Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [104]
I am sorry for the language, but that’s probably the nicest way to explain how I and millions of other Americans saw this election. You don’t have to agree, you don’t have to like it, you just have to read that sentence one more time if you want to even come close to comprehending the level of our anger.
I know a lot of good people could see no other way but to vote for the Democrat. They would rather be told “I love you” while getting screwed than have to look at the face of the Beast on top of them for the next four years. I know that feeling. Tell me that you love me and you can do just about anything to me—including trashing me in the New York Times!
But these Reluctant Democrats for Gore were really our allies. They wanted many of the same things we did, they just took a different path. My attitude was, if Bush won, we were going to have to work with these well-meaning liberals to save the world from the Lesser Bush. It was not right to just tell them to go to hell.
So I told the Nader staff. Hey, there’s no reason to purposely piss these people—our friends, or potential friends—off. Our fight is with those who have stolen the name Democrat—the party hacks, the lobbyists, the weasels who somehow couldn’t cut it in the Republican Party because they didn’t have what it takes to destroy a national forest, or close a thousand libraries, or take free breakfasts away from the malnourished little ones in the inner city. You have to have real guts to do stuff like that, and you have to enjoy it. Those who don’t, get jobs over at the Democratic Party.
Our fight wasn’t with the core voters who still feel some desperate connection to what is called the “Democratic Party.” The fact that millions of Americans still hold out hope that the Democrats are going to represent their interests better than the Republicans is more a comment on our failure to show the country just how similar these two parties are—and how the Democrats will sell them out nearly every time.
The Nader campaign asked me to go with them on this tour of the swing states in the final weeks before the election. I declined. I told them I would rather work hard in those states where Ralph could get a lot of votes without being responsible for Bush winning the election. Why not spend our energies in New York and Texas where the outcome is clearly known? —Tell people in those states not to waste their votes on Gore, they will have zero impact. But they could send a strong message if Nader were to pull down 10 percent of the vote.
That was not the strategy that had been decided. They respected my decision and wished me well.
I landed in Tallahassee on the afternoon of October 23, 2000. A student from Florida State, his brother, and his sister-in-law picked me up at the airport, and as we walked toward the car, they started asking about “the invite” they heard I had extended Jeb Bush.
“Everyone’s talking about it!” they told me.
“What ‘invite’ are you talking about?” I asked.
“The one you made in the paper yesterday.”
They handed me a copy of Sunday’s Tallahassee Democrat, the city’s daily paper, and there on the front page of a section was an interview I had done with a reporter the week before on the phone from New York. A big picture of me and a quote challenging the Governor to show up and face me on the stage that night. Ooh, Mr. Tough Guy! Real easy to throw down the gauntlet when you’re a thousand miles away, isn’t it? Of course, it’s a whole other thing when you’re suddenly all alone in a state full of people who don’t take kindly to smart-ass northerners. But I