"I voted in New York state, which went blue in 2000, so my individual vote did not help swing the election. But I still feel complicit. I jumped on the Nader bandwagon and bought into a set of beliefs that seemed right to me at the time but were proven very wrong over the eight years that followed.
Chief among them, I thought that Gore and Bush were essentially indistinguishable. Carbon copies of each other. Both corporate insider candidates, beholden to big-money interests and out of touch
with people struggling at the margins of the economy.
Nader voiced the discontent I was feeling. I was young and idealistic and wanted political revolution. It felt good to back a rabble-rouser, not the stiff, robotic Al Gore. I was annoyed with the Democrats for picking a predictable, incremental candidate who played not to the left, but to the mushy middle.
But here’s the thing: In the eight years that followed, I was reminded again and again that George Bush and Al Gore were not carbon copies of each other.
Gore might not have been a perfect president, but it’s likely he would have taken more reasonable action on the economy, climate change, and gun policy. It’s hard to say how he would have handled 9/11, but he might have been more cautious and more diplomatic in the Middle East than Bush was.
But if Bernie splinters the left and erodes Clinton’s support among voters, the consequences for our country could be even more dire than another Bush administration. If the Bush administration was catastrophic, a Trump administration could be cataclysmic." Slate.com
Nader voiced the discontent I was feeling. I was young and idealistic and wanted political revolution. It felt good to back a rabble-rouser, not the stiff, robotic Al Gore. I was annoyed with the Democrats for picking a predictable, incremental candidate who played not to the left, but to the mushy middle.
But here’s the thing: In the eight years that followed, I was reminded again and again that George Bush and Al Gore were not carbon copies of each other.
Gore might not have been a perfect president, but it’s likely he would have taken more reasonable action on the economy, climate change, and gun policy. It’s hard to say how he would have handled 9/11, but he might have been more cautious and more diplomatic in the Middle East than Bush was.
But if Bernie splinters the left and erodes Clinton’s support among voters, the consequences for our country could be even more dire than another Bush administration. If the Bush administration was catastrophic, a Trump administration could be cataclysmic." Slate.com
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