Very sharp post-- both in terms of your analysis and Obama's remarks themselves. Obama's response to Nader (a critique of his doctrinaire politics combined with a simultaneously pointed and respectful nudge to the margins) is one of the reasons I like the guy: in political life today, being tactically shrewd and actually being thoughtful are treated as conflicting impulses. It is refreshing to see a candidate merge political savvy and intellectualism as deftly as Obama.

Google "Harold Stassen" and you'll get a better idea of what a joke Nader has become.

Thanks for catching this Genghis. Man, this is just the perfect response from Obama and exactly how I feel personally. It is a challenge to the Democrats to win over Nader voters and I think that saying publically that he wants their vote is important.

I noted in another post that I think the only way that Nader is relevent is if Clinton is the nominee. Obama is running as the anti-establishment candidate and has a huge following with the youth voters who flock to that message, where Hillary will have lots of problems getting these voters on her campaign in the Fall.

So - in a nutshell, Nader won't matter because ain't no way Hillary is getting this nomination at this point.

Quick check of history is in order since my memory was that Nader took a very small but critical percentage of votes.

Wikepedia reports that Bush beat Nader by 537 votes in florida while Nader took 97,421 votes in Florida. Nader is reported to have revealed that exist 2000 exit polls showed that of his voters 20% stated they would have voted for Bush, 38% for Gore and the rest would not have voted.

Nader was a clear spoiler and Obama's vaunted ability to bring us together is not stopping him from being a spoiler again.

In Austria and in the Netherlands there were scary racist parties in the govt. In Austria there were no great problems, due to a strong party leader.
In the Netherlands, they were a huge fiasco.
To sum it up, they went from zero to hero back to a laughing stock zero again. They took 26 seats out of 150 seats parliament, joined a coalition government, which fell only a year after, due to huge infighting and the influx of politically huge incompetent selfstyled businessmen.

But ... they paved the way for other parties which seem to be more stable, even though the conventional wisdom is that extreme right in Europe will eventually fragment and marginalize.

I heard that Obama made a pretty sharply snarky comment as well - something to the effect that Nader claimed in 2000 that there was no difference between Bush and Gore... that Nader was wrong then and he's wrong now. Looking for the exact quoat... will update if I find it.

Obama is smart and he has successfully outmaneuvered everyone who has underestimated him, including Bill and Hillary Clinton and Tavis Smiley. Sounds like presidential timber to me.

The argument ad hominem against Nader doth protest too much. In any one of his last fifty years he has accomplished more for this country than either of the Dem. front runners in their entire lifetimes to date.

The Dem. campaigns in 2000 and 2004 were slovenly run so all this anti-Nader projection has become the conventional wisdom by way of misdirection. The real culprit in Democratic defeats is corporate control of the two major parties. In every election, the most complicit candidate (from either party) wins.

The MSN is preparing the country for an Obama landslide because the Republicans are self-destructing and can't deliver. It will be an opportunity to clean house but nobody on this list or anywhere else knows what Obama will do with it except his corporate backers. I hope he disappoints them.

I value the generally civil tone of the discussion here, on both sides. It’s important.

I voted for Nader, though not in Florida. I’ve gone back and forth on my vote ever since and can only conclude that Nader was part, but not all of what helped Bush steal the election. Nader voters should accept responsibility.

Die-hard Democrats, however, should not be so quick to shirk responsibility themselves. All of us, for instance, are responsible for a system where huge swaths of voters are routinely disenfranchised. This happened in Florida in 2000, just as it does all over the place. There are many problems with our electoral system. The many points about the flawed direction and language of the Gore campaign also hold. To look past all of those issues in order to lay all of the blame at Nader’s feet is dishonest. It also obscures the need to work on serious electoral reform.

I doubt that Gore would have sent us to war with Iraq, though he had his hawkish tendencies. But we wouldn’t be in this war if democrats in congress had gone to the wall to stop it. Instead, a huge portion of them supported it. To ignore that fact and then take offense at Nader’s phrase that there’s “no difference” between the democrats and republicans misses the point. Of course there are differences (and Nader is wrong to oversimplify). But when so many congressional democrats vote to authorize the Iraq War, vote for the Patriot Act, vote to give Telecoms retroactive immunity, and supported NAFTA, the 1996 Telecommunications Act, capital punishment, and the Defense of Marriage Act, it’s important to recognize the many areas of overlap between the two parties.

I doubt that Nader will have much impact in 2008. I don’t plan to vote for him, because for now, I’m persuaded that the progressive wing of the party has come alive (partly as a result of Nader’s 2000 run). While I have my doubts about Obama and many more about Clinton, I’m encouraged when rank and file democrats get together to push the party in a good direction by working for candidates like Ned Lamont and Donna Edwards.

(As for TPM’s headline that referred to Nader as “Bush’s Chief Enabler,” surely that title belongs to Antonin Scalia.)

ll of us, for instance, are responsible for a system where huge swaths of voters are routinely disenfranchised.

How does Nader help in this regard, minoxidil? Posters here routinely assert that Nader is tough, uncompromising, etc.

Politics is about building consensus and Nader is dictatorial in the extreme. He runs on a platform of righteousness, it seems to me, and it's important to recognize that the neo-cons feel just as righteous in their acts.

Moreover, what has Nader done in the off-years to either (a) move the Dems to action you would like or (b) create a viable 3rd party?

You can't be both a crusader and be a politician. The roles are very different. Moreover, if you like Nader as a crusader, note that others out there like *their* crusaders (Huckabee, for example) and have just as valid reasons for their support. Nader, in my view, doesn't advance the national dialog in the least because there is no means to tap the system along -- he wants to jerk it all in one, fell swoop.

Except in revolutions, political systems don't work that way.

Clearthinker,

I’m not saying that Nader necessarily helps enfranchise the disenfranchised.

I’m saying that the oversimplifications about 2000 run both ways. Nader voters should take responsibility for playing a part in the result of the 2000 election. On the other hand, everyone else should not lay the whole thing at his feet. I offered voter disenfranchisement as an example of something we have all allowed. It was a problem long before the narrow 2000 election, and it remains.