Al Gore and Ralph Nader — A Beautiful Friendship?

[NYCGirl]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/383451p-325522c.html

A BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP? I hear that Al Gore and Ralph Nader - whose third-party candidacy is still blamed by some Democrats for Gore's 2000 defeat by George W. Bush - are actually quite cordial these days. The two former antagonists are apt to run into each other this weekend while accumulating bags of swag at the Sundance Film Festival, where they'll be attending the premieres of documentaries about themselves. "I think Gore is much better out of office," Nader told me yesterday, adding that he's a big fan of the ex-veep's speeches about the Bush administration (which he believes should be collected in a book), including yesterday's barnburner attacking President Bush's surveillance of American citizens. "That's the speech the Democratic leadership in Congress should have given weeks ago," Nader said, adding puckishly: "I bear him no ill will. He took more votes from me than I did from him."


(Casablanca photo added by me)

[helderheid]

1. thanks for this - means Gore will be in Utah - gotta track him down!!

[Crazy Dave]

2. I'm not surprised.

Intelligent people know, as does Gore, that Nader didn't "steal" any votes from him in Florida, he earned them. People voted willingly, not with guns to their heads. Gore knows this too. Gore is smart enough to realize now what he did or didn't do to send liberals over to the greens. It would be great if the incumbent, blue-bloods would realize it too. Now that he doesn't have handlers he can pretty much do and say as he pleases.
His speech yesterday got more publicity than MLK's birthday.

[pberq]

4. Great post! Those who blame Nader for 2000 need to read this.

[moobu2]

5. You’re right, Nader didn’t steal them

Those ignoramuses willingly threw their votes away on the lying fake corprate slut. They might as well have voted Repuke. Same thing.

[EFerrari]

7. And, intelligent people know GORE WON the election. n/t

[moobu2]

13. If Nader voters were so damn intelligent

Why didn’t they just vote for Bush. LOL dont they know it's the same thing?

I don’t think they’re all that sharp anyway though.. :kick:

[EFerrari]

17. I think you misread my post. n/t

[Crazy Dave]

18. Intelligent people also know that...

...if you don't like certain candidates, you vote against them in the primaries but when it comes to the actual election, you always vote with the party. I'll fight like hell to keep Hillary from getting the nomination and hopefully Dean or Edwards will make another go at it. That would be the two candidates I'd be supporting but if she does get the nomination, she'll get my vote in the election.

It's that damn important for a democrat to win.

[AndyTiedye]

20. It Does Rather Beg the Question...

...why was Nader campaigning so heavily in swing states,
instead of solid Democratic states where he would get far more more votes.

I don't think Gore has any hard feelings about it, though.
If they hadn't been able to steal the election,
Gore would have been JFK'ed and Lieberman would have given them their war.

[NNadir]

26. Nader is still a piece of shit Repuke, though.

While Gore is speaking on the assault on the constitution, Nader is worrying about Terrell Owens.

Nader was, is, and always will be a fraud, and I don't care what Gore says to him.

[Crazy Dave]

28. Why you telling me?

I never said I supported the guy. I just think people are stupid that said he "stole votes".
:wtf:

[NNadir]

29. I agree. Most people who voted for Gore were intelligent.

Those who did not, were not.

[Coastie for Truth]

3. "...some Democrats..."???

You posted

..whose third-party candidacy is still blamed by some Democrats for Gore's 2000 defeat by George W. Bush...

My 94 year old mom - who has never missed an election, has a perfect 100% Democratic voting record, and at 94 gets her hair done the day before the election, and gets the mini-bus to take her (plus walker, oxygen, etc.) to the polls, insists that "The vast right wing conspiracy, and the Scaifes, and all of the Bush dirty money funded Nader's campaign" and "if Nader hadn't siphoned all of those votes Gore would have been elected."

[hippiechick]

6. It was the Supreme Court that stopped the recount, if you recall ...

... and 'privately done' recounts showed time and time again that GORE WON FLORIDA.

Nader didn't steal a thing.

I didn't know your mother had a PhD in electoral science.

[EFerrari]

10. Right. And who gains when the Dems and the Greens

view each other with suspicion? :eyes:

[Coastie for Truth]

15. The GOP. NT

[NYCGirl]

9. I tend to be in the "some Democrats" camp. But I didn't write the article.

Glad to hear that Al Gore is such a decent man, though.

[pberq]

11. See post #2 above.

The establishment Democrats have successfully brainwashed many people into believing that Nader "cost" Gore the election in 2000.

How about this: Gore and his DLC handlers failed to EARN the election in 2000. Everything he said, every speech, was covered by the MSM. Meanwhile Nader's message was covered in back pages if at all. The fact that Nader got as many votes as he did shows how bankrupt the DLC message is.

