Talk:Ralph Nader/Archive 3

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Atlantic Monthly warring

I move to strike the sentence entirely, or put it in a criticism or 2000 US presidential election section. It doesn't belong in the lead bio. It looks like someone pushing POV and glares at you in kind. It's also not even accurate. The Supreme Court ruled W pres, despite Al Gore winning the popular vote. All the anti-Nader stuff that he "made" Bush Jr. president is stupid and naive. SeeknDistroi (talk) 23:50, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

You just joined Wikipedia yesterday. This topic was debated and a consensus was reached. Please respect the editors who came before you. Astruc (talk) 03:48, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

I've read this page about this issue with great care. You are reverting to use of the quote in the lead bio. That is not the consensus. Please respect other editors' views posted here. Thank you, SeeknDistroi (talk) 19:31, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

You arrive at Wiki, find this place first, read it "with great care," don't post anywhere but this article, and then leave. You're part of a mysterious trend around here. I expect you will not edit any Wiki articles except this one and never be heard from again. Am I right? Astruc (talk) 23:36, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

No, you are wrong. And you've lost the argument. SeeknDistroi (talk) 00:19, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

First, there are no "arguments" here. The question is whether a telling, descriptive quote from an excellent source belongs in this article. I don't think anyone can doubt that the source -- the Atlantic Monthly -- and the way in which that magazine obtained the quote -- from its polling of leading American academics. Some editors, however, want to turn this into a political debate. I will look to see whether you contribute to other articles at Wiki besides this one. I hope you do. It would give you a modicum of credibility. Astruc (talk) 00:24, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

There are arguments here. Please refer to the article talk page, above. The consensus is to remove the sentence. Your opinions, while relevant, are not in the majority. Furthermore, the POV of the Atlantic Monthly and its academics, however seemingly prestigious, is clearly false. The Supreme Court ruled GWB US president despite Al Gore winning the popular vote. Concurrent with this, such criticism is inappropriate in a lead bio. Finally, I will ask that you refrain from making uncivil remarks. A "modicum of credibility" is hardly WP:AGF or CIVIL and, quite frankly, coming from a user who preaches rules he doesn't himself follow, lacking in credibility or foundation for vicissitude. SeeknDistroi (talk) 01:42, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Foundation for vicissitude? Wha? Astruc's point is that this conensus you find doesn't exist. There are plenty of opinions on both sides, if you read carefully above. The compromise (not conensus) that was reached was to include the quote and then, after a semicolon "others discount his role in the 2000 election" with ample footnotes. Howaever, some editors here can't abide any criticism of Nader. I think most Americans at this point know Nader from his role as a presidential candidate, not his role as a consumer advocate. The Atlantic quote introduces readers to his consumery advocacy, which I thought was good, and also acknowledges his role in the 2000 election. It captures Nader well. Notice in the discussion above that some didn't think Nader was much of a consumer advocate. Please read the above carefully. Griot (talk) 05:42, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

actually there was a very clear consensus on this very talk page under heading 36 - i think you'll find peter huntington, pastor david, the nervous mermaid, telogen, and several anon users, agreed that the quote did not belong in the intro. that it provided no context, was very obviously pov (and a very demonstrably incorrect pov at that, considering the election fraud as well documented by Greg Palast, and the fact that gore actually won the election anyway), and should be moved to another section. the only user who participated in the debate who thought it belonged in the intro was griot. you can't just disregard the consensus because you lost the debate. (talk) 09:47, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

That is a very selective reading of the debate that took place here, as I will demonstrate shortly. Griot (talk) 15:45, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

i don't think you have any right to edit other people's signatures, griot. how is it "selective"? it's "selective" to state the laughably obvious, that no one except you was in favor of the quote being in the intro? no one seemed to have a problem with keeping the quote, but in the intro it shows clear pov bias and provides no context. you lost the debate - deal with it.90.240.172.139 (talk) 16:29, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

I have to go to work. But tomorrow or this weekend I will lay out an exhaustive look at who said what and when, with reference to which contributors only edit at the Ralph Nader article and which ones do Wiki the favor of enlarging the entire encyclopedia. I am concerned about the number of anonymous and newbie contributors to this article, some of whom appear to be sockpuppets (Toes+umbrellas chacha, who started the edit war yesterday, has been indefinitely blocked from editing Wikipedia!). In my analysis I will note who signs their names to their ideas and who doesn't. I spent quite some time examining this page last night and I was suprised to find out that, absent anonymous contributors and two or three people who are now blocked from editing Wikipedia, the majority of editors favored including the Atlantic Monthly quote in this article in one way or another. To do justice to these editors, I will present a summary of everyone's views with links to their edits on this Discussion page as well as links to their Contributions pages so that objective third-parties can examine this matter in good faith. What you call the "laughably obvious" is not "laughable" or "obvious." Moreover, Wiki does not have "winners" or "losers" (as you and SeeknDistroi keep asserting) but only truthseekers. I hope you will sign your name next time. Griot (talk) 16:40, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

We're still waiting for your fascinating explanation as to why the above debate, wherein no one save you was in favor of the quote's inclusion in the introduction, doesn't constitute a perfectly tenable consensus on this issue. None of those users are sockpuppets as far as we can see, (I've reviewed Toes and Umbrellas' edits, and they seemed to be perfectly good faith attempts at removing a clear violation of NPOV policy, so I really don't understand what your point is about that user being blocked for a simple 3-revert of vandalism). Wikipedia is supposed to be a non-hierarchical democracy - and the votes were counted - it's just like a democrat though to not understand who actually won and bear a grudge against the people who try to show them the actual results. Not to mention the fact that the comments you left on Astruc's talk page shows a very clear bias on your part, that you simply dislike Nader, and confirms everyone's suspicions that this is not simply an issue of you wanting a highly POV quote, despite the consensus in favor of its being placed in a different section, but that you're just using wikipedia as your own personal coloring book to slander. 84.67.30.51 19:05, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Hey 84.67.30.51 (Contributions): Don't worry, I'm working on it. I'm still fascinated why so many people who claim to know all about this debate -- which stretches back many months and has many twists and turns -- can't sign their names to their opinions and only joined Wikipedia on the day they wrote their opinion. Toes+umbrellas chacha (Contributions), who did sign her name and whom you mention, has been banned from Wikipedia. I smell a rat. We're talking here about an objective, consensus quote from the Altantic Monthly. Wikipedia isn't a place to defend or promote politicians like Nader. It's a place to describe what is known about them. REmember that. Griot 18:02, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Umm - I'm not exactly "promoting" him. I'm a Democrat, and I voted for Gore. But the consensus of several users - in fact, EVERY user except you - was very clearly in favor of the quote being removed from the introduction. The quote provides no context, is blatantly POV, not to mention terribly inaccurate and silly, considering what actually happened with the election fraud (see http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1104-36.htm) and the fact that Gore actually won anyway. So how did he make Dubyah the president? . This, like the quote, is not true at all, but merely an ill-researched fallacy. Does this mean we should write in Cass' introduction that she is best known for having choked on a ham sandwich? No, because it simply isn't factually based or accurate at all. Even if it was accurate, it still wouldn't be appropriate for the introduction as it provides no context. Pretend you are someone who didn't know anything about him, and you saw this quote that he "made George W. Bush the president"-what would that mean? Is he the magical fairy who goes around granting wishes and making people president with his magical fairy wand from Lollypopland? You need to provide context and a detailed account of what actually happened before you provide such a glib, not to mention factually inaccurate, summary. As I said before, I've reviewed Toes+umbrellas chacha's edits, and none of them appear to be vandalism, but a pretty good faith attempt at removing something which not only constitutes a huge violation of NPOV policy, but also violates the consensus as reached on this talk page months ago. So again, I don't know what your point is about that user being banned, when the offense seems to be only the fact that they removed vandalism well over 3 times. To me, your offenses of violation of NPOV, violating consensus when no one agrees with you, and editing other user's sigs seem a twinkle more extreme than theirs. I invite everyone to look at the comments that Griot left on Astruc's talk page wherein he revealed his very clear bias on this issue-he accused Nader of being a "Maoist"-and he is clearly just using Wikipedia as his own personal coloring book to slander him in violation of NPOV policy, and in violation of an irrefutable consensus on this issue. 84.67.30.51 10:46, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Your saying "the consensus of several users - in fact, EVERY user except you - was very clearly in favor of the quote being removed" clearly shows that you haven't read through the arguments on this Disucsson page. Your comparing Nader's role in the 2000 election to Mama Cass's death by choking is crass. You write, "I've reviewed Toes+umbrellas chacha's (Contributions) edits," but this person -- who is now banned from Wikipedia for vandalism -- did not even venture a comment on this Discussion page; she merely reverted edits time and time again on the Article page in what amounted to a temper tantrum. My reference on Astruc's page refers to the Red Guards's action of white-washing history and expunging portions of history books, something you are trying to do by expunging the Atlantic quote; I do not believe Nader is a Maoist or even a socialist.

Nobody objects to the first part of the Atlantic quote ("He made the cars we drive safer"); the objection comes to the second half: "thirty years later, he made George W. Bush the president." You and many others believe Nader's role in the 2000 election was negligible to the outcome, but many, many others, including some of Nader's former backers in 2000, disagree, and the Atlantic quote appeared in this article because it represented this idea better than any other quote. Nader in the popular consciousness of most Americans represents two things -- a consumer advocate and the candidate who swayed the 2000 election in Bush's favor in Florida. I believe that should be covered in the article, not expunged from it.

