I disagree. Nadar is simply another option in this election. I hate the rhetoric that Nadar "takes" votes away from Kerry or Bush. Thats bullshit. Kerry and Bush need to be commanding of their decisions and effective in convinving people to vote for them. If someone votes for Nadar instead of Kerry, thats Kerry's fault, not Nadars. Kerry's job is to convince the voters to go for him.

So if the democrats want to cry a river because they are "losing" votes to Nadar, that is there own damn fault. Same goes for republicans.

now is not the time to suicide bomb the nation's electoral process.

Well, Nader has the right to do what he's doing, and just because he might hurt one candidate or help another is no reason to make such a wild claim.

How quickly we forget spoiler Perot, who won a whopping 19% of the vote and guaranteed that Clinton would become the next President. Everyone likes to blame the economy and a hundred other things on Bush's defeat in 1996, but the only factor that lost him the election in then end was Ross Perots popularity with conservatives. If not for that, Bush 41 would have won his second term.

Besides, even if Nader did not have his sights set on being a spoiler before, he certainly has reason to now. Kerry supporters have been taking the Nader Campaign to court all over the country, trying to have him thrown off the ballot any way they can. Nader may now be just annoyed enough to WANT to take Kerry down.

I find it ironic that, while Kerry speaks of possible Republican efforts to disenfranchise voters in November, his staff is out in many states right now trying to disenfranchise voters who want to support Nader. It's Kind of like Gore who, during the 2000 recount kept asserting, "I just want every vote counted," while his lawyers were working to disenfranchise voters who had used absentee ballots.

As the old saying goes, "there's nought so strange as folk."

David

As Bush is no Reagan, so Nader is no Ross Perot.

Has Perot not quit then re-started his race he would have gotten an even larger vote than he did and there would probably be a viable third party today.

He did, there isn't.

As I said in the initial post, I actually like Nader a bit. If this were any other election I wouldn't take issue with him running. There's just too much at stake this time around. And, true, if Kerry were a stronger candidate and his campaign actually knew how to defend him against unfounded attacks Nader wouldn't even be an issue. But, he is.

Nader's attitude and approach to this is what really gets to me. He knows he has no base -- the Green Party has even abandoned him -- yet he continues this charade in an attempt to push Kerry to the left. That's all his agenda is; he's not trying to win.

If he wants to bring change to the electoral process this is not the year and the base is not yet there. You can't force a movement into being, it has to happen of its own volition. As Hal pointed out, Perot could have started such a movement in `92, and he didn't. Nader is in no way starting a movement this year around, so, to me at least, it seems as if he wants the importance of being the kingmaker no matter the nonsensical rhetoric he spouts.

The problem seems to be that America's electoral system (like Britain's) is broken, where the entire election is decided in a handful of swing states, and nobody else's votes really make a difference. The winner-take-all approach to the electoral college means that third parties often split the vote and end up handing victory to the party on the opposite side.

I don't know enough about the American constitution to know what can be changed without a constitutional amendment. Can a state switch to proportional voting for electoral college votes? That could make third party leaders kingmakers (which may be a good or a bad thing, depending on the third party).

I assume it's impossible to junk the electoral college altogether, and have a French-style two-round process?