TrueBlue left the following comment on my Primary Voting entry:

I am not sure which of the three you should be most ashamed of.

1. You voted against Clinton?
2. Nader? How did that work out for you?
3. Kerry - can’t blame you for that, although, maybe if people wouldn’t have voted it for Nader, you wouldn’t have to have voted for Kerry.

I suspect that tb is really just having fun in my comments considering I know he did not get political until after BuSh took office and I don’t know if he even voted in ‘96 or 2000. But it gives me a chance to get on my soapbox so I’ll go ahead and tackle his points in reverse order:

3) No point here. Really just reiterating #2.

2) First of all - not Nader. There are a lot of 3rd parties. I did NOT vote for the Green Party. But more to the point of people who think Nader cost Gore the election and 3rd parties are bad and a waste of your vote, which is completely opposite of the truth. By now we all know that the electoral college decides our president and people elect the college and not the president. I’m not arguing that this is not utterly retarded and next to the 3/5 compromise the most boneheaded move the founding fathers could have made but that’s the rules of the game, for now. So your vote does not matter at all if the state you live in goes against you. In other words, if you live in Texas or Colorado and vote for a Democratic president, your vote might does not count towards electing a president, pushing an ideology, nothing. It is a wasted vote.
Now if you vote 3rd party, you know your guy is not going to win, I’ve never met anyone who thought differently. But now you’ve voted more honestly toward your conscience (which is kind of the point), and if by chance your team manages to pull a meager 10% of the popular vote - you’ve got both parties want to adopt the platform in order to get your votes. Your vote will count a lot more towards getting the ideas you support listened to. Voting 3rd party is the most honest expression of democracy and should be lauded instead of ridiculed. And no one cost Gore that election but Gore (and possibly Linda Tripp). He could not carry his home state, he had a f’ing retard as a running mate and was wooden on stage. Both Bush and Gore ran so far to the center is was near impossible to differentiate them and since they were both born as fortunate sons, I didn’t view it as necessary. But obviously BuSh thought running a campaign where he stated he had daddy issues and no respect for the Constitution would not get him elected and lied his way through the campaign.
1) If Clinton had not gotten elected in ‘96, no Lewinsky and Tripp, no Bush running in 2000 (no one challenges an incumbent president for the party nomination). Don’t know what kind of president Dole would have made but I know what we would have avoided and it’s tough to imagine getting anything worse.

Thursday, February 7th, 2008 @ 5:18 pm Activism, News
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