And so it begins -- AGAIN.

And so it begins -- AGAIN. The irrational hatred of, and attacks upon, Ralph Nader. And all for the "crime" of (Gasp!) exercising his Constitutional right to run for president. And you just know it's going to happen: the same irrational attempts by Democrats to keep him off the ballot in 2008 as in 2004, wasting precious time and energy that would have been far better spent simply promoting their party's nominee -- with the same result as last time, too: turning potential voters away from the Democratic Party in a year in which we need as many as we can get.

I don't know how many times it needs to be stated before it sinks in. Ralph Nader did not cost Al Gore the 2000 election. George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, John Ellis (a Bush cousin), Fox Noise Channel, Database Technologies (now ChoicePoint DBT), the Supreme (Kangaroo) Court, and -- much as you hate to admit it, even though the man himself does -- Al Gore...all these people cost our last legitimately elected vice president the 2000 presidential election.

They had help, of course, from Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress in 1998. Clinton, for being dumb and selfish enough to cheat on his wife and lie about it under oath, and the Congress for pursuing a political witch-hunt that culminated in railroading a sitting president into committing perjury in a case that had nothing to do with his extramarital affairs. The scandals, be they exaggerated or fabricated, sufficiently weakened the president and created a mentality in which his legitimate successor felt obligated to distance himself on the campaign trail two years later.

All these things combined to nourish the conditions required for the shrub and his campaign to steal the presidency. And they received absolutely no assistance from Ralph Nader. Yet far too many Democrats insist on blaming him anyway. Why?

According to this web site [1], the official tally of Florida ballots handed Bush the White House by a margin of 543 votes. Nader, who ran that year on the Green Party ticket, received 97,488 votes. Embittered Democrats, unwilling to accept that had their candidate won his own home state of Tennessee, he would have gotten sworn in as president despite the election theft in Florida, figured that Nader had somehow stolen votes that rightly belonged to the Democratic Party.

It's a stupid example of excuse-making, for the following reasons:

1.) Even if those 97,488 had a significant impact upon the outcome of the 2,000 general election (then-Florida state secretary and head of the Florida Bush-Cheney campaign Katherine Harris, with a fraudulent list of "ex-felons" supplied by Database Technologies, purged between 58,000 [2] and 90,000 [3] legally registered voters -- mostly Blacks, Hispanic, and Democratic -- from the rolls, depending on whose numbers you go with), there is no credible reason to believe all or most of those voters really would have cast ballots for Gore had Nader not been running. Less than half, according to CBS [4], would have voted for Gore; but at least thirty percent said they wouldn't have voted at all. That leaves roughly fifty percent who would have cast ballots for someone other than Gore, had Nader not been on the ballot. Which kind of lessens the impact of Nader-voters on the 2000 election, considering the next two points.

2.) Registered Democrats in Florida who either stayed home and didn't vote in Florida, or cast their ballots for Bush. Why does no one attack them?

3.) There were other political parties with candidates on the Florida ballot in 2000, and could just as easily be blamed for costing Al Gore the election as Nader. And yet, no one blames the Libertarian Party's Harry Browne for costing Gore the election. Nor, as Allison Kilkenny points out [5], do GOPers obsessively blame Pat Buchanan for siphoning votes away from the shrub. Maybe that's because the Republican candidate, as KilKenny observes, squeaked to "victory", so if Bush had failed to steal the White House it might very well be Buchanan and not Ralph Nader being attacked at every turn. But then, Nader keeps on running for president, while Buchanan has been content to spew his idiotic venom on MSNBC, so who knows. Anyway, I'm getting away from myself. The tally of Independent political party votes in Florida 2000, other than Green Party ballots, breaks down thusly:

Reform -- 17,484

Libertarian -- 16,415

Natural Law -- 2,281

Workers World -- 1,804

Constitution -- 1,371

Socialist -- 622

Socialist Workers -- 562

Write-in -- 40

That is a total of 40,579 voters who cast ballots for someone other than Al Gore. Yet who among the candidates in those other political parties receives the hate and scorn heaped upon Ralph Nader? Not even one.

How many times does it need to be stated? Nader did not "steal" votes from Al Gore; the vice president simply didn't make a strong enough case for why voters should have cast their ballots for him, and that allowed Team Bush to steal the election. This is FACT. But far too many Democrats keep refusing to accept the truth. Most people, when losing an election, take a few minutes (or years) to reflect upon what they did wrong so that they don't repeat those mistakes the next time around. As evil and destructive as they are, the Republicans managed to do this following the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections. They focused their efforts on winning and keeping the Congress, and by 2000 had successfully united their party enough to squeak their guy in. So in spite of their losses in the presidential elections, the Republican Party did learn from its previous electoral mistakes.

But not Democrats, especially not the top-tier ones [6], who -- unfathomably -- still cling to the notion that somehow they are entitled to votes in spite of all evidence that they haven't earned those ballots at all.

There may be a valid campaign strategy to put up against Ralph Nader. His positions on policy, for example, but if you consider yourself Progressive you may want to avoid making this the hallmark of a campaign for the Democratic nominee. Instead, Democrats should try to focus on how and why their candidate can implement the Progressive policies Nader champions. This, however, requires that the Democratic nominee actually run on Progressive policy positions, so be sure to do everything in your power to make your candidate do just that.

Don't try to sell your candidate as the lesser of two evils. It's not enough to say that your candidate is not a Republican; that only states a technical fact, it doesn't explain why your candidate is better. Example: Joe LIEberman. Have you got my point, now? Given the choice between 'New' and 'Classic' coke, people will pick the real thing every time. And whatever you do, don't condemn people for not supporting your presidential candidate, or try to threaten them with four more years of Republican misrule if they don't. That's the surest way to turn voters off. Even if you can't convince voters to back your presidential candidate, you still might sway them on voting for Progressive Democrats in U.S. Congressional or state-level races, so it does you no good to alienate voters with attacks on them for not liking your guy (or gal, if you're a Clinton supporter and she wins the nomination).

The point is to cease making Ralph Nader the source of your anger and blame for the 2000 disaster, and above all, to move on. Continually harping on the man serves no purpose other than to confirm what he and those who agree with him have already concluded: that the Democratic Party is, fundamentally, no different than the GOP -- at least in terms of electoral, political, and ethical behavior. And that really needs to stop. If not, then don't go whining and placing blame on Ralph Nader when the Democrats lose again in November.