As a disclaimer: this is my opinion about what happened in 2000. Now, in 2006, I am a huge fan of Al Gore and his great speech yesterday.

[zalinda]

21. Sorry, never heard of the DLC before I joined DU

and that wasn't until 2004. I could see Nader with his huge ego, causing problems just by what I saw and heard. As soon as he said there was no difference between dems and repubs, I knew he was a repub agent. And in 2004, running again, taking money from them out in the open, it was confirmed. Used to admire the man, now he can rot in hell, and so can anyone who still supports him. He's a traitor to the liberal and progressive agenda.

zalinda

[pberq]

23. Just because you never hear of the DLC

before you joined DU doesn't mean that they didn't exist and that they hadn't taken over Gore's campaign.

[zalinda]

32. So, I still don't really know who or what the DLC is

If it's an organization that keeps the dems in the middle of the road, then I'm all for it. I've read some crazy stuff here at DU, and they are lefty views. Way to radical for me and most of the rest of the country. Most of the country are MOTRs, that's me too, although I may lean a little more left on the environment. I'm a pragmatist with some optimism thrown in.

A lot of people here don't seem to realize that there are people outside of your circle of friends that don't agree with you, and they are NOT repubs. They will agree with you on a lot of things but not everything, and some here can't handle that. Not every dem will agree with everything, and THAT'S OKAY, we're dems, we don't have to. And guess what, repub lite is okay with me as long as they vote for a dem.

zalinda

[bananas]

37. demopedia and wikipedia links

These have links to the DLC website.

demopedia
http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com/index.php/Democratic_Leadership_Council

wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council

[radio4progressives]

34. nader has never ever been a republican..please please please

i beg people please get informed.

[zalinda]

38. Then why did he take money from them?

And why did he run in 2004, when he knew this country was falling apart. After his run in 2004, all I have for the man is hatred.

I mean really, how dumb are some people here? If you have a third party and it's left leaning, it takes votes from the dems. If it's right leaning it takes votes from the right. Whether you like it or not, we have a 2 party system. You want to change it? Get dems in office and pressure them to change it. Voting for Nader or any other lefty quack pot, is just going to keep the repubs in power.

If Nader had stayed out of 2000, Gore could have had almost 10% more of the vote. That would have been difficult to hide, since they didn't have everything in place yet. So, if you want to excuse Nader for his ego, go ahead, but don't expect me or millions of other dems to forgive him.

Naderites are just lefty Bushies.........they can't see their idols for the asses they are.

zalinda

[EFerrari]

12. Gore could have won and the DLC would till be blaming Nader.

Oops! :)

[Coastie for Truth]

14. I am not DLC

I am from the SF Area

[EFerrari]

16. Sorry -- I didn't mean that you were.

My take is that the DLC did have a stake in putting the blame somewhere other than in their mostly dumb strategy.

/spell check is just barking at me and closing today

[LaurenG]

8. The SCOTUS gave the election to Bush anyway

I hold no ill will either.

[Pirate Smile]

19. This line makes my head want to explode: "I think Gore is much better out

of office," Nader told me yesterday.

Yeah, he's great out of office.

I think there may have just been one itsy, bitsy problem with having Gore out of office. Just a tiny problem for all of us and the entire world. :eyes:

:nuke:

[EFerrari]

35. It's the kind of thing that Ralph would say. If you think about it

EVERYONE is better out of office, lol, because the whole shark tank isn't between them and their projects.

The flip side of Nader's focus is his myopia, this remark being a perfect illustration of same. I don't think for a minute that this was a lefthanded endorsement of Mad Monkey Boy -- who would definitely be better out of office.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

22. Well, he has a lot more in common with Nader than a lot of Dems.

But, rather than acknowledge that the votes that went to Nader were available to Gore if he had spoken out instead of listening to the DLC handlers, it's easier for some to blame Nader.

[pberq]

24. Exactly. Nader has been successfully put up as the

scapegoat for the sell-out DLC policies.

Nader exemplified what Democrats traditionally have stood for. Unfortunately, the DLC and their Republican-Lite friends and supporters want us to believe that their pro-corporate policies are what Democrats should be supporting.

If you like the DLC, why not just go all the way and vote Republican?

[NNadir]

27. Really? Democrats care deeply about NBA officiating?

I've been a democrat all my adult life, well over thirty years, and I don't need a mindless cretin like Nader to tell me what a democrat is.

Nader has been for one thing and one thing only: Nader.

In the last two elections, Nader has run the Repuke line almost exclusively. It consists of three words: "The Democrats Suck! The Democrats Suck! The Democrats Suck!"

