His voice is drowned out anyway. There is no evidence that he’s having any effect on any policy or legislative matters.

At least as a Congressman he could serve his constituency and benefit his district. He could also vote on legislation and introduce legislation and serve on committees that send send bills to a vote.

It’s clear that these gadflies and ivory-tower airmchair politicians in the fringe parties do not actually care about improving the lives of real people in the real world. Because that would require winning real elections and dealing with the practical day-to-day problems of constituent issues, Washington politics, and actually putting their theories to the test under real-world conditions. It’s so much easier to sit on the sidelines and mount pointless campaigns for “President” to get a few minutes of interviews with KPFK or some other set of old lefties.

In Europe the Green Party plays real politics, wins real elections, and uses their power to actually pass real legislation or get real cabinet seats to help real people and really accomplish something. If that requires being part of a coalition government, so what? The American Greens are too worried about getting their hands dirty or being sullied by having to kiss babies and eat knishes and do all the other theatrical things politicians have to do to win real elections.

And have his voice drowned out and be ineffective like Kucinich’s and Feingold’s? That’s some really astute analysis from you, Mr. Real World.

If the Democrats want votes of those who support Green Party or Nader, here are two simple solutions:

1. Actively call for, and support efforts for Instant Runoff Voting.
2. Adopt some of the platform/issues of Nader/GP that attract voters to them.

If the Democratic Party was serious about winning the elections, they would have taken either of those steps. “Anybody but Bush” – as it was in 2004 – is not a viable candidacy, in spite of Nader, who is just an easy target to blame and prevent some much-needed introspection.

Third parties are here to stay, gadfly or not, along with the corrupt two-headed single party we have (and their willing apologists). Get used to it – we need more voices and ideas in a democracy, not less. There’s more to contesting the national election than just winning – that’s just your opinion which I don’t share. If you are so full of ideas for what GP should or shouldn’t do, join it and bring your ideas with you.

As for Nader’s campaign having an effect, it has had an effect on me and made me aware of many things – people behaving pusillanimously and becoming apologists because that’s the “real world”; liberals and progressives showing their fundamentalist colors and their low tolerance for diversity of ideas as well as their close-mindedness; the media’s approach to third parties and their distortions and spin, including their successful campaign to malign Nader; a different view-point to compare and contrast with what the two parties put out; and a desire to work towards having more acceptance of third parties and inclusive democracy. Best of all – to not be influenced by your cynical attitude and “real world.” In a nutshell, grassroots change, baby.

Then again, elections are more about symbolism and pageantry than rational thinking or logic (according to you), so why should it surprise you that Nader or McKinney/GP appeal more to some than McBama?

As I pointed out above, the Bradley effect has been discredited. There is no good evidence that it ever existed. See NPR’s On The Media, last week . . .
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/10/24/04

That doesn’t mean Obama can’t find a way to pull defeat from the jaws of victory. The link I posted previously to the Iowa Electronic Markets shows that just since I posted it the race has narrowed significantly, although Obama still enjoys a big lead.

He’s even stolen ideas from Ralph Nader such as putting the country back to work to rebuild the infrastructure

That is complete nonsense – infrastructure investment to create jobs is a basic tenet of Keynesianism. It has been for decades, and continues to be, promoted by many on the left. If Nader and his supporters are taking credit for it, this simply proves what I was saying earlier about the fringe parties trying to grab more credit for moving the debate than they deserve.

This

The problem is however that the controversy that will arise over the racial issue if McCain wins with Obama ahead by seven points. Let’s just hope for the best.

Nothing if you don’t care about political change.

My point is that it’s hypocritical for a candidate to say he cares about effecting polical change and then behave in ways that are not demonstrated to work – i.e., get elected. If Nader was serious he’d run for a House seat, because he has a enough name-recognition to win one. But that would force him actually put his theories to the test in the real world.

I think that a party that is serious about making real political change can do so. There are enough seats around the US that are either uncontested, or where an incumbent is sleepwalking past some halfhearted opponent, that a few can be won by concentrating money and an army of volunteers on them.

I’ve seen both the Greens and the LP up-close-and-personal and I’m convinced that they don’t WANT to win legislative seats, especially un-glamorous ones like state-senate. It’s more fun to sit on the sidelines and cat-call then to have to deal with the day-to-day work of legislation and constituent issues.

You seem to be out of touch with the Green Party’s activities.

I think you are the one who’s out of touch. The Green Party has a Presidential candidate (McKinney). That is a complete waste of money and resources.

Just like all the other fringe parties the Greens just have to grandstand, wasting their scarce resources on a presidential race they cannot win, just to say “we have one too”, when that money and the volunteers’ time getting McKinney on the ballot could have been put into a few local races. BTW, they are also running candidates for governor they can’t win either. The Greens are doing the same sort of political masturbation the other fringe parties are doing. They are not serious about winning.

What’s wrong with faith-based reasoning? If it doesn’t make sense to you, then don’t do it – I’m not forcing you to. Or are you saying that everyone has to see the world and every action and phenomenon exactly as you do, and vote exactly as you do? How’s that any less fundamentalist?

Besides, how else do you explain people believing in Obama’s empty rhetoric of ‘change’ and ‘yes we can’ and glossing over valid criticisms of him? Just as Obama’s words make sense to maybe you and many others, Nader’s words make sense to me. We just happen to have different world-views and neither of us is omniscient or knows the future.

Embrace diversity.