It's pretty hard to read or hear anything about Nader anymore without a reference his actions in the 2000 election. As an experiment to find out what the popular idea of Nader is, I Googled "Nader's legacy." Here are the top-ten articles the search found:

1. "Three things have soured Nader's legacy even more: his 2004 attempt at a repeat of the 2000 ego-driven disaster (this time without help from the Green Party, to credit them with learning a valuable lesson); the full scale of disaster that the Nader-enabled Bush administration has proven to be, fully in line with my warnings in 2000 and contrary to the Nader claim that Bush and Gore were equivalent; and finally, the decline of the PIRG movement into an anti-labor, union-busting political machine that seems to be betraying its roots." Nader's Legacy: First George Bush's Presidency, Now Union Busting (newspaper article)
2. "Has his runs for President ruined it as a consumer advocate? I say yes, my only memory of him is this year and 2000 as a raving maniac." Commonground (a forum)
3. "The name that comes to mind for me when I think about consumer advocacy or consumer mentality is Ralph Nader." A Consumer Mentality" or "Nader's Legacy" (a sermon)
4. "In the documentary "An Unreasonable Man," Nader often appears to be a man who can't help himself, a tilter at windmills whose campaigns have led to safer cars, cleaner drinking water and, to hear his aggrieved critics in the Democratic Party tell it, the election of George W. Bush." Consumer crusader or political spoiler? (newspaper movie review)
5. "When Ralph Nader announced his 2004 run for president on February 22, most political commentators were predictably outraged. So was a good portion of the voting public. After all, wasn't Nader responsible for Bush's razor-thin 'victory' in the 2000 election?" Ralph Runs Again: What Does Nader Really Want?
6. "But Ralph Nader's legacy will be far worse. As the ultimate enabler, Ralph Nader's legacy will be that he was the person who visited this nightmare on us. Ralph Nader gave us George W. Bush." Progressive Ideas in Action: Nader the Enabler (blog entry)
7. Same as number 1; different source
8. Same as number 4; different source
9. "Both parties expect a close race in November, as in 2000, when Nader is believed to have pulled votes from Democratic nominee Al Gore. Nader, who ran on the Green Party ticket, received nearly 100,000 votes in Florida, which Bush carried by a mere 537 votes. In New Hampshire, Bush beat Gore by 7,000 votes; Nader captured 22,000 votes there." Democratic's Nervously Await Nader's Decision
10. "In any case, Nader's legacy, which might have been so much good he's done in the areas of consumer product safety and related things, will forever be the Bush presidency." How Did Leiberman Lie? (forum)
11. Nader admirer and former talk show host Phil Donahue adds, with deep regret, that Nader's role in the 2000 election 'is going to be the first line of his obituary.' But the makers of this superb movie, while giving plenty of air-time to Nader's many critics, set out to make sure that doesn't happen. # Nader Reconsidered: Without whitewashing the 2000 election, a terrific new documentary helps to rehabilitate much of Ralph Nader's legacy (movie review)
12. "Could it be that his recent controversial strategies will preclude his earlier activism? For now, at least, the collective progressive memory of Nader seems to have been erased, and nobody can remember quite why they actually liked the guy in the first place.""An Unreasonable Man" (movie review)

As you can see, 8 or the 10 entries go into Nader's role in the 2000 presidential election. If this is how Nader is popularly viewed, should the Wikipedia article ignore this? Should it white-wash his role in the 2000 election because some editors are uncomfortable with criticism of Nader? Griot 19:01, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

So what are you saying? You know Gore won anyway, you know about the election fraud, but it's all Nader's fault? What's your point? If the Greens had voted for Gore, Gore would've won by even more than he already had- is that your point? He already won! It was the Supreme Court's decision, including many democrats, Ted Kennedy, Paul Wellstone, and even Gore himself who let Dubyah steal it. Gore is so wonderful anyway right? Maybe you should look into a little thing called Operation Desert Fox, in which the Clinton-Gore whitehouse bombed Iraq and killed many, many innocent civilians. Or maybe you should read into the economic sanctions that they placed on the country, which nearly stopped all food and medical supplies - Unicef estimates that over half a million children below the age of 5 were killed because of them- OVER HALF A MILLION CHILDREN BELOW THE AGE OF 5. Not to mention the fact that he supports the current war and has spoken out against a diplomatic resolution with Iran. Or maybe you should look into the fact that he own stock at Occidental Petroleum, which drills for oil in environmentally sensitive areas, and destroys the lands of the indigenous people in South America. And his family owns a tobacco farm which profiteers off the deaths of thousands. And his electric bill is the highest in his state. And his documentary contains 20 factual errors which they acknowledge but refuse to correct in a revised edition. And he neglects to mention that if everyone did everything he said to do in that movie, that it would only reduce carbon emissions by about 20%, and the consensus these days among climatologists is that to avert further disaster, especially for the most vulnerable people (like the poor, ie New Orleans), emissions need to be reduced by at least 75%. And he doesn't mention the fact that 50% of the oil used in the US is used by the military. And he insists that it's all about what individual poor people can do, and it has nothing to do with corporate control or the fact that Exxonmobil all by itself accounts for 5% of all carbon emissions in the world. And he tours the world in a private jet that could hold about 50 people but only carries him and his wife Tipper, the queen of music censorship (you know what they call those parental advisory labels on records? TIPPER STICKERS) - She wrote a book endorsing this guy who insists that the star of David is a symbol of satan, and that your kids wearing hightop sneakers is a sign that they are listening to heavy metal or part of a gang and should therefore be deprogrammed at one of their christian rehabilitation camps. Not to mention, you know this "rendition" thing that's been all over the news with the bush administration saying it's okay to torture people, no matter how flimsy the "evidence"? Well, that policy was inducted by the Clinton-gore whitehouse. But that isn't even the issue up for debate here. Remember, I myself voted for Gore and this isn't about me "promoting" Nader but simply restoring neutrality to his page, as per not only wikipedia policy, but the consensus reached months ago. I stand by Gore and the democratic party, but anyone who blames Nader for what happened, in spite of the well-documented election fraud, in spite of the Supreme Court, and in spite of the fact that Gore actually won anyway, anyone who continues to blame Nader in spite of all these indisputable facts is not only a massive crybaby, but clinically insane. Being that the quote's allegation isn't at all factually sound, given the plethora of evidence, and given that your only reasoning for wanting it included rests on the fact that it's what most people think of when they see him, despite its being demonstrably untrue, I think you should ask yourself who you think you're kidding. A widely believed fallacy is still a fallacy. Just because a lot of people think something is true, that doesn't make it true. I hear the earth is round now. Wikipedia is the place for facts, not flimsy and easily disproved beliefs based on pouty sour grapes. There was a debate on this issue and the only user who agreed with you was Astruc, and there is some suspicion as to whether that's a sockpuppet of yours. So far, I've counted a total of 15 users who were in favor of the quote being moved to another section. Pastor David, Peter Huntington, Telogen, the Nervous mermaid, Toes + umbrellas chacha (yes, I know you're quite a fan of pointing out the fact that this user is banned, as if that goes somehow to furthering your point, but I will point out to you again that their only offense was reverting vandalism over three times), SeeknDistroi, Septentrionalis PMAnderson, CGijits, Luna Santin, CoolHandLuke, myko2, and several anon users. None of those users appear to be sock puppets as far as we can see, but I really don't know how to confirm that either way(there may be one, I really don't know), just as I can't confirm whether or not you and Astruc are sockpuppets. Did I miss some secret meeting where everybody just decided that 11 was a smaller number than 2? You've been out-voted - everyone is in favor of the quote being removed from the introduction - the only thing left for us to decide now is where to put it, or to keep it in the article at all. Personally, I quite fancied the idea of putting it in a footnote, but this is indeed a democracy, non-hierarchical and open to anyone. 84.67.30.51 20:49, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Wow! Let's stick to the topic at hand, anonymous user number 84.67.30.51 (Contributions) First you write a 1500-word diatribe against Clinton and Gore followed by "but that isn't even the issue up for debate here." (Very true.) Then you write, "I myself voted for Gore and this isn't about me 'promoting' Nader but simply restoring neutrality to his page." (Doubtful, given the diatribe.) Then you allege some sockpuppet stuff and mention names, several of whom I cannot find on this page. I am not concerned with people who reverted on the Article page, but with people who wrote their opinions on this Discussion page and, preferably, signed real names, not IP numbers, to their opinions. For example, try searching the Discussion page for that Toes person. He/she never wrote anything here. I find many people besides me on the Discussion page who voiced the same or nearly the same position as me -- that the quote should remain.

I really wish you would address my last post here. My Google experiment made it very clear that Nader is associated in most people's minds with the 2000 presidential election. You haven't explained why we should ignore this. If not the Atlantic quote, how do we convey the fact that Nader had a great deal to do with the outcome of that election. I don't believe in white-washing facts like that, and if you can come up with a way to present this fact, I would like to know about it. Griot 22:22, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

First, believe it or not, I am indeed a registered Democrat. I support Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, and I like a good deal of what Bill Richardson says. I've never once voted Green. Not once. Never voted for Nader - not once. What I mean by standing by Gore is that, living in a swing state, I held my nose and submitted to the lesser of 2 evils cabbage, and I stand by that decision. I still have faith in what the Democratic party can still be, but I recognize its definite flaws, and I support anyone who offers an alternative when the choice is between a mass murderer and a mass murderer.

Second, I would very much like to know which users you're talking about when you say they agreed with you, besides Astruc. Sorry, some of the users I mentioned did not express their opinions on this page but on user talk pages - including yours. Even if you only counted the ones found on this page, however, they would still well outnumber you and Astruc. One of them is even an admin. Sorry.

Third, why do you want to know my name so badly? Are you flirting with me you saucy devil?

Fourth, no I'm not in favor of "whitewashing" - but as I continually show you, the quote's allegation is simply not based at all on what actually happened when you consider those pesky little things like facts and see the well-documented election fraud, the Supreme Court, and the fact that Gore actually won. And as I said before, even if it were true, it still wouldn't exactly be appropriate for the intro because it provides no context. To a reader who comes to this article knowing nothing about him, it simply wouldn't make sense. How did he "make" Dubyah president? With superpowers? With his well-connected family? Is he the CEO of Diebold? You need to provide a detailed account of the facts to provide context before you include such a weird little soundbyte. I thought I told you that it doesn't matter if the election is what people think of when they see him if it isn't at all based in fact, but simply childish crybaby denialism disseminated by corporate media- I thought the Mama Cass analogy was quite apt in that just because it's what they're most famous for, it doesn't mean it's true, and it doesn't mean it belongs in the intro. The consensus is very clear on this issue. 15 to 3, if you count anon users. 11 to 2 if you only count registered ones. Why do you persist with this issue? 84.67.30.51 23:25, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, good to know we have something in common. I also like Bill Richardson very much and may vote for him in the primary.

