The Trail: A Daily Diary of Campaign 2008

Nader what a piece of work - "unsafe at any age" - he singlehandedly made Americans distrust 3rd parties.

I am proud to have been one of 5 in Washington state who sued him because he had a fake nominating convention. He got on the ballot by combining total signatures signed on a variety of occasions.

Sour grapes, bitter old man

Now he's trying to get money from Kerry and the DNC to finance his run. They had nothing to do with it. We did our suit as citizens who don't like fraud.

Ralph can't afford to run again, so he's found a cheaper way to grab the microphone for a while. At least he won't be screwing up vote totals in Florida again, may he rot in hell.

Shame on Nader for exercising his Constitutional rights! Just what is this country coming to? Next thing you'll tell me is that there people out there organizing "third parties" because they find that they're not represented in the Big Two.

I mean, it's not like "third parties" have done anything for this country, like pushing for the abolition of slavery, banning child labor, or demanding workers' rights when the monied parties of the time were telling the little people that these problems were too complex to solve.

The selfishness of these third partiers disgusts me. Clearly, they're abusing the freedom they've been given.

I recommend that we rig the state ballot rules so that it's really easy for Democrats and Republicans to get on the ballot, but make it impossibly hard for a "third party" or independent candidate to do so.
If they still don't get the hint, we can have DHS monitor their meetings and put their candidates on the No-Fly List for trying to undermine freedom and democracy by participating in *our* democratic (TM) processes.

Freedom is too precious a resource to be wasted on people with whom we disagree!

I'm starting to wonder seriously if Nader is a Republican operative.

"What's next? Bush should sue America for not allowing him a third term."

Don't give him any ideas.

The DNC does make some silly decisions. They blame Ralph Nader for making them loose Florida. Look at their strategy now though. All of the major Democratic presidential candidates vowed not to campaign in Florida or Michigan because those two states want to vote to move their primaries up to an earlier date. Now this year if Nader decided to run again and the Democrats loose those states, how can they blame Nader? Over the past two years the D.N.C. has done a good job of loosing Florida, and this year they are so casual with those votes that they don't seem to care that the number of electoral votes of both Michigan and Florida is much more than New Hampshire and Iowa. If they were serious about winning this race they should try to win the swing votes and get the message to those voters rather than focussing on one state (New Hampshire) which will probably go Democratic any way, and (Iowa) Which will probably go for whatever moron the Republicans field.

It is pretty clear that most of the third party candidates know they have no chance of winning but can by running bask in the limelight. It is a sad thing that by voting for these third party losers the voter has wasted his or her vote. Regards, Carl W. Lundquist, JD, Colonel, Army of the United States (Retired) ..... Boston

hodantrho: words well said, but otherwise wasted on the WaPo, where passion is "being shrill," integrity is "being unrealistic," and honesty is "rude."

Also - your post is too long and contains too many facts for the short attention spans of the WaPo punditry.

This lawsuit is a long time coming. It shouldn't matter how you feel about Ralph Nader--the lawsuit is about protecting what democracy we have left in the country. If you think the dems work keeping Nader off the ballot was just about the so-called "spoiler effect," answer me why in 2004 in Illinois, the Democratic legislature bent over backwards to pass a law to allow Bush on the ballot but the same state's dems were working hard to keep Nader off the ballot--or explain why they don't even try to spread the word about instant run-off voting now that they have some power.

It's bad enough the enormous unfair and undemocratic barriers (huge and complex [sometimes varying by county] ballot access signature requirements, closed debates, the list goes on) the Dems and Repubs have put in place to keep third parties and independents out of the election. But the harrassment of volunteers exercising their right to petition (e.g. see today's DemocracyNow! with the interview describing how Nader petitioners were intimidated by private investigators among others), hiring huge corporate law firms to make tons of lawsuits (sometimes in several courtrooms in the same state at once, when the Nader campaign didn't have enough lawyers to appear), getting judges to throw out thousands of signatures for stupid reasons like without legal basis like: some of the people who signed the petitions moved from one part of the state to another, and then going after the candidates' personal bank accounts for their huge legal fees (independent candidates now literally have to bet their house to run for office), and much much more.

