Ralph Nader did not lose the 2000 election for Al Gore. Al Gore lost it himself by being a bad candidate. Do you remember liking Al Gore in 2000? Because I don't remember liking him very much back then, and, come to think of it, most of the people I knew didn't like him, either. But we supported him because he was a Democrat, and because George H. W. Bush, Jr. seemed like an incompetent idiot.
What I find kind of ironic is that Al Gore tried to distance himself from the blundering President Clinton when he ran for president, who had somMy ehow outstayed his welcome after eight years. Now, as we're all embracing change and saying that Obama represents that stray from politics-as-usual and the dynastic administrations of the the last twenty-seven years, I find it rather hilarious that people are still losing their shit over Al Gore because he made a movie that reiterated everything the same things we'd learned since the '90s but suddenly started to believe because we had that bad hurricane that destroyed the poor, black section of a Southern city that we only care about for one week in winter anyway. (Also, the hurricane wasn't really the cause of all of that destruction; rather, it was most likely the man-made levees that had gone unchecked for several years. But having that argument is like disagreeing over the role that slavery had in the Civil War. I'm not going there.)
My point is that Ralph Nader also represents a departure from politics as usual and, in a perfect world, more people would realize this and vote for him. But because we're so bogged down in tradition, and really only get politically-motivated every four years because we think a few months of debates and sending emails to our friends and family will somehow make everything in our country change for the better, we tend to ignore the fact that everything in this country - from the Hill to how we run our daily lives - is politics as usual.
So yeah. I'm not voting for Nader, but I respect what he's trying to do, and I don't think he should be the scapegoat for the Democratic Party's shortcomings.
Related:
An Unreasonable Man
