My YDN op-ed on Nader and the Democrats is on-line here: ...And Nader is poised, as The Nation argued, not only to damage his self-stated goal of "retiring our current President," but to set back the prospects for a real progressive transformation of American politics. By running without having built a broad-based movement, in a season when many see ousting Bush as prerequisite for any lasting progressive change, and garnering far fewer votes than he did in 2000, he'll invite critical announcements of the death knell of third party politics. For these reasons, and others, I was one of the majority who voted against a 2004 run on Nader's exploratory Web site, prompting him to shut down the poll. When it comes to political hypocrisy, however, Ralph Nader has nothing on the Democratic National Committee, whose chairman, Terry McAuliffe, warned Nader against a legacy of "giving this country eight years of George Bush." While Nader's candidacy may indeed represent one nail in the coffin of the Gore campaign, McAuliffe's threat continues a long and disingenuous campaign by too many Democratic leaders and activists to appropriate Nader as a scapegoat for the tragic failings of their party. It's telling that the most memorable moments of Gore's listless, centrist, visionless 2000 campaign were a staged tongue-lock with his wife to defend himself from associations with infidelity, a series of accurate but unmoving attempts to defend himself from media charges of mendacity, and a Saturday Night Live parody of his "lockbox" strategy to defend social security from campaigns to dismantle it...