Thursday, December 18, 2003
Wonders of the World
The D-Train is rolling up here in Wisconsin, too. Dean's 33 percent is as much as Lieberman, Clark, and Gephardt (the next three) combined, and even outdoes "undecided" by 11 points. What that says to me is that Dean is the only Democrat anybody is paying attention to up here, as the numbers for the rest of them parallel the national numbers, which measure the grossest kind of name recognition. These national polls have consistently shown Lieberman to be stronger than he actually is on the ground. For a guy who supposedly has 11 percent support here, Lieberman has no presence at all that I've seen--if he's got a Wisconsin office, I don't know where it is. (He has only one Wisconsin endorsement at the moment, from State Senator Jeff Plale--one of the leading Democratic enablers of Republican nonsense in the state legislature, so go figure.) The poll was taken after the capture of Saddam Hussein last weekend--so that hasn't affected Dean's standing against other Democrats yet. I suppose it could, because three-quarters of those surveyed wouldn't admit to being "very sure" of their choice.
The worry I have about Dean at the moment is not whether he'll get the nomination--it's how well he'll match up against Bush, especially now that Saddam Hussein is in the bag. (John Nichols of the Capital Times says he'll do fine because he's still right about the war.) It turns out that Ralph Nader is worried about Dean vs. Bush, too. So guess what? He's probably going to run again. Nader says, "The Democrats are damaging each other far more than any Green campaign could. What they are saying about Dean...all that will be used by Republicans." Well, yes. But how that justifies another Nader run is not quite clear to me.
Nader acknowledges that many of his 2000 supporters won't come back to him in 2004 (those who have realized that, wow, there really WAS a difference between Bush and Gore!) but he can count on picking up a goodly number of the Kucinich people, who are going to have their hearts broken sometime around 9:00 on the night of the New Hampshire primary, and will be ready to transfer from one lost cause to another and thereby help Bush get reelected.
I voted for Nader in 1996, dropped five bucks in the Nader for President basket at the Madison Farmer's Market in 2000, and intended to vote for him up until about a month before Election Day, when I decided my vote needed to go to Gore. Politics was once famously defined as "the art of the possible." What is possible, and how are you, the voter, most likely to help make it happen? By casting a vote for a candidate at three percent in the national polls, or a candidate at 42 percent? Naderites (and Kucinich people, for that matter) don't like to make those sorts of calculations. To them, a Gore vote or a Dean vote is a compromise they're unwilling to make. But that's foolish. If you're starving and somebody offers you a loaf of Wonder Bread, are you going to hold out for organic wheat-free dairy-free European six grain? You have the right to, but you'll be dead when you could have been alive. Quality of life is a different issue. It's perfectly fine to be concerned about your quality of life--but you have to stay alive before you can do anything about it. So it is in 2004. Before we can do anything about what Bush has done to progressive causes, we have to throw Bush out. If it means eating Wonder Bread, so be it.
Recommended listening: After this morning's post about Ev Ehrlich's exploration of the Dean campaign's Internet dominance as a paradigm-changer for the very idea of political parties, I flipped on NPR to hear a story about how the Internet has altered the nature of political rhetoric. Surprisingly, it's actually turned the clock back.
The D-Train is rolling up here in Wisconsin, too. Dean's 33 percent is as much as Lieberman, Clark, and Gephardt (the next three) combined, and even outdoes "undecided" by 11 points. What that says to me is that Dean is the only Democrat anybody is paying attention to up here, as the numbers for the rest of them parallel the national numbers, which measure the grossest kind of name recognition. These national polls have consistently shown Lieberman to be stronger than he actually is on the ground. For a guy who supposedly has 11 percent support here, Lieberman has no presence at all that I've seen--if he's got a Wisconsin office, I don't know where it is. (He has only one Wisconsin endorsement at the moment, from State Senator Jeff Plale--one of the leading Democratic enablers of Republican nonsense in the state legislature, so go figure.) The poll was taken after the capture of Saddam Hussein last weekend--so that hasn't affected Dean's standing against other Democrats yet. I suppose it could, because three-quarters of those surveyed wouldn't admit to being "very sure" of their choice.
The worry I have about Dean at the moment is not whether he'll get the nomination--it's how well he'll match up against Bush, especially now that Saddam Hussein is in the bag. (John Nichols of the Capital Times says he'll do fine because he's still right about the war.) It turns out that Ralph Nader is worried about Dean vs. Bush, too. So guess what? He's probably going to run again. Nader says, "The Democrats are damaging each other far more than any Green campaign could. What they are saying about Dean...all that will be used by Republicans." Well, yes. But how that justifies another Nader run is not quite clear to me.
Nader acknowledges that many of his 2000 supporters won't come back to him in 2004 (those who have realized that, wow, there really WAS a difference between Bush and Gore!) but he can count on picking up a goodly number of the Kucinich people, who are going to have their hearts broken sometime around 9:00 on the night of the New Hampshire primary, and will be ready to transfer from one lost cause to another and thereby help Bush get reelected.
I voted for Nader in 1996, dropped five bucks in the Nader for President basket at the Madison Farmer's Market in 2000, and intended to vote for him up until about a month before Election Day, when I decided my vote needed to go to Gore. Politics was once famously defined as "the art of the possible." What is possible, and how are you, the voter, most likely to help make it happen? By casting a vote for a candidate at three percent in the national polls, or a candidate at 42 percent? Naderites (and Kucinich people, for that matter) don't like to make those sorts of calculations. To them, a Gore vote or a Dean vote is a compromise they're unwilling to make. But that's foolish. If you're starving and somebody offers you a loaf of Wonder Bread, are you going to hold out for organic wheat-free dairy-free European six grain? You have the right to, but you'll be dead when you could have been alive. Quality of life is a different issue. It's perfectly fine to be concerned about your quality of life--but you have to stay alive before you can do anything about it. So it is in 2004. Before we can do anything about what Bush has done to progressive causes, we have to throw Bush out. If it means eating Wonder Bread, so be it.
Recommended listening: After this morning's post about Ev Ehrlich's exploration of the Dean campaign's Internet dominance as a paradigm-changer for the very idea of political parties, I flipped on NPR to hear a story about how the Internet has altered the nature of political rhetoric. Surprisingly, it's actually turned the clock back.
