Been thinking a bit about the US Presidential election and the issue of wether Nader should run or not. In the begining I agreed with Lawrence Lessig’s reasoning in that Nader shouldn’t have run against Gore and for the same reasons should not run now in order to get Bush out the White House.

As much as anyone I would really like to see Bush trown out of the white house, but I think it is no excuse for Nader not to run, in fact I think its the opposite. As jamesh pointed out the system should probably be mended using Instant runoff voting.

But if Nader or anyone else never runs based on the idea that it might hurt the candidacy of the Democrats then I don’t see why the democrats should even consider supporting changing the system, I mean why support changing the system if the current system ‘forces’ independent candidates to not run?

Instead he should run (and so should Pat Buchanan) and their main goal should be to ‘cost’ the major party, their policies are closest to, to lose the election. I promise you that if the Democrats lose a couple of more presidencies due to Nader running they will quickly start to consider supporting something like Instant runoff voting.

I don’t believe aiming for the short term wins should be done at the cost of your (more important) long term goals.