In my reading of who supports what, I stick to this Discussion page only. Obviously, I can't go running around to others' Talk pages to find out what they think. If they care enough to have an opinion on this matter, they will write it here on this Discussion page, where it belongs, and sign a name to it. Here's my count:

Keep quote - 6. These editors wanted to keep the quote: Griot (Contributions), David Shankbone (Contributions), Astruc (Contributions), Michael Feinberg (Contributions), Malik Shabazz (Contributions), and Hashaw (Contributions).

Keep but in modified form - 4. These editors favored some form of compromise in which the quote remains but is not put in the intro or is put in the intro with a disclaimer (such as "others discount his role in the 2000 election"): PastorDavid (Contributions), TedFrank (Contributions), Pmanderson (Contributions), Peter Huntington (Contributions) (Huntington wanted to devote most of the article to the 2000 election: "Griot is largely on the right track, I think, but he overplays his hand...the Atlantic's reasons simply acknowlege the widely-held (but omnidirectionally disputed) view that one can draw a clear line from Nader to the Patriot Act and Guantanamo. I think the entire controversy should be laid-out in the Nader article.")

Remove altogether -3. These editors thought the quote didn't belong in any way, shape, or form: CGijits {Contributions), Nervous Mermaid {Contributions), Telogen (Contributions)

You may note that editors in the third category, "Remove altogether," didn't contibute to many articles besides "Ralph Nader"; their tenures on Wikipedia were very short; and they were very contentious. I don't think they understood very well what Wikipedia is about or what being an editor means (just my judgement).

You asked why I would like you to sign a name. Because it indicates to me that you take your opinions seriously and you want to develop a history here as an editor. It indicates whether you are a good member of this community. Why don't you want to sign a name to your opinions?

We can't argue about whether G.W. Bush won the presidency. He was the certified winner. A number of factors came together to make him president -- butterfly ballots, the Supreme Court's decision, the fact that Kathleen Harris, his campaign manager in FLA, certified the votes in that state, Gore's inability to win in Tennessee -- the list goes on and on. And Nader played a role too. I don't think there can be any question of that. He campaigned in Florida and other close states when his own former Nader's raiders asked him not to. He was much more critical of Gore than Bush. How big a role he played is, of course, a matter of opinion, but that he played a role can't be argued about. As my Google experiment showed, the majority of people now remember Nader chiefly for the 2000 election, not his consumer advocacy. Again I ask you: How do you want to cover this in this article if not with the even-handed Atlantic Monthly quote? Griot 01:11, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Like I said, I want to provide a detailed and objective account of what actually happened to provide context before we include such an overly simplistic and well disputed summary like that. What do you think I wanted to do, just remove all the controversy about the election altogether? I have no problem with the quote being in the article, but in the introduction, it shows clear favor for a certain POV. Can you tell me where these users voted, I don't see the debate on this page - I'm not arguing, mind you, just asking. I see Malik Shabazz, but he never said he wanted the quote, in fact he called it a gross oversimplification. I understand why many users don't use this talk page to vote or voice their opinion - it's very cluttered and in need of archiving, there's a good 4 sections or so about this quote controversy alone, so it's very confusing, plus many people may not see the point - after all, their objections have already been so well articulated by many other users already - what else can they say but "YEAH"? I don't like signing my edits, sorry. I don't really like how some users treat wikipedia as a social thing. I didn't start editing to make friends. And my previous edits have no bearing whatsoever on whether I'm right on this issue or not. I can tell you I've never once vandalized a page though, so I'm quite a trustworthy user if that's the issue. I understand your suspicion of sockpuppets, but the fact that some editors have user names doesn't make their opinions any more valid or merited than those who choose to work anonymously. Open to anyone, remember? Btw, your judgment seems pretty selective - you mention that some users mostly only worked on this page, but I've reviewed their edits and Astruc has done this too - Telogen seems to have contributed to just as many as Astruc - if he doesn't edit this page, he edits election or green party pages. Plus you forgot Toes - I reviewed their contributions, they don't have a history of vandalism, and their edits don't appear to be Nader-centric at all. You also forgot cool hand luke, who happens to be an admin, who voiced their support for the footnote version under heading 48 on this page. Plus me, don't forget me, ha. But I guess anons don't count. Even so, the vote's in our favor. 84.67.30.51 04:56, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

So User number 84.67.30.51, it looks like we've come to an impasse here. I don't know what else to do. You write, "I have no problem with the quote being in the article, but in the introduction, it shows clear favor for a certain POV." Where do you propose to fit it in the article? And what can we do about editors who don't want it in the article at all -- people like Toes who just revert the article any time the quote gets put in it without ever discussing it on this page? I'd appreciate it if you or someone else would come up with a solution for this. The article as it stands goes into great depth about Nader's consumer advocacy, but it says not a single word about the 2000 election, the event for which he is also mostly known. In other words, the article is incomplete. Suppose you come up with some kind of compromise so that this article doesn't continusouly get reverted? Griot 10:38, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Section break 1

Hi, this is me, my IP address just changes occasionally, usually to something beginning with an 8. I very much agree that the election controversy should definitely be covered - in an evenhanded manner, with all points of view given equal consideration and time. That's what the quote doesn't do, at least in the introduction - it tips the scale undeniably in the favor of a certain POV. I really don't care where the quote goes. Perhaps in a subheading entitled "Recognition" along with his other notable criticisms and notable accolades, perhaps in a section about the criticism of his campaign, perhaps in a footnote. But you can't deny the quote shows a very pronounced bias in the intro like that, without even considering other equally reputable points of view. 84.64.208.188 14:51, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Can you work up an outline of the article -- a version that introduces Nader’s role in the 2000 election in a just way? We could take it from there, fill in the details, and in so doing maybe create an article that makes everyone happy.

I can see your point about how placing the Atlantic quote early in the article sends the article in the wrong direction. Keep in mind about the quote, however, that the quote is actually very flattering of Nader. It states that Nader is the 96th most influential American who ever lived. This is really something. And the explanation as to why he is ranked 96th states foremost that “he made the cars we drive safer.” The Bush statement comes second. Putting the Atlantic scholars ranking of Nader in the article gives readers a sense of what an important figure they were reading about. I felt the quote was good for that reason alone.

BTW, I wrote a personal message to you on your Talk page. If you change IP addresses again, you may not notice it, but you can read it here. Peace. Griot 18:04, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to weigh in here, even though (or because) I am ambivalent about the Atlantic Monthly quote precisely because, as Griot points out, whatever its problems are it does reflect the judgment of ten eminent historians that Nader is a major figure in American history. First, sorry for the length of this post. I did a lot of research and thinking and I have edited and re-edited this posting very carefully for over a week, so though it's long, I hope you'll find it's packed with useful observations, references, reasoning and suggestions. I composed most of it before Griot and various-IP (not meant as a jibe, BTW) came to an understanding. So I'm glad to see there is headway in resolving the dispute. I have to vote against the complete re-write that Griot suggests, though. I think it's much better to evolve the article incrementally than to toss it out and start over. I certainly don't want to see all the work I've just put in to clean up the article's many poorly sourced statements tossed out.

As for the 2000 election, I thought details about it had already been forked to the Nader Presidential Campaigns article. I think the jury is still out whether the 2000 election is really a more important chapter in Nader's long career as a self-styled "public citizen" than the dozens of other controversial melees he's involved himself in. Most libertarian-minded conservatives, for example, would probably want to focus almost entirely on his role in creating EPA, OSHA and strengthening the domestic regulatory powers of the federal government in general, because libertarian-conservatives tend to believe government regulation is very significant because it is, in their view, so very very dangerous to civil liberties, property rights and democracy. In the end, it probably isn't true that most people consider the 2000 election as important a part of Nader's legacy as other things he's done. Most Americans are not Democrats, after all, and most people who might read the Wikipedia are not Americans. I think we should focus on completeness of coverage of the verifiable tangible impact Nader has had on society, not on what some people think other people think about him, because that's pretty much the definition of innuendo, isn't it? And innuendo is precisely what an encyclopedia entry is diamaetrically opposed to being. In any case, I think only a certain percentage of Democrats and some others care that much about Nader's role in the 2000 election anymore - even Gore himself doesn't seem to care: http://www.politicalcortex.com/story/2006/6/21/155528/265 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ8xOOm7aRg

I have to respond to threats on this talk page to "discredit" editors by proving we only edit the nader bio, or that we are new to wikipedia editing. Being new to wikipedia editing does not mean being new to the difference between good reference material and bad, or to civil and productive collaboration. I have to imagine, also, that most people who edit Wikipedia don't edit a bunch of articles, and shouldn't. I'd frankly be more suspicious of the motives of people who edit tons of articles - who has so much knowledge about so many subjects? In any case, I don't want to traffic in broad-brush suspicions at all. NPOV, V and NOR are excellent principles to guide us here and anyone who adheres to them faithfully, along with all other wikipedia policies and guidelines, is obviously beyond reproach on these pages whatever their motivations may be.

So I want to disclose three facts about myself. First, I am the IP-signed editor who started the "Unsourced Claims" and "Activism - ..." sections of this talk page. Second, I was a local volunteer for Nader's presidential campaigns in both 2000 and 2004. Third, I care about the wikipedia as a frequent user of it, despite the fact that I may never contribute to any article that does not involve Ralph Nader, because I think it's how I can best contribute to the Wikipedia with the scarce free time that I have. That may change, largely depending on how productive and positive my experience editing this page is. But I do know a lot about Nader, though not an expert per se, so here I am to share.

