"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
I'm The Problem
Posted 8:26 p.m., June 11, 2004
Updated 9:49 a.m., June 12, 2004
|
The following letter was received by the Kevblog earlier this week, and I have received permission to run it. I thought it was interesting enough to move to the home page. My response follows.
Mr. Featherly: Nader should run (and I will vote for him).
You represent everything that is wrong with American voters today.
In your Pioneer Press opinion article, you wrote that you believe the two-party system (duopoly) is failing, yet you say that you will not vote for Ralph Nader. Hopefully, you plan to vote for a different third-party candidate; otherwise you are contributing to the problem as well.
Too many people in this country treat voting like sports. Nothing makes sports fans happier than when their favorite team wins the World Series, Super Bowl, etc. Likewise, people take pride in voting for the "winning" candidate, but this is a problem. For example, I dislike the New York Yankees, but if the Yankees beat the Twins my taxes do not necessarily increase, no wars break out, and no prisoners are abused. What did all the people, whom voted for Bush, win?
If you own a corporation and received tax benefits for shipping workers overseas, and you voted for Bush, you won. If you want to exploit the environment for financial gains, and you voted for Bush, then I guess you won too.
Whatever happened to something called altruism? I plan to vote for Ralph Nader because I believe that he will make the U.S. a better place for everyone, not because he is going to make me wealthy. The time to end the duopoly and elect Nader, a man of integrity, is now.
-- Joseph Sorenson, Rochester, Minn.
...
Kev responds:
Lots to tackle here.
I guess I did win when Bush won, by your logic. Because, yes, I am willing to exploit the environment for commercial gain. And so are you, unless you don't travel streets and roads on your way to work. The question is not whether we should exploit the environment for our own gain--as a species, we hardly have a choice. It's a question of stewardship. I'm perfectly happy to allow logging, if replanting is part of the package, and if we are allowed to keep some substantial portion of our forests pristine.
I don't own a corporation, and I'm not getting any more of a tax cut from the Bush administration than you are, most likely. But the fact is that very few American jobs have been sent overseas in comparison to the number of people who have simply lost jobs. Outsourcing is way overplayed as an issue.
According to a Labor Department report released Thursday, during the first three months of the year, the jobs of 4,633 U.S. workers were sent to foreign workers. That was about 2 percent of the 239,361 private-sector, non-farm workers who lost their jobs for at least 31 days from January through March. So outsourcing isn't the issue--jobs are the issue. Outsourcing largely is a distraction.
So you see why I can't vote for Nader. Mostly, he's talking about things that don't resonate with me. Just because he's a third-party candidate doesn't make him my candidate. I'm not likely to vote Libertarian, either. Third parties are not the point. Viable alternatives are the point.
The one thing here where I agree with you, and I've written about this, is that a team-sports-run-amok mentality is infecting our politics. But, really, your brand just seems another wrinkle on the same thing. You're taking me to task for not rooting for your particular underdog.
My issue is with the neglected center, the moderate middle where a lion's share of voters live and where the major political parties, for some reason, dare not tread. I look around, and the extent to which I see the major parties manipulating public policy--not to mention public perception--just blows me away.
Case in point: Adam Nagourney's story in the New York Times today. It's a pretty good story; it talks about the role that undecided voters figure to play in the upcoming Kerry-Bush contest. But it quotes a Democratic pollster, Stanley Greenberg, saying "45 percent of undecided voters described themselves as moderate, compared with 23 percent of the general electorate."
Hold on. A national Los Angeles Times poll showed during the 2000 election that fully 50 percent of Americans, regardless of party affiliation, defined themselves as "moderates," occupants of the political center. Do you really think that has dropped by half in the intervening four years?
The New York Times, through Nagourney--a great reporter, incidentally--has allowed itself to be used by one of the party's pollsters to communicate to voters that the moderate factor is much smaller than likely it is. Voters probably aren't buying it, if they're paying attention, but this kind of stuff to me smacks of an attempt to make the sensible center seem insignificant to itself.
In fact, in its Sunday editions, the Times itself provided evidence that the pollster may have little idea what he is talking about.
Most voters are still centrists willing to consider a candidate from either party, but they rarely get the chance: It's become difficult for a centrist to be nominated for president or to Congress or the state legislature, said Morris P. Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
--New York Times, "A Nation Divided? Who Says?" June 13, 2004That argument may sound familiar to readers of the Kevblog.
But back on point: If a Democratic or Republican candidate arose that I thought could genuinely build coalitions and reverse the fractiousness of our current politics, I'd support that candidate. Particularly if that candidate had the foresight and the wisdom to champion reforms that opened the ballots up to minor party challenges that forced the two major parties to keep honest and deal with the full spectrum of the electorate--to remain mindful of healthy coalition building.
I do support Nader's run for office, but not because I agree with him politically. I don't. But he is the only thing we've got going right now to remind the electorate that there are, or at least could be, alternatives to having to choose the "lesser of two evils." Nader is the only noticable candidate now saying that a vote is not wasted if cast for someone other than a major-party candidate. I even hope Nader polls relatively well, say 4 percent to 6 percent of the vote. That would be pretty normal, historically speaking, for a third-party run in a U.S. presidential election.
If Kerry can't overcome that, he probably shouldn't be president. And anyway, Larry Jacobs at the University of Minnesota predicts that Bush faces a serious challenge from his right, from the Libertarians, who could poll strongly enough to keep him from winning a battleground state of two. If that's true, the Nader effect is a wash anyway.
So, sorry, I'm not going Nader's way. So I guess I'll have to remain part of what's wrong with American politics.
By the way, Joseph, thanks for your note. I've taken the opportunity to respond pretty strongly to it here, but I really am glad you checked out the Kevblog and took the time to share your thoughts.
And also, by the way, I do believe, as you do, that Ralph Nader is a man of integrity. I just don't think he has the formula for moving enough people to get us out of this mud rut we're in.
--Kevin Featherly
