Ralph Nader will win the 2004 Presidential Election.
Why, you ask? As V.I. Lenin, one Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, once said, "If you will it, dude, then it is no dream."
And if try really hard and use The Force and all my organic and supernatural powers, I can will it to happen. Really! I swear I can!
See, this one night I was sitting at the bar with Mr. Klutch.xls. I was telling him how much I wanted an old 80's Roland synthesizer so I could write some songs which would include some semi-cheesy New Wave synth sounds. I wanted that keyboard. Really wanted it.
The next morning I left my apartment for work. It was garbage day. Two houses up the street from me, someone had thrown away an old 1980's Roland synth.
I picked it up, took it inside, and it worked.
Know why I got the keyboard? 'Cuz I willed it to happen.
Okay, okay... YES, I found the keyboard in the trash the morning after the night I talked extensively about wanting it so. Did I WILL it to happen? No, probably not. But it's nice to believe.
So, yeah. Ralph Nader is not going to win the 2004 Presidential Election. Even if I use the Force and all that shit.
As it stands now, I have no doubt in my mind that the American Dubya Foundation will once again ascend to the throne.
Why? I'll tell you why.
1. Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, Bush is a wartime president. He got us into this mess, and a lot of middle-of-the-road voters are apt to think "Well, he got us into this. He's the one to get us out of it."
2. Yeah, there's a LOT of fuss from Bush-haters. They're making a lot of noise. But, c'mon. Do you know ANYONE who complains about G-dubb that didn't vote for either Gore or Nader in 2004? The noise-makers, they're not the ones who are gonna swing the election. (and how many of them are there in the swing-states, anyway?) They voted last time, and they didn't win. What's gonna change this time. (And yeah, you wanna go and blame Ralph Nader for this, go ahead. Almost everyone I talked to who voted for Nader would NOT have voted for Gore or Bush or anyone else for t hat matter. Now, I can't speak for an entire nation, but I have a feeling that a lot of the Nader votes in 2000 would not have gone to Gore, but to nowhere.)
3. As much as we've heard from the anti-Bush crowd, let's face it. Lots of people love this guy. Lots.
4. Politicians from Massachusetts generally do not fare well in Presidential Elections post-1960. Some of them even end up dead.
5. Perhaps this is my paranoid side coming out, but seriously, I believe that the American Dubya Foundation has Osama Bin Laden right where they want him, and will trot him out sometime in mid-to-late October. Just like Nixon did when he ended the Vietnam War, Bush will trot out his trump card just at the nick of time. Think about it -- if Bush-led American forces had captured Osama Bin Laden at any point, why on Earth would they trot him out at that moment? Why not wait for the big payoff and get something out of it? Sure, keep the video and audio tapes coming out. Keep the population nervous and rooting for you, and then BLAMMO! Hit 'em with the big guns at High Noon.
6. Cheney out. Giuliani in. Everybody loves a National Hero!
Notice that not one of my reasons was "Because Ralph Nader ran for President."
There's a lot of Nader-hating going on right now. "Oh, he's gonna take important votes away from the Democratic Candidate!" "He's just an egocentric troublemaker!" I even heard one guy claim that Nader had been bought-off to run by the Republican Party!
Hear me out, folks. I honestly don't believe that Ralph Nader is going to be the reason that Bush wins and the Dems lose. In fact, I only think he can help the Democrats overall... infact, if the Democratic Candidate (let's face it, it's gonna be Kerry) ends up winning the election, I think it will be because of Ralph Nader.
Now, I've been wrong before. And I may be crazy. (see the bin-Laden stuff above) But let's take a look, here.
Last time around, Ralph Nader was the Green Party candidate. One of his major goals in that campaign -- if not THE major goal -- was to garner at least 5% of the national vote, get a third party national campaign funding, and begin the end of the two-party system.
This time around, Nader is running as an independent -- which means, as I understand it, that even if he did get 5% of the national vote, no third party would get the national campaign funding (since he's running independently of any party). So he's not trying to do that this time.
No matter what he says, Ralph Nader does not honesetly believe he can win. And I don't believe he wants to.
See, Ralph, as you well know, has been a thorn in the side of many institutions and corporations for decades now. He's got some clout. And he has a somewhat-small but devoted group of followers who will vote for him whenever he throws his hat into the ring. These people tend to be lefties, people who were once Democrats but have become so disenchanted with that party's shift to the right, that they feel they have no where else to turn and want to turn somewhere.
So what I think the plan here is, see... Ralph says to the Democrats, "See? I have this constituency here... and they used to belong to you, until you abandoned them. Now, one of two things can happen here. Either you guys can come to us, meet us at least halfway... and I can drop out of the race and tell them all to go out and vote for you. Or 2) You can ignore us, and I can stay in the race until the very end -- robbing you of votes you surely could have had and will definitely need in what will probably be another very close election. It's your choice, guys. Reach out to us, and we can swing this thing for you."
That's my take, anyway. If that happens, then it's very possible that the Democrats could take this thing. In which case Nader would have been true to his word when he said that his entrance into the race could only help the Democrats take Bush out of office.
But on the whole... no. I don't think that's gonna happen. At least not yet. The Dems are still pig-headed and thick, steadfastly holding to their shift. They're not trying to win -- they're trying to win it their way, even if another way would be a lot more beneficial to them in the long run -- just like Mike Martz did when his Rams lost the Super Bowl to the Patriots in 2002.
So yeah, in short, everything is too fucked up to not have G-dubb back in for another four.
Please direct all hate-mail to drunkpirate77@yahoo.com Thank you.
