Kucinich and Nader
At Working For Change, Geov Parrish writes:
I voted for Nader in '96, and '00, and I don't blame him for Gore losing -- in my mind his swing votes in key states were about sixth or seventh down the list of the reasons why Gore blew an election he should have won easily. Moreover, he then allowed it to be stolen when the results were close enough to credibly allow that to happen. But politics is all about timing, and Nader's time for a presidential run is past, gone, expired, kaput. He will gain virtually nothing by announcing for president he wouldn't have, in terms of a soapbox, by his previous stature; few of his 2000 supporters wanted him to run this time, and there is no pretense this time of working to build a viable third party (which was one of the promises of his previous runs, but in fact there was very poor relationships between Nader's people and the Green Party national hierarchy and the GP generally got very little in the way of promised local volunteers, names, and money.) I don't begrudge Nader's running -- a man with his accomplishments, at his age, can do whatever he wants so far as I'm concerned -- but even after the convention Dennis Kucinich has done such a stellar organizing job in his campaign -- far more so than Nader in 2000 -- that he will be much better positioned to carry the banner for progressive issues as Kerry and Bush ignore all they agree on throughout the campaign. Beyond superior organization and political credibility, Kucinich has the additional advantage over Nader of having long been an elected official and being oriented, on many of the same issues as Nader, toward not just critiques or proposed regulations or lawsuits, but detailed public policies. He's done a much better job than I expected going into this campaign season, and I think he'll come out of it as the unquestioned progressive leader in Congress with whomever gets elected in November.
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