I trusted Nader and now I've got ... John Ashcroft?

I'm arrogant, perhaps even egotistical. I'm not quick to admit that I'm wrong about anything, so the following confession is going to involve much humbling on my part.

I was wrong. Ouch, that hurt. I was wrong and let me explain why. When the candidates were out candidate-ing, I was busy talking about Ralph Nader. Shun the status quo, screw the two-party system, don't "waste your vote," ignore the whole lesser-of-two-evils theory. Vote your conscience, do what you think is right, don't sell out to political pressures. Sweet mother of God, I was wrong.

 

Manish Raiji Nothing Catchy

A friend of my father's saw me recently, at one of those lovely family outings that involves a lot of talk about one's goals for the future followed by several hours of political rambling. He turned to me and said, quite bluntly, "it's your fault that Gore lost." I tried to put up a fight, bringing up vague notions of the loss of Tennessee, of Arkansas, of stupid Gore supporters who can't punch ballots. Although I still don't agree that it was my fault, per se, I do see the folly of my ideals.

I had it all planned out, and that's what is so frustrating. It was very precise and scientific - I would vote for Nader and fulfill some moral obligation to do what I thought was right, and either Gore would win or Bush would win. I was wooed by the political pundits who explained with serene verbosity that Democrats and Republicans had become centrists and that their political ideologies were largely the same. I was being progressive, I was being conscientious, I was being socially aware. My man wasn't going to win, but I was a fond believer in the idea that there were no real differences between Bush and Gore.

I've never been so embarrassingly wrong before. I had everything factored in, or so I thought. What I failed to take into consideration was the colossal stupidity of George W. Bush. Physicists forget about friction for a while, economists assume away inflation, and I overlooked the supreme idiocy that is George W. I showed weakness; I broke a rule that I have always promised not to break -never trust a politician. No, I didn't trust Gore or Bush, I trusted Nader. And I forced myself to believe that he wasn't a politician. He is.

He promised me that Bush and Gore were two sides of the same coin. He promised that the country would be no better or worse for having either of them lead us. He promised that the lesser of two evils is still evil. I believed him.

Bush won. Regardless of how slimy the victory was, regardless of what kinds of fraud, coercion and deceit factored into this election, he is the President-elect. When I first found out, I chortled, still believing that the minor ideological differences between Bush and Gore weren't worth getting upset over. Regardless of who sat in the Oval Office, this country would follow generally the same path.

But then Bush started naming his cabinet and all of my optimism crumbled. John Ashcroft? Linda Chavez? Spence Abraham? Gale Norton? There is no doubt at this point that Gore, "the lesser of two evils," would have selected a far superior cabinet. He would have surrounded himself by better people. I still believe that Gore would have done what every CNN correspondent promised; he would become a centrist president who didn't do much of anything. I thought Bush would do the same, but now I'm seeing how horrifyingly wrong I was. He isn't playing the centrist game; he's playing the right-wing, good-old-boy, white-male-American game.

All of this and he hasn't even been inaugurated yet. He's still the President-elect; what is he going to do when the suffix gets dropped and he becomes President? I can't help but shiver thinking about how he's going to stack the Supreme Court. I think of how gleefully cocky I was before the election, talking about centrist politics and the need for neo-progressivism. "Gore will lose the election because he's an impotent candidate and it has nothing to do with Nader." I still agree that Gore lost due to his own incapabilities, but I'm realizing that I should have overlooked those incapabilities and fought my hardest to ensure that Bush stayed in Texas.

Nader promised that his candidacy would push the Democratic party back to the left - it appears as if the only thing it did was push the Republican party farther to the right.

Maybe I'm being too hard on myself. I know this isn't my fault; Gore won Michigan and its electoral votes, so the whole debacle in Florida really had nothing to do with me.

But it does have to do with people like me, who blinked for perhaps a second too long and missed the fact that Nader is only a politician. Maybe that makes him a great politician; he tricked me into believing he was human.

- Manish Raiji can be reached via

e-mail at mraiji@umich.edu.