I want to re-emphasize that I am strongly against re-writing the article from the ground up. That's a massive revert, really, and I think the worst way to approach collaboratively improving the quality of the article. The article really needs a lot of basic fact-checking and gap-filling and a re-write would just open up more potential holes and gaps, and bones of possible contention that could end up repeatedly winding us up in edit protection, which really puts a hamper on constructive efforts to improve the article. I think most disputes can be handled with acknowledgment of opposing sides' legitimate underlying concerns, and a common effort to do enough research to find common ground in new quality content for the article. Rewriting with no better sources and no better coverage ultimately adds nothing to the article, just re-shuffles the same deck that's missing half its cards.

So I have done quite a bit of research to come up with a proposal to resolve this Atlantic quote dispute while addressing the concerns of each side of the argument. Here we go:

I think there are several key issues to this dispute, and teasing out their nuances may help us avoid harming Nader with our handling of the Atlantic quote or POV-ing the lead section, while at the same time not throwing the baby out with the bathwater:

1) What exactly does the Atlantic Monthly mean by stating that Nader "made George W. Bush president"? Is it just plain false? Is it hyperbole?

Well, what does it mean to make someone president? Legally, the electoral college has sole authority to make someone U.S. President, and voters elect state reps to the electoral college. So even the statement that one editor made on this page that the voters made GWB prez is not really true - any more than the voters made the Patriot Act the law of the land. Normally it would be acceptable to assume that electoral college reps vote to express the will of their constituents, but we already know that in the case of the 2000 election this assumption proved unwarranted. Bush's Florida electors did not do the right thing and vote Gore in to express the will of the Florida electorate that includes those denied the right to vote because they had the same names as felons. Clearly the Atlantic editors know all this so they don't mean Nader made GWB president in the Constitutional powers sense.

So it's not strictly literal, but is it hyperbole? Reading the Atlantic article carefully, nothing in context or rhetorical device would indicate that it is meant as hyperbole. The Atlantic appears to be genuinely asserting that Nader made GWB president, or at least asserting that many of its ten invited historians believe so.

All this begs the question of just exactly what the Atlantic or the ten historians believe Nader's exact role was in making GWB president, and why that role is of such grand historical significance that it is one of only two reasons given to justify the ranking. Unfortunately, the entire Atlantic article says absolutely nothing to shed light on this question.

First, note that the Atlantic is saying more than just, "If Nader hadn't run, GWB would not be president." It's a logical fallacy to conclude from this last assertion that Nader made GWB president, just as one cannot conclude from "If GWB hadn't run, GWB wouldn't be president" that "GWB made GWB president". It just doesn't follow. There has to be a material causal connection linking Nader's action and GWB becoming president, not just a "but for". And Nader's actions have to be more decisive than Gore's actions or GWB's own actions; otherwise the statement is still no more true than "GWB made GWB president" or "Gore made GWB president". Furthermore, Nader's role in causing GWB to be prez has to be so much stronger than Bush's or Gore's that it constitutes half the reason for choosing Nader as the 96th most influential American in history, over the likes of Ruth Bader Ginsburg who was the architect of women's equality under the law (comparable to Thurgood Marshall who played a similar role for racial equality and came in at number 84).

But since GWB himself does not make the top 100, nor even the top 33 list of "Living Influentials" (thus ranking below Martha Stewart, Stan Lee and Hugh Hefner)Top Living Influentials, even if Nader had rigged the electoral college and actually made GWB president, would it make sense that making such an apparently unimportant president the president is half the reason he is the 96th most influential American in history? Alfred Kinsey, which the Wikipedia states was the inspiration for Hugh Hefner's entry into the field of sexuality, would have to get more influence points just for inspiring Hef than Nader for making GWB prez. And Kinsey doesn't make the top 100.

It's very unlike historians to reduce a public figure's significance to one aspect of it. Wouldn't one expect something more akin to: "Ralph Nader is American's most renowned and effective crusader for the rights of consumers and the general public, a role that has repeatedly brought him into conflict with both business and government."Ralph Nader Biography: Making Government and Business Accountable

or something like "He founded the consumer rights movement, symbolized the common person's struggle against big business and big government, and made George W. Bush president."

There is one other plausible explanation, however, for why many of the ten historians might consider Nader to have "made GWB president", and why they might consider that to have been of great historical significance. It's plausible if they believe Nader's influence on the election outcome as a third-party candidate was unprecedented and historic in some sense other than who it purportedly made president. So when I did a search for political science research on Nader's impact on the 2000 election to see what hard evidence there was that Nader "made GWB prez", I also kept an eye out for something more significant about his run than the "spoiler" effect, since that effect is not unique to Nader's run - Perot is widely credited with making Bill Clinton president. I did run across a possible reason why Nader's 2000 run is of historic significance other than for who it may have made president - see my answer to question 7) below for details.

2) It really does appear that the Atlantic is dead serious in making this statement. But suppose it isn't. If the Atlantic means it as hyperbole, or anything other than as a literal and sincere statement of opinion about what Nader really did and its real consequences in 2000, then does quoting it in an encyclopedic context, without clarifying that it is not meant literally, portray the Atlantic's act of publishing it in a false light?

I think it does, without clarifying that the Atlantic wasn't saying this seriously. In any case, if it's hyperbole, it probably doesn't belong in the article, definitely not in the lead portion. If it's hyperbole, I vote for complete removal because Wikipedia policy is to maintain a serious, encyclopedic tone. We should use nothing sardonic or hyperbolic or satirical or otherwise rhetorical that relies on some unspoken background knowledge on the part of the reader - an encyclopedia entry should be accessible to those with no relevant background knowledge to the topic at all.

3) Does attributing a statement of opinion to a reliable news source create a false impression that the wikipedia is presenting the opinion as verifiable fact? (e.g. "The New York Times reported that ... " and then quoting something from a NT TImes editorial or an editorial comment within a feature article).

Yes, I think it does, unless strongly qualified and placed in a context in which the publication's editorial opinion is related directly and explicitly in the article to the bio subject's historical signficance and significant influence on society. The Atlantic quote has never been framed properly in this sense by the editors who have put it in.

4) Does deciding whether a statement is "reporting" or "editorial" in a feature article published by a reliable news source, and excluding the quoted statement from a living bio, constitute the insertion of original research on the part of a wikipedia editor?

No, I don't think so, because I think it would be absurd to read the NOR policy to mean that we have to trust everything a source deemed "reliable" says wholesale, without exercising editorial judgement as to whether a given statement in a given article in an otherwise "reliable" source is in fact not reliable at all. If we don't exercise that judgmement, we aren't encyclopedia editors at all and the Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia - it's Newsmax.

5) Is the Atlantic a reliable source for facts about living persons?

Selectively, yes, but the Atlantic is a literary journal focusing on politics and culture, not a news publication. So I don't think there is a clear line drawn in the Atlantic between its editorial stances, the opinions of its contributors, and its fact-checked reporting. I think they're all mixed together in its articles. It's not a newspaper or a news magazine, so it just doesn't have the same kind of internal discipline about separating opinions from facts. To do so would greatly detract from its value as a literary magazine, I believe, because it really aims to raise people's hackles and get people debating with some heat. For example, here's a real spark lit by an Atlantic report about a Bill Clinton speaking appearance:

James Bennet of the Atlantic Monthly Makes His Play for the Stupidest Man Alive Prize

Here's Michael Kinsley, former editor-in-chief of The New Republic, liberal co-host on William F. Buckley's Firing Line, liberal co-host of Crossfire and columnist for the L.A. Times, complaining about an Atlantic writer's disgruntled hack job on Bush's chief speechwriter:

Ghost Wars

As for balanced editorial POV, the Wikipedia's bio of the Atlantic's 1999-2002 editor-in-chief Michael Kelly discusses his bias:

In September 2002, Kelly criticized former vice president Al Gore for a speech that strongly condemned the Bush administration's efforts to drum up support for the coming invasion of Iraq. In a column in the Washington Post, Kelly said the speech was "wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible." He said Gore's speech "was one no decent politician could have delivered" and was "bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies."[1][1]

And here's Eric Alterman, one of the most adamant Nader critics on the left, about Kelly: "To Kelly, Nader voters were "pea-heads," including, presumably, TNR's campaign correspondent, Michael Lewis, and political columnist Ronald Steel." http://www.thenation.com/doc/19991025/alterman Navigating The Atlantic (This was published in 1999 and Alterman was talking about Nader's '96 run - Alterman now seems to have come around since then to Kelly view of Nader voters.)

And here is a quote about Larry Sanger from the Atlantic's article "The Hive" about the Wikipedia:

"Sanger made two great contributions to Wikipedia: he built it, and he left it. After forging a revolutionary mode of knowledge building, he came to realize—albeit dimly at first—that it was not to his liking." http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200609/wikipedia/5 The Hive

Should that quote be inserted into the lead of Sanger's wikipedia bio because it appears in the Atlantic? It's factually fair and accurate, right? But wait -- doesn't it sort of say, "Good riddance" to Sanger? But it does so with such subtlety, panache and sophistication ... In the Atlantic's article the writer Matthew Poe was clearly pro-wikipedia, waxed lyrical about Wikipedia, and made a big point about doting and jubilating on the fate of his own bio page in the article. One could really make a good case, really, that the Atlantic is nothing more than a manual of style for high-brow insults, innuendoes and velvet-fisted provocation - let the white gloves fly and the dueling begin.

But enough Atlantic bashing, albeit really fun and Google-easy to do. Most importantly, the Atlantic pitches to a well-read and politically and culturally sophisticated audience, so it assumes a lot of background knowledge on the part of the reader. Its role is more commentary than news or factual reporting. In a certain sense, it's really a tertiary source of news and it is worthwhile to avoid taking any statement that it publishes as literal fact without first corroborating it with an actual reliable news source or scholarly work.

6) If the Atlantic does literally mean to assert the quoted statement in dispute, and it is not insertion of original research to judge whether a statement in a feature article is editorial or reporting, then is it clear from the article that the statement is a fair summary of the judgment of the ten historians who voted on the top 100 list, or could it be that the statement reflects an editorial stance of the Atlantic that may not actually accurately summarize the collective reasoning of the ten historians for voting Nader in as number 96?