Nader by the way, has behaved personally more like a Repuke than anyone imagines. He fired the entire staff of the Multinational Monitor when they threatened to strike over illegal working conditions (80 hrs work for 40 hours pay.)

Now, Nader talks like a big friend of labor, but his history is a bit more complicated. In the early 1970s, his Raiders' work on transportation regulation treated unionized airline and trucking workers as among the beneficiaries of government-sanctioned monopolies; that work contributed importantly to the movement for deregulation of these industries, with disastrous effects on workers, later in the decade.

Closer to home, Nader was the prime mover in a very ugly tale about a publication he founded, Multinational Monitor. In 1984, he fired then-editor Tim Shorrock (an occasional contributor to LBO), allegedly for running a story on Bechtel's alleged bribery of South Korean officials to get construction contracts without getting Nader's approval. (So much for editorial independence.) But the sacking came after a long history of fights between Nader and Shorrock over near-sweatshop working conditions as well as editorial policy, with Nader, among other things, objecting to Shorrock's attempts to link CIA behavior to the interests of multinationals.

Shorrock was given three months to leave. In response, he and two colleagues organized a campaign to get reinstated, and, as Shorrock told LBO, they

enlisted the support of a number of writers, union activists and subscribers. Nader refused to meet with the group or even acknowledge its existence. Finally, our staff decided to ask for union recognition, and filed papers with Nader and the National Labor Relations Board. Within 24 hours, the locks on our offices had been changed and I was fired - by Nader's closest aides, who had been conveniently "given" the magazine as a free gift by Nader. In the next two weeks, the rest of the staff was laid off (and never rehired). From that point on, the Monitor became a scab publication.

But we kept up the fight, filed unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB and kept pestering Nader and his surrogates with protest letters and petitions. Then Nader retaliated: first, his aides tried to get the Washington, D.C., police to arrest me for stealing files. The case was thrown out of court. So we went public, and took our story to the Washington Post. Shortly thereafter, Nader's aides filed a $1.2 million civil suit against myself, the ex-staffers of the Monitor and one of our supporters from the Institute for Policy Studies, on the charge that we had tried to "destroy their business."

Eventually, a settlement was reached: we dropped the NLRB case, they dropped the suit. But the damage was done. Like the corporations he abhors, Nader won his fight through heavy-handed tactics and intimidation. No union was ever formed at the Monitor, and business went on. "I don't think there is a role for unions in small non-profit 'cause' organizations any more than...within a monastery or within a union," Nader told the Washington Post on June 28, 1984.

The Monitor story is not unique: around the same time, a much bigger union drive was squelched at Public Citizen, the largest of the Nader organizations....

A couple things I would add. First, Nader's campaign against me was incredibly vicious. His top aides spread all kinds of rumors about me in Washington and managed to get me pretty well blacklisted from the public interest crowd (which actually was a good thing). They even tried to convince people I was a communist (!!!) out to subvert Nader's organizations.

Ralph Nader may look like a democrat, smell like a populist, and sound like a socialist - but deep down he's a frightened, petit bourgeois moralizer without a political compass, more concerned with his image than the movement he claims to lead: in short, an opportunist, a liberal hack. And a scab.

http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Nader.html



I cannot imagine how anyone with a sense of decency idolizes this man. Nader his a fraud, and his supporters are notable only for being credulous.

[zalinda]

31. Thank you for posting this, I knew in my heart he was an ass

but this just confirms it.

If he really was so concerned about this country, he would have pulled out of Ohio and Florida in 2000, as he had made his point. Running in 2004 was just insanity. Where was he living, in a cave for all of Bush's administration? He saw what was going on and he knew that the Supreme Court was going to have to vacancies to be filled. Why didn't he put his "views" aside and work to elect a dem so the court wouldn't go more to the right and so the "war" could be ended? Why? Because he's an ass! He only thinks about himself, or maybe he was bought off by the Bushies.....no, I think it's because he's an ass!

zalinda

[no_more_rhyming]

25. Nader / Gore in 2008?

[NYCGirl]

39. GOD NO!!!!

:eyes:

[LittleClarkie]

30. I don't blame Nader for 2000. That would be stupid.

I blame him for OTHER things.

I still don't think he's the same man he used to be. He reminds me of Pat Buchannan. They both talk pretty, but they're both alittle cuckoo bananas.

[JI7]

33. "I think Gore is much better out of office,"

[Adenoid_Hynkel]

36. cool - let's run them together in '08

and screw this hillary nonsense

[GreenPartyVoter]

40. I don't think Ralph is well enough to do it any more.

[Beelzebud]

41. Nader bashers: If Gore had won his home state, things would be different.

And Nader didn't even factor into Gore's homestate loss..