And now, a rare political diatribe… Salon discusses reports that Green party chairs are “getting the feeling” that he will run for president in 2004.

Now, I have to begin by admitting that I voted for Nader in 2000. I have quite a bit of frustration at entrenched party politics, but also I felt confident that Gore had won Illinois, so I didn’t have to analyze my choice too carefully. If I lived in a state where the balance was closer, it would have been harder, but to be honest, I might well have gone Nader anyway.

Well, in retrospect I have to admit that there was certainly a difference between Gore and Bush, or perhaps more importantly, there is a great difference between Bush’s leadership team and what I’d expect Gore’s cabinet would have looked like. And unless the Dems put up a real bozo like Joe Lieberman, I imagine their candidate will be much more to my taste than the current regime.

After reading the entire article, my impressions are these: first, politics is always about compromise, and American progressives need to consider how to work together, even while potentially being members of different organizations. And secondly, you don’t build a party from the top down: as noted in the article, the Christian right has developed its political power by targeting local power-vacuums. No third party candidate will be elected president until his or her party has more substantial presence in local and state politics, as well as the federal legislature. Nader would probably be more effective if he ran for an office he could win, like representative or maybe senator.

I still hold out hopes of a pluralistic multi-party political system, but I feel like we learned the hard way in 2000 that idealism needs to be tempered with pragmatism.