I ask this because I found nothing in the Atlantic article that actually says the summary sentences in the Top 100 list accurately reflect the collective reasoning of the ten historians for voting as they did. The article discusses many of the judges one by one and discusses their very different approaches to defining and ranking "influence", so it would be very difficult to sum up in one or two lines such different and complex reasoning from ten historians about the influence of each individual on the list. Historians in general chafe at such pithy summations of historical figures and events, which is why they write such long books and articles about narrow historical topics, after all. I doubt ten historians could ever agree on a two-line summation of most of the top 100 figures' influence, given that the article makes a point that they don't even agree at all what defines "influence".

So it seems pretty obvious to me that the one or two line summations are the work of Atlantic editors, and not a serious attempt to summarize the probably often contradictory reasoning of the ten historians. Is this disingenuous, is it sleight of hand? Well, this is not scholarship, so no, it's just smart, competent magazine editing in the face of a deadline.

But if the statement isn't really what the ten historians collectively consider to be Nader's influence, then it really is an editorial stance of the Atlantic itself. In any case, it's unclear which it is, or how much of which it is, but fairly clear that it's some mixture of the two and needs to be properly qualified as such if quoted in an encyclopedia.

7) Are historians the most reliable scholarly sources for evidence that Nader made GWB president, and in a way that is of great historical significance? If not, who is and what do they have to say?

No, political scientists are much better sources than historians for evidence of Nader's impact on the 2000 election because they strive to quantify different kinds of influence and they justify their conclusions using rigorous statistical analysis. Historians generally do not try to quantify historical influences or prove them statistically, just identify and explain them.

I ran an EBSCOhost search and a Google Scholar search on Nader and found several poli sci papers directly examining Nader's impact on the 2000 election, presented at reputable conferences and/or published in reputable peer-reviewed journals. For citations, see footnotes to my proposed re-framing of the Atlantic quote below. The findings were complex and inconclusive as to whether Nader could have influenced many of his voters to switch to Gore instead of Bush even if he had tried.

One of the studies, however, does suggest that Nader might have had more influence on the election outcome than either Bush or Gore. One study analyzed National Election Survey data ( the data is available, btw for download at or on-line and queryable at [2]) to conclude that Nader was the preferred candidate of more voters than Bush or Gore, that for every Nader voter there were 6 Gore voters and 4 Bush voters who preferred Nader over either Bush or Gore, and that Nader would have defeated Bush or Gore in one-on-one contests against either one. (Minor Parties in the 2000 Presidential Election, p.3) It said this is the only known case in U.S. history where this was true of a candidate who did not go on to win the election and become U.S. President. This fact makes it more plausible that Nader really did make GWB president, because he may well have had a larger following among the electorate than Bush or Gore, and had he chosen to he may have had a strong enough influence among swing voters to create a landslide in either direction. Perhaps the election ended up so close precisely because Nader managed to convince swing voters that there was no significant difference between Gore and Bush.

This paper, I should clarify, does not try to measure what influence Nader actually would have had if he had withdrawn from the race and endorsed Gore as the Democrats hoped we would. But it does make it at least plausible for someone to believe that Gore would have won handily had Nader done so. And that supports the idea that the Atlantic Monthly or many of its ten invited historians might believe literally what the quote says, that by not endorsing Gore Nader "made George W. Bush the president".

I should explain also why I attribute the quote either to "the Atlantic's editors" generally, or to many of the ten historians, but not to Atlantic associate editor Ross Douthat, who has the byline for the article. Ross Douthat is on record as believing Nader was not the dominant cause of GWB becoming president. He writes elsewhere, "I think Reihan's absolutely right that Gore could have turned Nader's run to his advantage;" (Giulani's Nader?) And nowhere in the text of the article itself does Douthat suggest Nader made GWB president. In fact, he ends the article thus:

"And if George W. Bush's imprint is still strongly felt in 2056, then Al Gore's few Florida ballots (or one Supreme Court vote) short of the presidency will be (barely) remembered for the influence he never had the chance to wield."

No mention of Nader here as a factor in depriving Gore of his chance at influence.

Conclusion and proposal:

After reading the entire Atlantic article carefully, it's clear to me that the 96 ranking was sincerely and genuinely arrived at through the collective votes of ten genuinely eminent historians (most are named and quoted in the article). The only problem with the quote is that it cannot possibly justify the ranking, given how low GWB ranked, unless it reflects an understanding on the part of those historians of the little-known fact found in a political science paper by a Harvard professor concluding that Nader would have beaten Gore or Bush one-on-one. If that is what was important to the historians about Nader's influence on the 2000 election, though, the quote should have read instead "... he used his unprecedented degree of third-party influence on swing voters to make GWB president." I think it's most likely that the historians and the Atlantic editors were not aware that so many voters favored Nader over Gore and Bush, and that the article's summation of Nader's influence is simply inconsistent with their ranking of GWB and not an accurate reflection of the historians' reasoning behind Nader's high ranking. But even if the historians did know how unprecedentedly strong Nader's following was, the quote does not summarize that knowledge properly.

Griot, I have to disagree completely with your assertion that the quote is an "even-handed" summation of Nader's influence on society, and I hope to convince you of this as follows. While your Google search only really proves that people obsessed with Nader's role in the 2000 election post a lot about it on the Internet and know how to position their websites high in Google, I would agree that most people who pay attention primarily to mainstream media and the first pages of Google searches probably do think of auto safety and the 2000 election when they hear Nader's name nowadays. But it's precisely these people who come to this wikipedia bio to learn more about Nader than just those two things. We do our readers a disservice by tossing at them unqualified a quote that puts a seeming stamp of authoritative approval on their ignorance about Nader. The quote as it stands is only an even-handed summation of what people who know next to nothing about Nader believe about his influence.

The Atlantic quote is a very very poor summation of Nader's influence on America and most likely of the ten historians' judgement of his influence, and I cannot restate enough that it is contradictory to the historians' ranking of GWB below Hugh Hefner, Martha Stewart and Stan Lee. The quote mimics widespread ignorance about the "thirty years" in which Nader did many other historically significant things including in part: 1) leading the anti-nuclear-power movement that has successfully steered the U.S. away from dependence on nuclear power production for thirty years, 2) inspiring and advising activists who passed auto insurance reform in California in 1988, which proved for the first time that citizen and consumer advocacy groups could defeat heavily funded insurance lobbies at the ballot box, 3) mobilizing citizens via talk radio to stop a 51% Congressional pay hike, demonstrating the populist organizing power of talk radio, 4) starting with Poletown (and notice the Poletown wikipedia article mentions Nader, but our bio of Nader here doesn't mention Poletown) in the 1980's led citizen, consumer and legal campaigns against the use of eminent domain for corporate welfare, culminating in a Michigan Supreme Court ruling in 2004 overturning its Poletown decision , then a 5-4 loss in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2005 that such uses are constitutional Kelo v. New London, Nader on Kelo, but followed quickly by a sweep of state law revisions to tighten down on the practice, 5) forming right-left coalitions to combat commercialism in schools, teaching to standardized tests, corporate welfare, the Patriot Act and NAFTA/GATT, 6) led anti-globalization campaigns culminating in the Battle in Seattle in 1999 Unverified site - claims Nader edited anti-globalization anthology and co-founded IFG, 7) led campaigns against corporate lobby attempts to destroy the deterrent power of liability lawsuits through "tort reform" which Nader calls "tort deform", 1995 NY Times Article on Nader, discusses Tort Reform 8) and let's not forget his role in the passage of the Freedom of Information Act and the creation of OSHA and EPA.

In fact after noticing the Poletown article mentions Nader, I decided to do an advanced Google search for all en.wikipedia.org pages that mention Ralph Nader but do not mention the words "talk", "user" (to exclude talk and user pages), "Gore", "election", "candidate", "party" and "parties" and found 154 articles (wikipedia policy says no links to search urls, so I won't - but in Google advanced search put Ralph Nader in the exact phrase field, exclude the words I listed and put en.wikipedia.org as Domain), including for example this one: Biomedical_equipment_technician

Even more telling is that an on-line NY Times Archives query NY Times Archive Search for "Ralph Nader" between jan 1 1981 to dec 31 1999 produces 1,504 articles, or one every five days on average, and this was the 20 years in which so many people think he was doing nothing. A search on all NY Times articles 1980 and earlier produces over 3,000 articles. So were those 4,500 articles pretty much all retrospective pieces about how Nader had "made the cars we drive safer" back in the late sixties? That's what the Atlantic quote would have us believe.

The Atlantic's editors do read the NY Times, don't they? So they know all of the things Nader has been involved with, no doubt, which makes it even more glaringly obvious that their reduction of his entire career outside the 2000 election to the belittlingly understated "he made the cars we drive safer" (so did I - I had new tires installed on mine) is just the execution of the oft-repeated warning or threat levied at Nader that his legacy will be erased and he will no longer be remembered for all the other important things he has done.

But it's our job here, not the Atlantic's, to summarize and cite proper sources for all of these historically significant activities.

