However, much of the Left viewed Gore as an unacceptable centrist. A number of prominent progressives also rejected my warnings about the dangers posed by Bush, particularly my concern that he would restore the neoconservatives to positions of power over foreign policy.
I was especially alarmed by Bush's choice of Dick Cheney to be his vice presidential running mate. I had covered Cheney for years when he was in Congress and knew him to be a rigid ideologue who was much closer philosophically to the neocons than was generally understood.
Bush Illusions
At the time, most political analysts of all stripes viewed Bush as an Establishment Republican. They accepted his self-description as "a compassionate conservative" and thought he would govern with his father's moderation, surrounded by his father's old foreign policy hands, the likes of Brent Scowcroft and James Baker.
I was assured by several left-wing political analysts that I was overly alarmed at the prospects of a neocon revival if Bush won.
This widely held viewpoint fed into the notion on the Left that Bush would not be much different from Gore and that Election 2000, therefore, represented a good opportunity to "teach the Democrats a lesson" by showing them that they couldn't "take the Left for granted."
So, many progressives decided that they would back Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. To rally more support on the Left, Nader's campaign touted what may be one of the biggest and most dangerous lies ever told in American politics, that "there's not a dime worth of difference" between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Nader succeeded not only in siphoning off votes from Gore but his attacks on the Vice President often echoing similar attack lines from the Republicans frustrated the Gore campaign's efforts to gain momentum.
A Stolen Election
Though Gore still managed to outpoll Bush by about a half million votes nationwide and almost surely would have beaten Bush in the key state of Florida if all legally cast votes were counted, Bush used a combination of clever lawyering and hardball politics to seize the White House. [For details, see Neck Deep.]
To this day, very few Nader supporters will admit that they contributed to Bush's tainted victory, although it should be obvious that Nader's votes in Florida if most would have gone to Gore would have put the election too far out of reach for Bush to steal.
A Gore presidency also would have taken the country in a far different direction. Most significantly, he might have made significant progress in getting the United States to face up to the crisis of global warming, an existential threat to mankind that Bush studiously ignored.
It may be a bitter irony that the one
major political accomplishment of America's Green Party will be that it
helped condemn the world to environmental disaster.
Whether Nader backers acknowledge their complicity or not, the hard
truth is that the American Left in this attempt to "teach the
Democrats a lesson" contributed to the dangerous ascension of George
W. Bush to power.
Besides his inaction on global warming, Bush restored the neocons to key positions throughout the foreign policy bureaucracy and, after 9/11, adopted their aggressive strategy for seeking violent "regime change" in Muslim countries considered hostile to Israel.
As a result of Bush's "global war on terror" and his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, hundreds of thousands have died and many more including many children and other noncombatants have lost limbs and suffered maiming.
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