for no good reason [View All]

[MadHound]

Nader didn't cost Gore the election. You can blame that travesty on the Supreme Court, the Gore campaign and the Democratic party, along with the Republican party. But Nader had nothing to do with it.

Journalist Greg Palast handed the Gore campaign the entire Votescam scandal on a silver platter early in the recount process. Names, numbers, players, all there. Now imagine this, you have not just the constitutional duty to see justice done in this case, but you would also be banishing Bushco to the political wilderness forever. What would you do? Well we see what Gore did with it, he sat on it, and tens of thousands of people were disenfranchised.

Also you've got to consider another thing, how Gore pissed off Florida voters. He did this on the issue of off shore drilling, and the question of letting the industry come closer to the Florida shoreline and beaches. He was, at his corporate backer BP's insistence, all for shortening the limit. This pissed off two hundred thousand registered Dems, and four hundred thousand self described liberals so much that they went and voted for Bush instead. Whoopsie!

And if you think that Nader cost Gore the election, don't you think that Democratic leadership would be looking to hang it all on Nader? God knows, they needed a scapegoat. But even Al From, head of the DLC stated: "The assertion that Nader's marginal vote hurt Gore is not borne out by polling data. When exit pollers asked voters how they would have voted in a two-way race, Bush actually won by a point. That was better than he did with Nader in the race." <http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=127&subid=179&contentid=2919>

Then there was the fact that the Supreme Court made the call, in a one time ruling that even they were ashamed of, since they said it should never, ever be used as a precedent.

Oh, and one other thing, a consortium of newspapers and magazines actually went into Florida and did their own vote count. You know what they found? That Gore actually won the state.

So as you can see, Nader wasn't at fault here. But the Dems would rather scapegoat this man and use him as a diversion, that way they don't actually have to deal with their own flaws and problems.

I suggest that you wake up and stop buying into the bullshit. Otherwise those same flaws that plagued the Democratic party in '00 and '04 will continue to plague the party and cost us all.