this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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I am fascinated to wonder who is upvoting this.
I mean, it’s true that the left base didn’t completely show up for him. Enough of them showed up that he won the popular vote and the electoral college, but if the vigorous activist left that was focused on WTO and GATT and other non electoral issues had been on the ground in the same way that Roger Stone’s machine was, they might have been able to stop Bush from stealing the election, and we might have had action on climate change back before it was too late, no global war on terror affecting hundreds of thousands of lives, no ISIS, no 2008 financial crash, and we might not have had all the failures to take US intelligence’s warnings seriously, that led to 9/11. Plus God knows what else actual forward progress.
Reframing “the US news media is so corrupted by propaganda that the average viewer can’t determine who is better between Gore and Bush, by a large enough margin to overcome a pretty blatant coup” as being all Gore’s fault somehow, is the most Lemmy-fake-leftist thing I’ve seen today, and I’ve seen someone praise the USSR’s justice system and someone else say that Biden shut down Trump’s insulin price cap.
“Too centrist”
Get the fuck out of here
You’re right about Hillary though, that part is true
The fact that Nader ran to his left and had decent success is a pretty good indicator that Gore was too close to the center to win.
But I mainly blame the design of the Florida ballots for Gore's loss.
There's also that minor matter of Republicans actively sabotaging the recounts by standing outside the counting office and chanting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
That doesn't make sense for a couple different reasons, but thinking how to explain that it is wrong actually led to me to realize that Hotelling's Law is a not insignificant part of the incentives at work in a FPTP system which is yet another reason not to use them.
(Basically, in short, whatever point Gore staked out on the little spectrum, Nader can gather some votes by picking a different point. Doesn't mean a damn thing about how good the point either person picked was or the relation between them. But yes, mathematical pressure on both "main" candidates to move to the center and similar to each other is absolutely a real thing and I hadn't fully realized that before, although it seems totally obvious in retrospect and like I should have realized it before this.)
You're right, "too close to the center to win" doesn't make sense. But Nader did run to Gore's left, and took votes from Gore that might have caused a different outcome.
I know because I got yelled at for it on the Internet for eight years.
(Though I still blame the stupid ballots.)
All the Democrats are too close to the center except for a handful of congress people. Honestly, I won't disagree with your earlier point there. But my point was that Gore out of all the Democratic candidates was pretty fuckin sensible in terms of seeing big problems and wanting to deal with them, instead of just having a big party for all the defense contractors and oil companies and Wall Street.
But yes, Nader was a factor, sure. Also: I actually know somebody that worked in politics for quite a while, and her take on the whole Florida debacle was very interesting to me -- basically that it was a failure of on-the-ground organizing by the Democrats; that they should have been able to pick up right away that people were at risk of getting confused by the ballots, and have someone at every polling station that could be able to give a little spiel (or cause the election workers to give a spiel) about how to mark your vote correctly. Like, it was rigged (on many different levels, including in my opinion deliberately making the ballot confusing in a way that would confuse a certain percent of Gore voters), but also every election is "rigged" somewhat, to whatever extent each side can get away with, and part of your job as a political organization is to watch close and be sharp and not let the other side get away with stuff.
IDK if I agree with her, but that was her take on it and she has a lot more firsthand experience than me.
Totally agree. He got lampooned for the "lockbox" but it was actually a decent idea. Regarding the ballots: There's a (paywalled) study from Stanford that claims to show that people accidentally voting for Pat Buchanan were a significant reason the election went the way it did. The ballot is pretty terrible
All this analysis would be fun if it weren't (a) so consequential and (b) continually showing our only hope dropping the ball.
"So like 50 assholes just worked hard on getting the guy they wanted, did some fairly basic shenanigans including showing up at an election office and throwing a fit?"
"Yeah. Is bullshit. And they changed the result, and looking back, it changed the whole world."
Press A: "Wow. I'm never getting involved in politics, that's corrupt as fuck."
Press B: "Holy shit. Can we make a bunch of people to go somewhere and throw a fit? Like, what did they do? And it worked, and it made a difference?" "Yeah like a huge one." "Holy shit..."
