Who do you think should be elected in 2008?

[sisterandcousinandaunt]

Originally Posted by Haradrim

The reason i believe Nader to be the reason Gore lost is he was running as a Green Party Candidate whose primary objective is to be environmentally friendly.... and seriously folks when you think environment i guaruntee Gore is in the top 3 if not first person you think of. He wasnt running because he thought a candidate didnt support the right issues, he was running because he is Ralph nader and is an egotistical moron. Sure he did great things years ago but since then he has actually hurt the same causes he pretends to be supporting. And if Nader hadnt run Ill bet you good money Gore would have recieved at least 954 more votes than Bush in Florida.

100% agreement. Nader's plethora of issue institutions sets back consumer and environmental protection by YEARS. Only a few of them deserve any office space. And they suck up the energy of activists until they burn them out. It has just eviscerated the Left.

Look at the institutions that matter. The Sierra Club. Oxfam. The AFSC. The Southern Poverty Law Center. The Center for Science in the Public Interest. These are the go-to guys on the topics of interest to people in the environment and justice. None of them are Nader organizations. There's a reason for that.

Also lets not forget that Gore won the popular vote. So its not a matter of people being more upset with the Democrats that year, it was a matter of the electoral college and Nader made it so that Florida, a very green state, was not won by the man it should have been won by.

I've always thought personally there should be two rounds of elections. One to find the top two candidates and then a second round where there are only two candidates. That way one of those two does get the majority share and consituiences cant be split in two by egomaniacs.

There's a simple solution, as the Framers intended. No tickets. If there had been no tickets, the 2000 election would have given us Bush/Gore or Gore/Bush. Either way would have been better for the COUNTRY than Bush/Cheney. And not because Cheney's a corrupt warmonger, but because 1/2 the country wanted the other guy. Eliminating tickets makes a bi-partisan solution (which is really all the country cares about, guys) not only possible, but likely. Where it's legal, it works.

Originally Posted by Nurvingiel

Giant ego aside, people generally seem to hate Nader because he has the nerve to run for election in a two party system. What exactly is wrong with that?

Nope. I don't hate Independents. I hate useless egotists.

Why doesn't the Green party choose a leader who isn't, as it seems, universally loathed?

You can't have read my links. Nader is NOT the leader of (either) Green Party. You know, people DO that work, give them credit. Nader has more name recognition than people doing the work. So he gets more press coverage for the issues, and may get more votes. BUT HE'S NOT A GREEN.

In this case, why not change the electoral system so that the President is elected by the popular vote? It would still be democratic, of course.

The short answer is, that's not the kind of country we are. We are a federation. States still have rights. The Electoral College system was designed (as was our bi-cameral legislature) as a compromise when getting a Constitution at all was in debate. We didn't degenerate into civil war then, because we had brilliant statesmen who designed a compromise.

The long answer is, you just need to look at the electoral map to see what a catastrophe that would be. Dems would run in the cities, and Reps would run in the country. And they'd never have to give a fig as to what minorities on any side wanted. Destroy the country.