The election
Bush approval ratings: raw poll data. Down, down, down
Nader fails to make California ballot
State election officials said Nader fell far short of the 153,035 signatures needed by Friday’s deadline. He submitted 82,923 with 56 of the state’s 58 counties reporting.
Meanwhile, David Cobb, the nonentity Green Party candidate, is running such a low-key “campaign” that he’s practically invisible. Google and Yahoo News show few articles about him, no doubt because there’s nothing to report.
And Kerry is deliberately moving to the middle.
Bush is aiming at Republican strongholds, but so is Kerry!, but as we all have been pointing out, Kerry had a strategery from way back to run to the middle. It annoys the hell out of some of us, but it’s smart politics, all the same.
True enough. While I’m tepid towards Kerry, he’s running a savvy campaign, grabbing swing votes from Bush. A Bush defeat would be a huge victory for the left, and would end the influence of neocons and the Religious Right on the White House, as there’s not a chance a President Kerry would listen to them. Would anyone dispute that Kerry is orders of magnitude less loony than Bush? (On domestic affairs, that is, there’s little difference between them on Iraq.)
What about progressives like Nader, you ask? Well, in my view, Nader isn’t running a progressive campaign, and instead spends most his time attacking Democrats, rather than attacking Bush, like he promised he would. Plus his reliance on the right to get ballot sigs shows his campaign to have little actual support from progressives.
The Green Party and Nader have suffered serious collateral damage from the 2004 campaign. One wonders if either will recover.