You seem to be out of touch with the Green Party’s activities. They have been doing exactly what you’re saying for the past few years – focusing on the grassroots and winning elections at the local level. Attitudes like yours prove to me exactly why it’s important that media cover the activities of third parties. Maybe if you’d been involved with the Green Party instead of supporting the corrupt duopoly status quo, you’d know what they’ve been up to over the past few years.

I could rebut all your points, but I’m simply not interested. Suffice it to say, your arguments do not convince me to adopt your apologist stance, as well as “voting for the least-worst” phenomenon. Nice try though.

Let’s agree to disagree and you vote for Obama and let me have my choice of “wasting” my vote on a Green Party candidate or Nader.

That’s why I support practicality with basic human moral values, to make it happen, it does take a candidate with common sense and wisdom to bridge the gap.

And if this election is about divisive bluster then Obama is unqualified. And if this election is about pesto and cream cheese then neither candidate is qualified.

What does it mean to be “about” IQ? All elections are about the same thing – making an emotional appeal to people’s hopes, fears, and identity. Elections are a combination of witch-burning (of the candidate’s opponent) and witch-burning-in-reverse of the candidate.

The only sense in which this (or any race) is “about” IQ is in regard what IQ means iconographically the voter, i.e., it could be a plus or a minus.

As a democrats, Obama believes in Free Market with some rules and guidance. I support him because he practice “common sense” not some fancy ideology.

“accept the result of the democratic system” ???? First of all, you have to question if this is really the result of the democratic system.

Yes, I will definitely be depressed, because I was very depressed in 2004. Because I couldn’t stand to watch Bush and his administration for another 4 more years in 2004. Just like I couldn’t stand the fact to watch Palin and McCain for the coming 4 years. Yes, life will move on, yes, zen like thinking will help me to through another 4 years, zen like thinking is a way to survive when you don’t have lots of options, yes, I will need to continue breathing deeply for another 4 years if McCain wins, I will need to learn some kind of Qi Gong to redirect my anger and frustration energy whenever McCain administration drops some dramatic and fearful bombs on this nation. Life does move on no matter it’s better or worse, but I choose better. If the worse wins, so what?????

2. fair ballot-access laws that facilitate citizens to run in elections without being multi-millionaires,

There are lots of political parties and lots of uncontested, or hardly-contested, seats. And this is EXACTLY what I meant above when I said Nader is not “serious”. Neither are the other fringe parties.

Have you ever noticed how every fringe party in the US feels a bizarre, neurotic, compulsion to put up a Presidential candidate? The Greens, the LP, the Socialists, etc? Why? If you were serious about getting a national voice and actually getting elected why put even ONE PENNY or even ONE MAN HOUR into a presidential race?

Across the country there are DOZENS of House seats that are uncontested. And Houses races are cheap to run and because they are in a small geographic area they can be done with a small force of motivated volunteers going door-to-door. Furthermore there are THOUSANDS of state legislature seats that are hardly contested across the US.

Any political party that was serious about actually winning elections and voting on, or introducing real legislation, and someday growing up to be a big political party would start at the grass roots winning local elections and a few House seats. If the Greens or the Socialists or the LP or other national parties took their few, meager resources and concentrated them on a small number of carefully-chosen races they could really win then they would achieve vastly more success than they ever have before.

But that would take the fun out of it. They aren’t serious about real politics; they like playing this game and whining about the dominance of the two major parties.

The idea of doing something – especially something that seems repetitively pointless like losing over and over again, is faith-based reasoning. Intellectually it doesn’t make any more sense when a liberal does it than when a religious fundamentalist does it. Nader (and other extreme minority parties) should at least be intellectually honest enough to admit that what they’re doing is performance art, not politics. If they were serious they would come up with a plan to actually win, but they’re not serious – they just like playing the gadfly role.

Minority parties on the left and the right try to convince themselves that they are “moving the debate”. Just as the LP tried to take credit for school vouchers and pollution credits, the tiny lefty parties will, no doubt, try to take credit for the fact that everyone’s talking about national health insurance. The reality is that these ideas have been floating around for decades with real-world examples outside the US for much of that time, and in every case public pressure and practical problems facing millions of people are what moved the major parties, not influence from the fringe.

Not to mention the fact that Bush’s fiscal policies have run up such an insane deficit + debt that there is no money left to actually do anything. GOP strategists as far back as 2000 said that this was their goal (they called it “starve the beast”).

But let’s not let the Dem’s off the hook. They never saw an appropriation they didn’t like and the general piling-on that added an extra $170B to the $700B bailout package had a lot of donkey-prints on it.

Furthermore the general public also bears a lot of the blame because they also never saw an appropriation they didn’t like, and furthermore, they were so used to getting up to their own necks in debt for their houses, cars, vacations and widescreen TV’s, that a few trillion dollars of federal debt doesn’t bother them, so they are perfectly happy to put their hands out for government programs and stimulus checks and then punish any politician who proposes to raises taxes to pay for it.

Rachel:

First of all, if you or someone doesn’t care about democracy, that’s his/her prerogative – there’s no penalty in the US for not voting or not interacting with one’s elected officials. Democracy does have its faults, and I do agree with what Churchill and some other philosophers have said about a democratic system.

Second, the zen-like approach implies to me that if Obama loses, I don’t descend into a well of despair, but instead, accept the result of the democratic system and start working for the next election. I should have been clear on that – of course we put in efforts towards an (expected) outcome. The point is not to get attached to that outcome either way – and go crazy with happiness if outcome happens, or become depressed if outcome doesn’t happen.

Yes, our human history and earth is just a fraction of the life of the universe, and if that outlook and approach is helpful to you and brings you happiness in day-to-day life and interactions, then good for you. Whatever floats your boat.