So I propose that the quote be reinserted, and it should be in the lead section because it reflects, if misstates, ten eminent historians' judgement about Nader's general overall influence on society, but I propose that it only be re-inserted along with mention of Nader's various other Top 100 honors, and with the vague counter-comment after semicolon replaced with heavily sourced qualifications as follows:

"In 1999 an NYU panel of eminent journalists ranked Nader's book Unsafe At Any Speed no. 38 among the top 100 pieces of journalism of the 20th century.MEDIA; Journalism's Greatest Hits: Two Lists of a Century's Top Stories, NY Times, March 1, 1999, p.2 In 1990 Life Magazine Washington at Work; Eclipsed in the Reagan Decade, Ralph Nader Again Feels Glare of the Public, NY Times, Sep. 21, 1990, and again in 1999 Time Magazine American Program Bureau Ralph Nader bio "A Triumph of the Newsmagazine's Craft" (mentions Nader as one of the Top 100 Influentials attending a Time 100 dinner), named Nader one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th Century. In 2006 the Atlantic Monthly, in its list of the "100 most influential Americans" in history, ranked Nader 96: "He made the cars we drive safer; thirty years later, he made George W. Bush the president";"The Top 100: The Most Influential Figures in American History.", Atlantic Monthly, (December 2006) p.62] But scholarly research on Nader's impact on the election of George W. Bush is divided, complex, inconclusive and insufficient to justify a literal reading of the Atlantic's rhetorical comment.abstract of THE ROOTS OF THIRD PARTY VOTING The 2000 Nader Campaign in Historical Perspective. By: Allen, Neal; Brox, Brian J.. Party Politics, Sep2005, Vol. 11 Issue 5, p623-637, 15p, 3 charts , http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content?content=10.1080/07393140600680015 abstract of If it Weren't for Those ?*!&*@!* Nader Voters we Wouldn't Be in This Mess: The Social Determinants of the Nader Vote and the Constraints on Political Choice. By: Simmons, Solon J.; Simmons, James R.. New Political Science, Jun2006, Vol. 28 Issue 2, p229-244, 16p, 5 charts, 1 graph , Did Ralph Nader Spoil a Gore Presidency? A Ballot-Level Study of Green and Reform Party Voters in the 2000 Presidential Election,The Dynamics of Voter Decision Making Among Minor Party Supporters: The 2000 U.S. Presidential Election, British Journal of Political Science (2007), 37: 225-244, Minor Parties in the 2000 Presidential Election. Nader's influence on society has also involved far more than merely his role in improving auto safety and his impact on the 2000 election."

(I've changed the ref tags above to in-line quotes because the ref tags don't work on the talk page)

The sources supporting the last sentence above will need to be provided throughout the rest of the article. I've made a start with the paragraph on his role in the anti-nuclear-power movement. I cited a Reagan Administration Commerce Dept document basically declaring Nader public enemy number one in the government's ambition to jump start its then-flailing nuclear power agenda.

I think there is one piece of common ground we can find: many of us seem to share a great concern that the bio not be used to propagate myths about Nader. Some seem to fear propagating the negative myths spread by his critics during and after the 2000 election. Others seem to fear propagating the positive myths from decades of repetition and embellishment that have made Nader perhaps the most widely recognized international symbol of the common person's struggle against the powers that be, the Saint of John Q Public. If we can agree that neither of these mythologies should be propagated by the wikipedia bio, except to the extent hard facts support them, then perhaps we can focus on doing the serious secondary research and meticulous citation work that will actually give us something other than hopelessly POV rehashes of these mythologies to publish here.

The Atlantic did make an attempt at scholarly objectivity and did at least end up ranking Nader in the top 100, if only so grudgingly that they refused to be honest about why.

Jautumn (talk) 11:55, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Section break 2

wow- that took me like half an hour to read! I agree that the controversy should be mentioned in the intro but the quote definitely tips the scale in favour of a particular, and hotly contested, pov and doesn't give the reader the opportunity to make up their own mind and consider the myriad of other factors-diebold, voter harassment, the tossing of black votes, other misc election fraud, the supreme court, etc- and irresponsibly, not to mention inaccurately, paints him as a scapegoat. How bout we just say, "Nader has very controversially run for president on four separate occasions," and if you want, you could add the following to that sentence after the comma: "... his role in the 2000 election in particular proving the subject of much political analysis and debate." and then we lay out the cold, objective, evenhanded and extensive details of all factors involved, presenting both points of view in an impartial manner. And I like the idea of putting the quote along with all the others in a new section entitled "recognition", with all his other notable criticisms and accolades from reputable sources —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.77.138.164 (talk) 20:59, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond. I think a Recognition section might work, but we'd have to separate the Atlantic quote from the Atlantic ranking, because the quote would belong in the 2000 election section whereas the ranking would belong in the Recognition section. I think that's appropriate, as I've shown pretty clearly above that the quote is an Atlantic editorial comment that cannot possibly reflect the reasoning of the ten historians in ranking Nader 96, because it contradicts the same historians' ranking of GWB below Martha Stewart, Stan Lee and Hugh Hefner. If we want to keep the ranking and the quote together, though, it should remain in the lead section, and must be heavily qualified right afterwards in the body text to make it clear that the wikipedia is not presenting the quoted opinions as if it has evidence, expert judgment or even necessarily sound reasoning behind it. I agree that the quote is POV, but it is tied however unfortunately to the NPOV 96-ranking. I think we have to respect the fact that the author and copyright owner of both, the Atlantic, put the ranking and the quote together, so there's a slight flavor of inserting original research in separating the two. I would argue that it's okay to separate them, since it's clear they are separate judgments by separate parties, and it eliminates confusion to separate them. But I'm still a bit hesitant because it might be seen as a machination, even though I think I've proven that it isn't. Making sure we avoid even the appearance of tampering with quoted material to push a pro-Nader POV is very important here, though.

Jautumn (talk) 15:31, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Jautaumn--Thanks for the long, thoughtful entry here. I take it that you believe the quote should be reinserted in the intro section along with Nader's other honors ("So I propose that the quote be reinserted, and it should be in the lead section because it reflects, if misstates, ten eminent historians' judgement about Nader's general overall influence on society, but I propose that it only be re-inserted along with mention of Nader's various other Top 100 honors"). That's okay with me. I do think, however, that the qualifications you want to insert after the Atlantic quote should go in a footnote. Many people would object to the other Nader accolades you mention -- NYU panel journalists making Unsafe At Any Speed no. 38 among the top 100 pieces of journalism of the 20th century, Time and Life also making him a top 100 influential American -- if only on the grounds that they are out of date, as they were given to Nader prior to the 2000 election. If Life and Time were to name the top 100 Americans today instead of in 1990 or 1999, would they take into account Nader's role in the last two presidential elections? They certainly would. It's unfair to the Atlantic's scholars to single them out for criticism without singling out Time and Life, for example. Griot (talk) 18:43, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Delete quote per (User talk:SeeknDistroi) 216.7.150.82 (talk) 02:31, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

SeeknDistroi, thanks for your vigilance and investigative work, but I have to assume good faith until the case you've made is formally submitted and dealt with by administrators. Even if you're right, the Atlantic quote still is not a simple case of POV, because the ranking it purports to justify is NPOV, and because it is properly attributed to the Atlantic. And the principle of saving by amending and enhancing toward consensus rather than reverting has to be observed with great earnestness or the Wikipedia will become no more than a vast shoreline littered with ever-melting sandcastles. See the Unsourced Claims section of this page to see many items I've removed as easy cases needing no discussion - this is a hard case and needs full discussion. What do you think of my proposed solution, various-IP's and the response I just posted to various-IP?

I think I've shown that the argument that Nader made GWB president can be made if premised on evidence that Nader had a strong following among swing voters deciding between Bush and Gore, which I've provided some evidence to support, and I provide more in my answer to Griot I'm about to post below. So I don't think your earlier stated view that the claim "Nader made GWB Prez" is "stupid and naive" is justified, though I agree it is both POV and inflammatory. I think it's much worse, and definitely stupid and provably false a thousand times over, though, that the Atlantic quote glosses over Nader's thirty years of intense activism between Unsafe At Any Speed and 2000 as if it were not of significant influence. That aspect of the quote may actually be potentially libelous, at least it would be if we take it and put it in an encyclopedia bio without stongly qualifying and bracketing it for what it is - a provably false and absurd editorial POV. It contrasts sharply, and profoundly contradicts, the Atlantic historians' 96 ranking of Nader in all of U.S. history, which may be the highest honor ever bestowed upon Nader - only 16 U.S. Presidents, four U.S. Supreme Court justices and one or two journalists were ranked above him. He came in above Nixon, Jimmy Carter, GHW Bush, JFK, William Rehnquist, Warren Burger, William Brennan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Rockefeller. I think that may be why the Atlantic stuck in its barb at Nader, because its editors didn't like its own invited ten historians' objective assessment of Nader's importance. If we remove the quote entirely as you suggested, I still think it would be remiss of us not to mention the ranking. But if we mention the ranking without the quote, our citation would direct readers to the quote anyway and give the impression that we regard the quote as an accurate summary of the reasons for his ranking, which I cannot repeat enough that I've shown to be impossible. I hope I can convince you that the most objective approach, and the most clear, honest and helpful to our readers, would be to include the quote but qualify it heavily to make clear it is not justified by any reliable evidence and does not, cannot possibly, be an accurate summary of the reasons for the ranking.

Jautumn (talk) 15:31, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for reading my long posting, Griot, and for your response. Again, sorry for the length of my response but I feel this discussion needs to dive deep for common ground. Here we go:

- Footnoting the qualifying statements, unfortunately, would give the appearance in the body text that the Wikipedia considers the Atlantic's deliberately slanted editorial statement to have reliable evidence or expert judgment behind it, which I have shown above that it cannot possibly have. The claim that Nader made GWB prez has been studied by scholars with no clear answer, so any claim one way or another is POV. The implied claim that Nader did nothing of significant influence for thirty years is provably false and absurd. For both reasons, the quote must be qualified right in the body text to make it clear that we, as Wikipedia editors, know and can cite sources proving that the quote is false and misleading POV published under false color of objectivity. If you're not convinced of this, please explain why my argument does not convince you and present a counter-argument if possible.

- The NYU School of Journalism panel's ranking is not contradicted by a contentious, misleading statement published alongside it; the Atlantic's ranking is, and it is the Atlantic's unjustified statement - not its ranking or the rankings by NYU, Time and Life - that I've shown to be reckless POV-pushing. The problem with the Atlantic quote is not that some people find it objectionable, but that it is unfounded editorial rhetoric rather than an honest summation of the reasons for the ranking. So it doesn't matter who objects to any of these rankings - they are rankings made either by scholars (NYU, Atlantic) or by reputable news sources (Time, Life). The NYU panel, convened by a reputable university's journalism dept, would also seem to hold more weight than a gathering and collation of separate scholarly opinions by a commentary magazine such as the Atlantic, moroever, because it was hosted and managed by some of the scholars themselves, not by magazine editors with the power to insert their own POV in the final report at their whim.

