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:: 2.23.2004 ::
Remember Bush's plan to give amnesty to illegal immigrants? No surpise here, the Right hates the idea. Hundreds of GOP loyalists booed the president at a rally where U.S. Senate hopeful Howard Kaloogian and his allies denounced Bush's plan to give temporary legal status to undocumented workers.
"Enough is enough!" the crowd shouted. "Enough is enough!" From "Rifts Show at State GOP Event", in the LA Times. "Booed the president." Wow.
The above was found on Tom Tomorrow's blog (originally on Atrios), as was this: I still believe that Nader had (and has) an important critique of the American political system.
But 2004 is not 2000. If you will forgive me for stating the obvious, 9/11 changed the world we live in. I don't know what the Bush administration would have been like if not for the terrorist attacks, but I know what they've done as a result. 9/11 gave the administration's most radical elements the perfect excuse to pursue their wildest fantasies of empire.
And we can't afford four more years of this.
Look, I figure there are two main reasons to mount a third party insurgency campaign: as a vehicle to get a message across, and as a party-building excercise.
Well, let's take them in order.
As far as the message--after the debacle of the 2000 election, that message has been reduced to a bitter laugh line: so there's no difference between the two parties, huh? There's a lot more to what Nader has to say than that, but it doesn't matter--that's all most people hear. If the 2000 campaign was an attempt to bring a message to a wider audience, it ultimately did more harm than good. In the aftermath of the Florida debacle, there are probably fewer people willing to consider that message than there were before. Nader is now living in his own private Twilight Zone episode, and the harder he tries to make people listen, the faster he drives them away.
(Anyway, Kucinich has already been out there, as this season's standard bearer, fighting the good fight for universal health coverage and the repeal of NAFTA and so on, and...well, he hasn't exactly taken the country by storm. And I mean no disrespect to Kucinich in pointing out this unhappy reality, but there it is.)
And as for the second point, party building: he's not running as a Green party candidate. No party. No party building. End of story. Gotta agree with Tom there. I heard about Nader's announcement this morning on NPR and my first thought was "oh shit."
:: Deb 6:01 PM :: permalink ::
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