The first thing to be said about the presidential election of 2000 is that George W. Bush and the Stupid Party lost miserably. This is true despite their actual victory in the great post-election Florida chicken-scratch because, without Ralph Nader on the ballot, Al Gore would have won the election easily. Nader's votes in Florida alone would mostly have gone to Gore and put the Democrat over the top almost as early as the TV networks originally predicted. The same is even more true in a number of other states, including Washington and Oregon. Exit polls estimate that some 47 percent of voters for Nader would have voted for Gore had Nader not been on the ballot. If it's conspiracy theories about the election you want, forget the Mossad manufacturing fake absentee ballots in Israel and the various frauds each party is supposed to have perpetrated in the Sunshine State. The real question is how much the Republicans paid Mr. Nader to stay in the election.
The meaning of the Gore-Nader vote is that all the pandering, all the big-tent compassionate conservatism, all the muting of traditional conservative themes and issues, all the hiding of the conservatives in the basement at the GOP convention, all the careful waffling in the party platform, all the outreach to blacks, Hispanics, women, homosexuals, Martians, and three-toed Lesbian Pacific Islanders in which George W. Bush and his Rainbow Republican allies enveloped themselves...