- Are the other rankings out of date? No, not at all. It's 2007 - there's nothing out of date about recognition for being influential between 1900 and 2000. Should we not report in people's living bios their honorary doctorates earned before 2000 just because some people don't think they deserve them anymore? I'm sure some people never thought they deserved them in the first place. Regardless, anything Nader has done in the 21st century obviously would have no bearing on his ranking as an influential of the twentieth century. Even if it did, surely it would only add to his significance, not subtract - you aren't arguing that his influence on recent elections has reduced his overall influence in history, or somehow warped time and erased the influential things he's done in the past that earned him those rankings back then, are you? And the old rankings are likely more objective than post-2000 ones precisely because they know nothing about his more controversial presidential runs. I know there is rhetoric out there that his presidential campaigns "erase his legacy", but that is just logically nonsensical but emotionally effective campaign rhetoric from his opponents - a legacy is, by definition, that which is not erasable. Nader's response to this charge was, "Are they going to start ripping seat belts out of cars?" What Nader did to earn him his earlier rankings still remains what it was and is, and remains voluminously documented in those 154 wikipedia articles and 4,500 NY Times articles I mentioned, just as it does not erase the impact of Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation, or his Optics even, that after publishing these monumental works he spent the remaining decades of his life devoted to speculating on theological notions that no one takes seriously today.

The only way I can make sense of your claim that the rankings are "out-of-date" is if you believe evidence has emerged since the year 2000 that Nader never really did the notable things he is reported heavily to have done in the past. I have found no evidence to support that, though, just some libel from Salon.com and elsewhere that accuses him of financial and labor misbehavior, accusations I have proven to be self-contradictory and unreliable elsewhere on this talk page. If you can produce any such evidence, I'm all ears, but I've searched for it myself and turned up nothing. To be honest, my own opinion of Nader evolved opposite to his ex-admirers in that I never admired Nader UNTIL his 2000 run, because until then he seemed too elitist and too believe-in-the-system for me. So I have looked very hard for evidence to discredit him because for two decades I saw him as a dangerous gatekeeper. I have good research skills, and I've found nothing to support my prior suspicion but badly supported, and usually badly written, innuendo or expressions of personal bitterness from people whose prior idolization and pedestalization of the man in and of itself raises doubt as to their own capacity for balanced, reasonable character assessment. I have no patience for cult-follower types.

- You completely misread what I wrote above when you claim I'm singling out the Atlantic scholars for criticism. On the contrary, I exonerated the Atlantic's scholars from discredit - by proving that they could not possibly be responsible for the reckless quote the Atlantic published about Nader. Time and Life, I believe, don't engage scholars for their rankings so they don't try to dress their rankings in the garb of scholarly objectivity. Their rankings reflect their judgment of the newsworthiness of each ranked person's actions, and being a reputable news source means having some objective authority on newsworthiness. Not that I personally agree with what the NY Times, Time or Life believe to be newsworthy, but Wikipedia policy is to rely on news sources with a solid reputation for fact-checking, and Time, Life and the NY Times fit that description whereas the Atlantic does not. That's why the Atlantic had to invite ten historians to give credibility to its rankings. So the Atlantic rankings are well-sourced; the Atlantic's editorial inflammatory rhetoric glossing its Nader ranking is not.

But I want to do more than just pick apart the text of your arguments, Griot. I know that behind them you are trying to get at something important, and I do appreciate that you have a worthwhile concern about Nader's bio properly registering the difference between his work prior to 2000 and after. But we are biographers here, albeit amateurs, so we need to look for consistency and cohension in Nader's life's work, a way of recounting his influence that does not reduce to pro and con or love him or hate him, or he suddenly turned bad because (insert favorite insult or innuendo here), because this is not a place to pass jugdement on Nader positive or negative. I could find you plenty of published quotes that claim Nader is saving the world with his presidential campaigns, but I won't. They are clearly opinions colored by hopes. The places on the web to find such hope or fear infused commentary are legion. Rare is the spot where those emotional colorings are suppressed enough to reach a semblance of thoroughly researched and fully presented documented fact that can deepen people's basic understanding of the topic at hand, a place to step back and contemplate the provable consequences of Nader's existence, not speculate on unproven consequences good or bad or stand in judgment of his existence based on one's fears or hopes. Nader, to me, is a great hope, if a complex and incomplete one, and to you he is a great threat and menace, if perhaps in some ways a sympathetic one. This bio is not the place to project either my hopes with reservations or your fears and regrets about them onto the facts of his life and work. Naturally hope and fear will tend to highlight and downplay very different aspects of Nader's life, but we can't include conflicting emphasis in the article the way we can include conflicting points of view. We can only be fair in emphasis and coverage by taking a very broad, long view of what we consider "noteworthy", and give fair space in the article to all the tangible documented impact Nader has had on different aspects of society. Our readers should feel they are being given a thorough but succinct walking tour of his career from start to present day.

So should half the article be about the 2000 election? A quarter? If it weren't for the enormous impact Nader had on society in myriad ways before 2000, maybe. But the fact is, if Nader is a menace, it is precisely because he has such an enormous reputation and influence due to his work prior to the 2000 election. He was a public figure in the campaign that eclipsed Gore and Bush that year, despite the media and both major parties' attempts to stop that from happening. If it weren't for pre-2000 Nader the restless celebrated crusader making news in the NY Times as a private citizen every couple three days, there couldn't possibly have been Nader the post-2000 (insert favorite diminution or deprecation) because he would not have had the political capital to become such a purported menace. So no, it's impossible to understand Nader's impact on the 2000 election without first understanding just how broad and deep his influence and reputation had been prior to that time. The debate over his 2000 impact has been misdirected - it isn't really about shifting 538 votes from Nader's hard-core supporter column to Gore's. It's about moving 269 Nader-preferring strategic swing votes from Bush's column to Gore's, and the fact that Nader refused to endorse Gore to swing those voters over to him despite pleading from all sorts of people on the left. It's really, objectively speaking, about Nader's enormous influence on the mainstream swing voting public, coupled with his break with the left politically.

Influence on voters: For example, even in 1988 when his public stature and influence was supposedly at a low point in his career:

As the battle of the ballot initiatives heated up, an opinion poll taken in California produced the following finding: Among state residents who admitted knowing absolutely nothing about the four rival proposals, 67 percent said they would vote for Prop 103 simply because it was associated with Ralph Nader. That compares to 13 percent who said they would vote for Prop 104 because it was being pushed by the insurance industry. - Martin, Justin. Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon, Basic Books, New York, NY, 2002, p. 225.

This enormous influence over uninformed, authority-following voters is really the source of Nader's critics' accusation that he is a pied piper. But addressing this concern directly would remind people of the enormous popular influence and broad appeal Nader has, so his critics avoid being straightforward about their fears and concerns in this regard. Nader supporters see his critics tongue-tied in this way and just leave it be. Both sides of the debate seem to settle on this stalemate of silence on Nader's influence. Anti-Nader: He tipped swing votes to Bush, but we won't be honest about how because that acknowledges his widespread influence on centrist swing undecided voters and hence his legitimacy as a major mainstream presidential candidate who really could have won the election if given a fair chance. Pro-Nader: Nader critics' denial of the fact that Nader is electable contradicts their other more supportable claim that he's a pied piper, so both their arguments cripple each other and if we keep quiet we won't have to argue much against either. The wikipedia bio should not be hamstrung by either side's rhetorical strategems. It should neither get tongue-tied about Nader's enormous influence on mainstream American voters, nor pretend there is no serious pied piper issue for Nader - it should source and describe Nader's enormous past influential activities so readers can understand just exactly what the real threat Nader posed to the two major parties was in 2000, and how he probably was in a position to mislead a significant bloc of swing voters who trusted him on his word, whether or not one thinks he actually did mislead them.

Break with the left: The break didn't happen suddenly in 2000. It had been brewing ever since he ran as a write-in in both the Republican and Democrat N.H. primaries calling himself "none of the above", and later aligned with Perot and Buchanan against Clinton's NAFTA the following year. The fact that at his childhood dinner table his father used to regale against both the Democratic and Republican parties as two sides of the same coin also puts Nader's obstinance on that point in a more consistent and cohesive light, and is consistent for his stated reason why he has never actually joined the Green Party, because he promised his father he never would join any political party. Nader's alliances with organizations and individuals alike have always, it seems, been alliances of convenience toward his own aims, based on what he deems at any given time to be in the public interest. He has never been loyal to the left, the right or anything in between, just loyal to his own view of what is in the public interest.

I think the fairest, objective way to allocate coverage of Nader's life work is to do so chronologically based on the material available for each year of his working life, in proportion to how newsworthy his actions are deemed by reliable news sources at the time and how significant they have been regarded to be in scholarly papers or government documents. I think it's a well established fact that he does nothing but work pretty much, day and night. So we know he was working on something almost every day of his career, and if it gets reported in the NY Times or some other reputable news source, then obviously it is of some note. Another measure that seems to be used for Nader especially is to calculate how many lives "he saved", which is POV language that must not be used. But calculating how many lives have been saved by regulatory measures he has supported is fair game, I think, as long as we don't do the calculating, but if it's calculations reported in a reliable secondary source. Right-wing critics would like to calculate how many lives his regulations have cost, and if we find such calculations presented with factual evidence and sound reasoning in a reliable news sources, by all means we should include them.

