Scott Lemieux takes up the Nader wars, arguing that Ralph was really Bush's best friend:
Actually, I am taking him at his word: "If you want the parties to diverge from one another, have Bush win." "Which, Nader confided to Outside in June, wouldn't be so bad. When asked if someone put a gun to his head and told him to vote for either Gore or Bush, which he would choose, Nader answered without hesitation: “Bush.""
Oddly enough, his word was correct, then, wasn't it? The Democratic Party really has diverged from the Republican Party. Its progressive and liberal strains have amassed vast amounts of influence and organizing capabilities. The most ostentatiously, unnecessarily conservative of its members are being seriously primary'd, an effort that, whether or not it succeeds, will worry all incumbents who would break faith with the left. The party is vibrating with new health care bills, national security strategies, economic philosophies, and progressive worldviews -- most all of which explicitly or implicitly reject the rightward drift of the 90's. And Gore, the man Nader helped beat, may well be the phenomenon's most compelling example: Where in 2000 he ran a mealy-mouthed, uninspiring campaign with few big ideas and even fewer moments of real liberalism, he's become an electric voice for progressivism and conscience, emerging a hero to lefties everywhere.
This, of course, is not to exonerate Nader. The damage Bush has caused is incalculable, the death toll staggering. But insofar as Nader believed his victory would reawaken the left's progressivism, he appears to have been dead on.
