THE NADER VOTE | 2000-11-04
Nader presently has five percent of the vote in most polls. That would get the Green Party Federal funding in the next election. If they get Federal funding, they will, like everything else the government funds, become permanent.
There will be people who will want that Federal funding, and that will make it certain that there will be a Green Party next time. The old hippies are alive and well. There are a lot of kids who like the Green Party, but the real base is the 1960s hippies and Hollywood lefties.
The media, which is largely run by these overage hippies, still likes to say the old New Left, now the Green Party, is a Young People's Movement. They still think they're Flower Children. Actually, even in the Sixties, the New Left was largely made up of the children of limousine liberals. All the kids these old time rich leftists saw were leftists, so the media thought all the young people were.
Actually, the World War II generation was much more liberal politically than the actual mass of young people in the 1960's. I saw lots of young people at Wallace rallies, but you never saw A SINGLE ONE in the media.
So the old hippies like Phil Donahue might have a platform from now on. That is worth thinking about. And I don't see how it can be anything but good for us, as it pulls the Democrats to the left and splits liberals.