Here is the truth of US political geography: a gigantic majority of leftists (such as PEN-pals) -- even more disproportionately than the majority of Americans -- live in one-party states, many of them concentrated in left-leaning urban areas like New York City, Chicago, and the Bay Area in states dominated by the Democratic Party like New York, California, and Illinois.
So, for the majority of leftists, the presidential election is really a no-brainer -- vote against the pro-war candidates of the Democratic and Republican Parties, vote for Nader, Cobb, or any other candidate on the left whose program you support.
yoshie,
for one thing, i do not even see such a pragmatic recommendation coming from roy.
Well, I can't speak for Arundhati Roy. I don't know her, except a couple of articles that I read on the Net, _The God of Small Things_ that I speed-read (which I thought probably won the Booker Prize in part on the strength of its one-dimensionally negative portrayal of the CPI[M] -- I don't know if the book's criticism of the CPI[M] is justified based on facts), and the fact that she is a very beautiful woman!
At 10:27 AM -0500 11/2/04, ravi wrote:
also, questions remain: what/who constitutes the majority of leftists? is it a small group of marxists that roy and other leaders of the left wish to appeal to and restrict their appeal/advice to? does it include "free market liberals"? if the group is large enough (to be significant) then even such "safe state" considerations may not apply.
One definition of leftists in this context would be those who voted for Nader + those who preferred the Nader/Green Party program but actually ended up voting for Gore in 2000. In 2000, only one in ten voters who preferred the Nader/Green Party program actually voted for Nader.
Cf. "An analysis of the National Election Study data by Harvard political scientist Barry Burden shows that only 9% of the people who thought Nader was the best candidate actually voted for him [in 2000]. If people had not voted strategically for the lesser evil, Nader would have had over 30 million votes instead of 3 million and might have won the election, especially if he had been allowed in the debates" (Howie Hawkins, "There Never Were Any 'Good Old Days' in The Democratic Party," March 1, 2004, <http://www.gpnys.org/archives/000069.php>). -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
