Nader or not

I did listen to Meet the Press in the end: it seemed appropriately suited to the task at hand: tidying up a bathroom or two.

Listening to the pre-show, i.e. Schwarzenegger, was painful enough, especially when he got to his closing comment – about the possibility of a constitutional amendment permitting immigrants who have lived here for at least 20 years to run for the presidency. (Had I the foresight to predict this possibility, I would have lead an untarnished life, just in case duty called…) Does he see himself on this path? Would you believe it, he has yet to do a single remarkable thing for California (though repealing the auto tax hike at a time of such a severe state budget crisis was pretty remarkable), and yet he is unabashedly smackin’ his lips at the possibility of the White House.

Nader, though, was even more painful, in part because he would not acknowledge the likelihood that his candidacy will have a devastating effect on the Democratic run for the White House. He is known for claiming again and again that if Democrats do not win (in 2000 or 2004), they have themselves, and not him to blame.

Okay, Nader makes one good point here: his name on the ballot cannot be viewed as the sole reason for putting GWB where he is today. Nader listed others on the ticket that also drew votes away from Gore back in 2000. So true. Basically we vote without reason or thought. Perhaps we don’t understand arrows either, thinking that they designate the person who should be eliminated from the race. And why do some voters continue to vote for people who are not even running? In the Wisconsin primaries alone, many non-candidates got hundreds of very real votes. What kind of a voting public are we anyway? We’ll vote for Nader whether he proceeds with his candidacy or not. We’ll write in our neighbor’s name, just for the heck of it. Maybe some people draw decorative arrows that lead to nowhere. We are basically voting fools. Nader wont change that. But he could maybe not go out of his way to create another opportunity for us to display our idiocy.