Fuck you Mick, you haven't won anything.

People who have been working on long term agendas and profound social, economic, and political change don't really even give a shit about the upcoming election. That is why Nader and Cobb are still in the race. It is their issues they want to see discussed.

Many leftists are, this very week, calling into question the conventional Democratic Party wisdom, including some prominent labor leaders like this article from yesterday's Washington Post points out:

SEIU Chief Says the Democrats Lack Fresh Ideas
Stern Asserts That a Kerry Win Could Set Back Efforts to Reform the Party
By David S. Broder
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 27, 2004; Page A13


BOSTON, July 26 -- Breaking sharply with the enforced harmony of the Democratic National Convention, the president of the largest AFL-CIO union said Monday that both organized labor and the Democratic Party might be better off in the long run if Sen. John F. Kerry loses the election.

Andrew L. Stern, the head of the 1.6 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), said in an interview with The Washington Post that both the party and its longtime ally, the labor movement, are "in deep crisis," devoid of new ideas and working with archaic structures.

Stern argued that Kerry's election might stifle needed reform within the party and the labor movement."

Another leftist thinker (rather than sheep in the fold follower, like yerself there, Big Mick), ZNet's Michael Albert, has this to say about the election hyperbole, and I agree with him 1000%:

"I am constantly asked, nowadays, what should we do about the election? More often, I am told to work for Cobb, work for Nader, or work for Kerry. When I reply, I am often berated as an ultra left loon or a sniveling democrat, as the case may be.

At ZNet I also see a stupendous volume of written election commentary. I see so much that even if most of it wasn't highly fractious and redundant, I would wonder if all the time going to eyeballing, debating, celebrating, investigating, and otherwise hyperventilating the election wasn't reducing attention going to other pursuits...

Holding one's nose and voting for Kerry in contested states is a good thing to do, though I can certainly understand third party votes, even in contested states...

It makes sense to run radical campaigns to build movement infrastructure, raise consciousness, and push mainstream candidates left. To these ends, I prefer Cobb to Nader because Cobb is about movement building and Nader has demonstrated since 2000 that he is a poor movement builder. Still, I can understand someone feeling differently...

The benefits to Kerry of aggressive left support seem so minuscule (if they are even positive) as to make it politically inefficient for people well left of Kerry to move their attention away from long term priority activities toward his campaign.

Indeed, it may even be electoral suicidal to put aside long term work since the deciding factor in the election will likely be elites' perceptions of the probability that Bush can function without disastrous movement and international response and derivative destabilization. Leftists setting aside our antiwar and other activities will diminish rather than increase elite fears. Instead of boosting Kerry we need to provide visible signs that militant opposition is growing.

a self-proclaimed leftist relating to the campaign in a way that implies that Kerry or Clinton or Gore were or are good guys, and that considers any of these Democrats honest much less exemplary, and that fails to reiterate the ills of the Democratic Party, of our system of government, and of capitalism, is something I cannot understand."