I'm sick of people using Ralph Nader as a scapegoat for the 2000 election--it was stolen--look up Greg Palast's work on how, or watch the movie An Unreasonable Man. Look up the facts, don't just buy into whatever the media's feeding people.
The only way to get better candidates is if they know that they can't take our votes for granted--they need to know that if they don't stand for (in their actions, not just words) what's important to us, we will vote for someone who will. Otherwise, they'll keep giving in to the pull of big corporations that are lobbying them day and night, and keep getting worse every four years. Even if they can't "win," they can push issues--how do you think we got things like the women's right to vote?

Please junp in! Take no more votes than we need to win.

undecided Huckabee or Romney

Yes, had Nader voters in Florida voted for Gore, Gore would have won. If Socialist voters had voted for Gore, Gore would have won. If Libertarian voters had voted for Gore, Gore would have won. If elderly Jewish Voters in Dade county could tell the difference between Gore and Buchanan, Gore would be President. And guess what, if 300 Bush voters had picked intelligence over the "aww-shucks country boy" routine, Gore would be President.

Blaming Nader is as silly as blaming Buchanan or the Socialist candidate. Both received votes in numbers such that if they had gone only in part to Gore, he would have won. The fact is that Gore played the center, thanks in part to the Clinton triangulation schemes that treated liberals and progressives as pawns. If Gore had articulated his beliefs in 2000 as he has done in recent years, many Nader activists such as myself would have voted for him. He didn't. You can't fight for the center and expect to win on the margins.

I'm only sorry Nader isn't including CA, as he should. An Independent Candidate has the RIGHT to be on the ballot. The USA isn't owned by two corporate parties, and one to do the dirty work of the other and visa versa. If candidates don't have rights, then voters never will have them.

It's characteristic of a Democratic Party accustomed to being the least worst that the 2000 elections are, seven years later, being blamed on a third-party candidate and not an inept Gore campaign, a buckling of the Senate in refusing to challenge the results, or, dare I say, a dubious Supreme Court ruling that ended the recount.

The mentioned lawsuit was put forward not because Nader didn't win, but because the Democratic Party and its adjuncts a) engaged in (or at best, encouraged) widespread harassment against Nader campaign volunteers working to simply get the candidate's name on the ballot, and b) attempted to derail the campaign through frivolous lawsuits that would drain the treasury to fight off. As Ballot Access News reports, for example, "The complaint goes into great detail, including a coordinated effort to sabotage individual petition sheets in Oregon (anti-Nader activists were instructed to sign a petition sheet in the space reserved for the circulator, and then to line it out, which had the effect of ruining all the signatures already on that sheet)."

Now, there's a stark difference between getting votes by making a good pitch to voters and getting votes by bullying your competition off the ballot. It's disappointing, not to mention basely ironic, that the Democratic Party so ferociously pursued the latter path in 2004.

This is why I love America. It is a constant source of comedy.

One judge sued a laundramat 54 million $$ for losing his pants. One legislator sued God for all our problems (and got a response) and now Nader is suing the DNC because he is not President.

What's next? Bush should sue America for not allowing him a third term.

Seriously, does Ralph Nader have anything better to do than try to annoy Democrats. It's bad enough that he made it possible for Bush to steal FL. (Look at the numbers: in FL, net of 16% of Nader voters, of 15,000, said that they would have voted for Gore if Nader was out of the race [37-21] and Bush "won" FL by 537 votes.) Then again, maybe he is doing this to distract people from the fact that he has used Republican operatives to try to get on the ballot after Dems realized the danger of signing a petition for Nader.

I have a bad back from the war, and to me, if it weren't for Nader, my back wouldn't sound like Rice Krsipies and get stiff. Thanks, Ralph! No difference, my foot!