DON'T ATTACK NADER... YET

Ezra has a plan for how Kerry should deal with Nader:

It strikes me as a potential opportunity. By using Nader as the extreme liberal foil and Bush as the extreme conservative, Kerry can paint himself as the mainstream candidate. Running against both Bush and Nader and equating them in every speech creates the potential for Nader to actually help offset Kerry's perceived liberalism while highlighting Bush's extreme right-wing ideologies.

Attacking Nader sure sounds like a juicy way of going about things for Kerry. But is it really necessary?

The available polling out there has Nader at 4 (ARG in Florida) and 6 (Ipsos Nationally) percent, respectively. Those numbers are a mirage for a couple of reasons.

The first, important reason is that Nader is running as an independent, and without a party apparatus, he will be lucky to get on the ballot in 30-40 states. (With the Greens, he was on the ballot in 43 states.) Ipsos polled likely voters across the country, so they certainly polled voters in states where Ralph will not make it onto the ballot. That may take a couple percentage points away from Nader to begin with.

In 2000, Nader finished with 2.74 percent of the total vote. Did real support for Nader jump all the way up to 4-6 percent since then? It would be ironic, because now that he doesn't have a party, Nader would be able to receive "Ralph Nader Party" matching funds with vote totals like that in November.

But all kidding aside, I don't think those numbers reflect an actual upswell of support for His Holiness Saint Lazy-Eye. If I had to bet, I'd say there was a near-reflexive short-term revulsion to the prospect of a Kerry nomination in the minds of a segment of left-Democrat voters who flirted with Nader in 2000, and supported Dean and Kucinich in the primaries this year. However, I think that contingent of voters is very likely to return to the flock once their initial reaction to the less-than-perfect-and-pure Kerry candidacy fades, and the more critical objective -- sending Bush back to Crawford/Connecticut -- becomes clearer. They constitute the gap between Nader's 2000 support and current polls (along with those who wont be able to vote for him due to what was described two paragraphs ago), and with noses held or not, they'll pull the lever, touch the screen, flush the toilet, whatever, for Kerry. This probably accounts for the increase to 4% in Florida that the ARG poll found, along with whatever buzz was generated by the lead-up to his decision to run.

The idea of attacking Nader and Bush simultaneously to paint both of them as extremists while casting Kerry as the mainstream candidate sounds really good, but it's not necessary yet. Aside from his post-announcement flurry, we don't know yet how much actual electoral impact Nader is going to have in November, so it would be better to wait a period of weeks (months?) to see how much of a dent he actually makes. Sure, Al Gore didn't attack Nader and we know how that election turned out. But the bigger deal was that Al Gore didn't attack Bush nearly as much as he needed to. If he had "let 'er rip", to use his words in 2002, Nader's numbers might not have been statistically significant compared to Gore's margin of victory.

If in May or June polls continue to show Nader hovering around 4-6 percent, then Kerry should definitely roll out the suggested strategy. But in the meantime I'd rather wait and see: My gut tells me that Nader won't top 1.5-2% this time around.

(Note to those who think a Nader run would push Kerry, and the Democrats, to the left: If he adopts this strategy, then Nader will have pushed Kerry to the center -- at least rhetorically -- for better or for worse.)