Who is the spoiler?

No matter which way the Florida recount goes, one key fact (among many) will continue to be completely ignored by the Loyal Liberals:

If Al Gore had won Tennesse, his home state, he'd be president-elect right now. Gore lost his own damn state by a margin greater than the Nader vote there.

In the wee hours of the post election morn, when it became clear that both candidates needed Florida to win, NPR commentators kept talking about Nader being the election spoiler because of Oregon and (possibly) Wisconsin. But this made absolutely no sense, since Gore could have won both and still not won the electoral college.

It's very, very interesting that in all the complaints about the irrelevance of third parties, and the massive efforts to stamp out Nader and the Greens, it turns out that such a fledgling third party had a number of significant effects on the election. Of course, in an election this close, every third party "made" some difference (at least in the sense that if their votes went to one of the major parties, it could have swung a key state). But this is always the case. One doesn't have to win to be important, and Nader did a lot of good this election cycle merely by being in the race.

Those who claim that Nader should have withdrawn, or was irresponsible, or would be "at fault" for throwing the election to Bush have a rather confusing line to argue. Every vote for Nader was cast by someone, for whatever reasons, who didn't want to vote for Gore. To say that Nader "should have" withdrawn, thus preventing those votes from going to him, is to say that the voters must have less choice rather than more. It was an effort to force a vote for Gore, rather than him earning it. Given Gore's record, it's no surprise that progressives must be forced to vote for him.

I predict a witch hunt. Loyal Liberals will do their utmost, whatever the election's outcome, to destroy the Greens. That should not be allowed to happen.

Here's one lovely example of Loyal Liberalism at its typical level of confusion:

Nader fails to grasp that the two-party system has proved durable because it forces political leaders to build coalitions across a huge country. -- Boston Globe editorial, November, 9 2000

(I suppose that the requirement to build coalitions doesn't include building them with Nader or the Greens.)

If this silly line were at all true (and anyone with a gram of historical or political science knowledge would know it's not), there would still be the serious question of why there is so much legal and extra legal effort to annihilate third parties? Or, to slighly edit John Stuart Mill:

Those who attempt to force Greens into voting for Gore by closing all other doors against them, lay themselves open to a similar retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be, that Gore did not render supporting him so desirable to Greens, as to induce them to vote for him for its own recommendations. It is not a sign of one's thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when one allows only Hobson's choice, that or none. And here, I believe, is the clue to the feelings of those Democrats, who have a real antipathy to the equal freedom of Greens. I believe they are afraid, not lest Greens should be unwilling to support them on key shared issues, for I do not think that anyone in reality has that apprehension; but lest they should insist that the support should be on equal conditions; lest all people of spirit and capacity should prefer doing almost anything else, not in their own eyes degrading, rather than vote for Gore... -- Paraphrase of The Subjection of Woman

In essence, the Loyal Liberals doth protest way too much. If Gore had been a good and attractive choice for Greens, there would have been no need to keep Nader out of the debates, or whip up the "wasted vote" argument, or spew such wretched venom as:

Before Tuesday Nader had earned an honored place in US history as a pioneer in consumer safety. If Bush prevails in Florida, Nader will become a footnote as the willful eccentric who denied Gore the political prize he deserved.

The Boston Globe should be ashamed. Gore "deserves" no political prize (for what? years of service? a mediocre campaign? since when is the presidency a "prize" to the most "deserving"?) and there is no sense in which Nader could have "denied" it to Gore. The presidency is not Nader's to give or deny. Those who voted for Nader (such as me -- and I gave him money, too; a second $100 on Monday) should be roundly insulted at these insinuations. For better or for worse, we wanted Nader on the ballot and we wanted to vote for him. Al Gore and his minions could not convince us to vote for him -- a fact that is true of almost half the voters. To try to force voters to vote by limiting their choices, terrorizing them, and smearing a "pioneer in consumer safety" is truly to spoil this election, and the very concept of free and democratic choice.