{"id":385,"date":"2004-02-21T16:27:40","date_gmt":"2004-02-21T16:27:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=385"},"modified":"2004-02-21T16:27:40","modified_gmt":"2004-02-21T16:27:40","slug":"ralph_wasnt_hug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=385","title":{"rendered":"Ralph Wasn&#8217;t Hugged Enough As A Child"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some of my fellow Democrats are all in a tizzy about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2004\/ALLPOLITICS\/02\/20\/elec04.prez.nader\/index.html\">Ralph Nader&#8217;s imminent decision about whether he&#8217;ll run for the presidency<\/a>.  I think they&#8217;re unwittingly playing into the man&#8217;s thirst for attention.  Let him run, if that&#8217;s what he wants.  Most left-leaning voters with any political sense will realize the stakes are simply too high to even consider Nader.  And the ones who do won&#8217;t be enough to matter.  Nader won&#8217;t have the benefit of any party structure to get him on the state ballots, which I believe will hinder him greatly.  We need to get acknowledge and accept that the US is a two-party nation, for better or worse.  Third parties may eventually win a place in state legislatures and Congress, but the presidency is simply not an attainable goal without the support of a major party machine.  Nader is only a threat if the Democrats can&#8217;t draw a bright line between themselves and the Republicans.  And in 2004, that shouldn&#8217;t be difficult.  So whatever Ralph decides, it should be met with a collective yawn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some of my fellow Democrats are all in a tizzy about Ralph Nader&#8217;s imminent decision about whether he&#8217;ll run for the presidency. I think they&#8217;re unwittingly playing into the man&#8217;s thirst for attention. Let him run, if that&#8217;s what he wants. Most left-leaning voters with any political sense will realize the stakes are simply too <a href='https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=385' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-6d","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}