Ralph Nader: Let The Voter Beware by Thom Hartmann

[reprehensor]

Published on Friday, August 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Ralph Nader: Let The Voter Beware

The frauds and deceptions of the Bush administration are legion and, sadly, to be expected, based on the Bush family's past (from sweetheart business deals going back to WWII, to smearing John McCain in South Carolina in 2000, to lying to the American people just before the election of 2002 about the threats Iraq posed).

But few people expected Ralph Nader - one of America's finest defenders of the public interest and the commons - to employ deception in an election.

Specifically, Nader has gone to great lengths to exploit the lack of knowledge most Americans have about how other democracies around the world work, and thus deceive people about both the history and present reality of our electoral system and the role of third parties in it.

When the Founders and the Framers of the Constitution put together American democracy in 1787, it had never been tried before in the way they visualized. In ancient Athens, it took 6001 citizens to turn out and agree to pass a law; Rome was a republic, but not of, by, or for "the people"; and the Iroquois Confederacy had no "executive branch" to elect, a remnant from the days of kings that the Framers were unwilling to give up. Thus, the Framers of the Constitution had no "truly democratic" model to work from.

So they created a flawed constitution.

SO much more@link

[madaboutharry]

1. Excellent article.

Interestingly, Hartman points out how Nader chooses to exploit and capitalize on ignorance. Nader has truly learned from the Bushies. Nader takes college students for fools, as he does most people. He is an arrogant fraud. Kerry somehow needs to reach Nader supporters, and maybe getting them to understand the political system in this country would be a better path than simply bashing Nader. It is a sad fact that a person can move through the education system in this country with no understanding of how government works. (My tin foil hat tells me that maybe it is meant to be that way).

[Green Lantern]

3. Understanding the system

What would you like to see the third party folks presented with?

How do you feel about third party activity? How would you change it?

What is it you see as a goal for the Naderites?

How can Kerry capture those votes?

There has been much heat and little light on this subject here on DU, and I for one would like to have something positive to consider.

Thanks in advance for the consideration

GL

[depakid]

2. Outstanding article- not really about Nader

but about some of the serious structural problems in the American electoral system that prevent us from becoming "the greatest country in the world."

The key point:

Few other democracies are locked into a two-party system like ours because most emerged in their current forms after 1861, when John Stuart Mill proposed the idea of proportional representation in his book "Considerations on Representational Government." It solved, once and for all, the problem of Madison's factions making a nation less democratic.

Under proportional representation - in use in virtually all the other democracies of the world - the percent of the vote a party gets determines the percent of seats they have in Congress or Parliament. It's far more democratic than our system, and if Madison were alive today he'd be wishing he'd thought of it in 1787 when he helped write and sell the Constitution.

[union_maid]

4. Right, and the key points of this thread are important..

1.Wishing we didn't have a two party system doesn't make it so.

2. Voting third party doesn't create a different system.

3. Nader knows this very well.

[depakid]

5. Wish in one hand

and help make it so in the other.

Obviously, the two parties are vested in the status quo- Nader makes this point, but he's lost the movement- he's a surfer without a swell.

True, there are some angst ridden undergrads who his Quixotic 2004 campaign appeals to- but despite what the effervescent polls say, the Nader vote has become irrelevant. So it seems to me, he's not even worth derision- and shame on Camejo.

Better, I think, to look for ways we might change the very real structural problems that reinforce the so called "middle."

It's been done already- and there's nothing in the Constitution that prevents it from being done everywhere, statewide- just like this:

http://www.fairvote.org/sf/

In the next decade or two, my guess is that IRV will move forward just like suffrage in the last Century.