June 30, 2003
Dean's Day
I've been having a lot of fun watching the Dean Campaign today. I was mildly surprised yesterday when they blew through the six million fundraising total so easily, which was a very big accomplishment - I found an article likening him to the six million dollar man ("we will build him stronger... faster...") - but I didn't think there was a chance they would hit seven million the very next day. But there it is, 7.1 million as of midnight EST. Really amazing. People are going crazy over there on the comments of his weblog, I haven't seen so much political optimism for a long time.On the same day, there's more mutterings that Nader might choose to run again. Reading his announcement, I got thoroughly turned off by him for the very first time. He said something about how it didn't seem that the Democrats had anyone who would be able to beat Bush, so he's thinking about running. That judgment is nothing but self-serving this early on. If he actually had constructive intent, he'd run in the Democratic primary. They've got Kucinich in there already, it's not like Nader would have to compromise his platform to run as a Democrat.
But instead he has to make it about increasing the viability of the third party, when actually it turns out that he probably damaged the Green party last time. I don't get the feeling that local and state Green candidacies are taking the nation by storm. This seems to be more about a destructive protest effort than anything else now. It has a whole "damn the consequences" vibe to it, and even kind of reminds me of the soldier who said he had to destroy the village to save it.
I'll say it again - voting Green might be voting one's principles, but if you try to do so through using an unprincipled voting system, the end result is NOT principled.
The best way out of this is for Democrats and Greens to come to an agreement - have the Greens support a Democratic candidate in exchange for issue concessions, and in exchange for Democrats using their vast resources to bring about statewide preference voting in as many states as possible. You get Condorcet voting (NOT IRV) implemented in a few swing states, and then Green and Democrat can both be happy without either turning into a spoiler candidate.