You young ones won't know this, but Gore had a very different persona as Congressman and VP. Note that the only reason Clinton, a notorious draft-dodger, picked Gore as his running-mate was because of Gore's reputation as the top Pentagon-hawk. As well, Gore led centrist wing of the party that wanted to eliminate welfare and implement austerity measures.
People who say Gore would have kept us out of Iraq, or not done all the other dumb shit Bush did, don't seem to recall that politician Gore was complete polar opposite of post-political Gore we know today.
Dude I don't really wanna play the game of "let's pull on this thread and see if a bunch of conservative-propaganda-worldview stuff pops out" again, I've done it like twice in the last 2 days and it sometimes takes a while
But (a) it's like a cat with a laser pointer (b) tbh it doesn't look like this particular thread is all that long
I mean everyone knows we all look down on people who didn't fight in the Vietnam War, and in general who don't do what the federal government wants them to do. Fuckin cowards, what was wrong with them! What do you think? Clinton should have gone over and shot a bunch of Vietnamese people, amirite fellow anti Iraq War person?
Perhaps should have put quotes around "notorious". I figure most here knew it was another just another media-generated controversy.
Yeah, completely fair. I see what you mean. I think I am impatient and short tempered after talking with a series of not very nice people yesterday and today.
Regardless of that I still think your main point is made up, though. Here and here are some contemporary stories about the pick -- he voted for the Iraq War 1, but that was seen as sort of a surprise given his father's antiwar reputation. His reputation at the time was as an environmentalist and technocrat. It's important to remember that the tolerance for austerity at home and war abroad was a lot greater in 1992 than it is today; it was a much different political landscape. Gore wasn't seen at the time as any kind of hawk in either respect that I'm aware of and rereading the stories from the time I don't see any kind of inkling that Clinton had him on to pander to pro-war people or anything.
Gore voting for Iraq I was hardly a surprise, as he championed it regularly on TV. He then chastised Bush I for ending the war too early.
In the Clinton Administration, he was among the staunchest hawks. He would give speeches calling for removing of Saddam ("finish the job"). You can probably find some of those speeches with Google...cover the name over and you'd think you were seeing something from Rumsfeld or Cheney.
Contrary to myth, Iraq II was not invented by a small group of neocons. It had full bipartisan backing in Congress, and there are some who were close to Gore who believe he would have also been in support.
Here’s a speech Gore gave about Iraq War 2. You don’t need to believe whether or not he would have been in support; you can go back to contemporary speeches and find out whether he would have been in support, and he wasn’t. As you pointed out, it had pretty freaking broad support, so that made him an outlier.
Idk what you mean about “among the staunchest hawks” in the Clinton administration. It’s not the VP’s job to do policy decisions and take part in the debate about what the president’s policy should be (at least not in public). If he was making pro war statements from 1992-2000 that’s a statement of what the Clinton administration’s policy was, not what Al Gore’s policy preferences were.
He was okay with war, in general, in ways that would make him an anomaly for a progressive Democrat today, but not at all at the time. (At the time, we were still doing our own Israel-in-Gaza slaughter and torture operations all over Central and South America with, as you pointed out, broad bipartisan support with 0 of this modern level of protest or debate about whether we should be doing it.) And like I said, he definitely wasn’t brought into the Clinton administration because he was some pro war guy. I honestly have no idea what you’re even talking about with that. Anyway, I showed you the contemporary articles about why people were saying he was brought in; you’re welcome to read them, or alternatively to think what you like about it if you’re committed to your way.
Man, I lived through it. Don't piss on my leg and call it rain. I followed Gore's campaign. I watched his debates. The man had splinters in his ass from riding fences. He picked Joe Lieberman as his running mate to prove how centrist he was.
Compared to modern Democrats, he's basically a communist, but 2000 was a heady time for progressives. We thought Bill Clinton was just the beginning, a transitional precursor to a new era of balanced budgets and human rights for all. But it was not to be.