Put aside the notion that he is a prophet/angel or hypocrite/devil and try for a moment to categorize him politically. Socialist? No. Libertarian? No. I find it most useful to consider his ancestry which traces back to Phoenicia, the birthplace of townhall democracy, or not so far back to Zahle, the hometown of his parents in what is now Lebanon, and an independent democratic city-state within the Turkish empire until the Turks razed it to the ground during WWI. One right-wing commentator offered "authoritarian" as Nader's creed due to Nader's belief in the net benefit and necessity of government regulation of both industry and individual public conduct. Non-controversial should be the term "genius" applied to Nader, top of his class at Harvard law and editor of the Harvard Law Review, had read the entire Congressional Record front to back by the time he started college, knows every congressperson's playbook and stats like he knows basketball players', a brilliant lobbyist and a formidable legal or political opponent. These facts about him are as troubling as they are encouraging to me about his potential role in future politics, so I feel I am not projecting positive feelings on him by stating them as such. If we want to provide a good historical account of Nader's role in the 2000 election, we have to explore not just the fact that he burnt a thousand political bridges all of a sudden, but whether it was really so sudden, where and why those bridges first got built, who traveled them for what reasons while they stood, how they had decayed or hadn't decayed before he burnt them down, etc. The best way to do this without engaging in original research or injecting POV is to stick to V, verifiable facts, gather them from everywhere we can and summarize them as succinctly and accurately as we can. 4,500 NY Times articles is a gold mine of V to start chewing on. Any takers?

Unless someone can counter the evidence and arguments I've made, the Atlantic quote has to be treated differently than the ranking, but not necessarily separated from it. I don't see how we can do better than to include the quote but immediately qualify it in the body text with heavily sourced statements clarifying that there is no clear answer from scholars as to whether Nader made GWB prez, and there is a mountain range of evidence that the Atlantic quote absurdly and recklessly understates Nader's influence by omitting mention of thousands of influence points documented in NY Times articles over the same thirty years the Atlantic quote glibly skips over. The Atlantic has a sense of humor - it carried out a journalistic version of a hit-and-run on Nader's career, a drive-by roasting. In the end, it does rank him 96, one of only four living people in the top 100, which proves that the Atlantic didn't really mean what it said in the quoted sentence and that the Atlantic knows it is false and absurdly understated. I really think it was meant as a wry joke to its readers and nothing more, and a rib at Nader to say, "Yes, of course we know you're one of the greatest Americans in history, but you really really piss people off, buddy, really really really." Let's not take that joke here and turn it into something actually libelous by repeating it as if it was meant in all seriousness. Seriously, journalists failing to mention the Freedom of Information Act as part of Nader's historic accomplishments? Is there even one political article the Atlantic has published in the last thirty years that doesn't rely to some degree on some FOIA'd document somewhere? I believe that if the Atlantic were accused of reckless editorializing, they would say it's absurd for anyone to believe they meant the quote seriously, and that their promulgation that Nader ranks 96th most influential in all of American history proves they were only kidding.

What do you think of various-IP's suggestion that we create a Recognition section (and I think it should come right after the lead section), and my suggestion that we mention the ranking there but move the quote to the 2000 election section?

Jautumn (talk) 15:31, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Section break 3

To answer your question, the Recognition section is fine, but the dozen-word quote from the Atlantic would have to accompany the Atlantic's recognition of Nader as America's 96th most influential person, just as a short quote from other sources that have recognized Nader belongs as well. These quotes are necessary to explain why Time, Life, the Altantic etc. have acknowledged Nader in some way. BTW, I do not see that the Atlantic quote is incendiary, inflammatory, and especially not libelous (I would remind you that libel charges are not considered by American courts, and we should all be grateful that our first amendment rights trump libel charges).

The article as it stands now is pretty poor. It offers a laundry list of Nader's accomplishments without explaining how he accomplished anything. The "Activism" and "Non Profit Organizations" sections are just lists of organization names. Did Nader found these organizations? Did he oversee them? The article also barely mentions Nader's role in the 2000 election, and yet this is what Nader is chiefly remembered for today (unfairly, probably, but that's how it is). That Nader played a role in 2000 is not debatable; therefore, it needs to be explained.

I'm baffled by this statement: " what the NY Times, Time or Life believe to be newsworthy, but Wikipedia policy is to rely on news sources with a solid reputation for fact-checking, and Time, Life and the NY Times fit that description whereas the Atlantic does not. That's why the Atlantic had to invite ten historians to give credibility to its rankings." You have this all backward. The Atlantic did not come up with the list and then ask historians to validate the names; it invited the historianas to make the list. Further, the editors didn't attach the Nader quote to the historians' rankings. The historians provided the Nader quote, just as they provided a short summary quote as to why they put the other 99 names on the list. I'm also baffled by your notion that the Atlantic doesn't fact-check as thoroughly as the NY Times or Time magazine.

Last, to paraphrase Shakespeare, brevity is not just the soul of wit. Griot (talk) 17:34, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

But Kant said of his tomes: had they been shorter, they would have been much longer.

It would also serve brevity if I did not have to repeat myself again, but for you, Griot, I will do it:

No evidence that historians wrote summaries - As I said above, I can find nothing in the Atlantic article stating that the historians supplied the summary statements for the rankings. Do you have a quote from the article or some other evidence that shows that the historians supplied the summary statements?

Evidence historians didn't write Nader summary - The summary statement for Nader's ranking contradicts the historians' ranking of GWB below Martha Stewart, Hugh Hefner and Stan Lee, so the historians did not produce the statement. The historians ranked the entirety of GWB's impact on the U.S. to be less than any one of the following: Marvel Comics, Playboy Magazine, Martha Stewart's Living. You may not agree with that, but that is what the historians decided. So how could Nader making such an unimportant president the president constitute enough influence to be half the reason for ranking Nader 96th all-time, above all but 16 U.S. Presidents, 4 US Supreme Court Justices and 2 journalists? It cannot. The historians ranked GWB to be almost inconsequential compared to Nader, so they must deem Nader making GWB president similarly inconsequential compared to Nader's other activities. Clearly the historians had other reasons for ranking Nader so high, and the summary statement does not accurately describe their reasoning.

Further evidence historians didn't write Nader summary - Nor is the above the only contradiction that flows from the false premise that the historians deemed Nader making GWB president of such enormous importance as to be half the reason for ranking him 96th. For example, Lee Harvey Oswald made LBJ president, much less arguably so than Nader made GWB president, and LBJ is ranked 44 above Fermi and Oppenheimer and hence nuclear bombs, whereas GWB is below Marvel Comics. So why is Oswald (=LBJ > nuclear bombs) not ranked anywhere near as high as Nader (=GWB < Marvel Comics)? Oswald, like GWB, doesn't make it on the top 33 living influentials list, on which Nader ranks 3rd. Oswald may not even be ranked in any of the sub-lists at all. In other words:

Premise: The Atlantic's Nader summary statement accurately reflects the judgments of its ten invited historians about the reasons for Nader's high influence ranking.

Absurd consequence: the historians' influence rankings plus the summary statement asserting half Nader's influence was making GWB president gives us the following influence ordering:

( nuclear bombs = (Oppenheimer or Fermi) < LBJ = Oswald <<<<<< Nader/2 = GWB < Marvel Comics )

therefore ten eminent historians judged nuclear bombs to be miniscule in influence in history compared to Marvel Comics.

Conclusion: premise entails absurdity, thus premise is false, hence The Atlantic's summary statement does not accurately reflect the historians' ranking judgments

What the Oswald example also shows is that the historians didn't consider the making of presidents important at all. If they did, Oswald certainly would have ranked higher than Martha Stewart, Hugh Hefner and Stan Lee. This is another way in which the Nader summary statement contradicts the historians' rankings.

Unlikelihood any two-liners could do justice to ten historians' views - I have also made it clear that the article itself discusses the ten historians' wildly differing notions of what constitutes influence, and that it is very unlikely that they could ever come to agreement on a two-line summary of the influence of any of the individuals ranked. All this points to the conclusion that the Atlantic's editors wrote the summary quotes. Don't agree? So here is an exercise in brevity for you: please explain how ten different definitions of influence applied to an historical figure's entire career can be summed up in one or two sentences yet do justice to all ten definitions and that figure's entire career. It's highly implausible that this was done or even attempted by the Atlantic. The Atlantic editors must have supplied the summaries, not the historians, and could not have even pretended to have been summing up in a balanced and accurate way the complex and contradictory reasoning of so many eminent scholars in one-liners and two-liners.

Unlike Time and LIfe, the Atlantic is not a news magazine, thus has no objective authority of its own to rank influence - I made it clear in what I wrote that the Atlantic invited the historians to rank the influentials, so I have not misunderstood that at all. I wrote in my first posting, "it's clear to me that the 96 ranking was sincerely and genuinely arrived at through the collective votes of ten genuinely eminent historians." Nowhere have I implied that the Atlantic editors are responsible for the rankings. I make it very clear in my prior postings that the historians are responsible for the rankings, but the Atlantic editors must be responsible for the summary statement of Nader's rankings because the statement contradicts the historians' rankings. So let me re-phrase in a less succinct but more precise way what I mean by the sentence you found baffling: The Atlantic had to invite historians to do its rankings for it, because it is a magazine for commentary and opinion, not for news reporting, and thus has no reputation for objectivity in regard to judging newsworthiness like Time and Life have. Hence it cannot rely on its own reputation to lend credibility to any ranking of influence it publishes. Therefore to publish a credible ranking, it must seek outside experts to do the rankings instead of doing it themselves. Does that clarify?

The Atlantic's summary statement is inflammatory because it echoes and carries out the warnings and threats from Democrats made frequently during the 2000 and 2004 campaigns that Nader's legacy would be "erased" by the ignominy that would befall his reputation due to his presidential runs. This is really nothing more than outright extortion - a demand for compliance under threat of harm by slander and libel for non-compliance. The inflammatory part of the Atlantic summary is not so much the hyperbolic "made GWB pres" part, but much worse the more heavy-handed diminution and omission of everything else Nader has done in comparison, which I have shown could not possibly have been the judgment of the ten historians. "The only thing you'll be remembered for is how you ruined the election and put Bush in office" was the endless mantra of the anti-Nader Democrats. I ask you to consider how the statement plays now to the thousands of people who sincerely campaigned for Nader because we believed his message was critical for America to hear and think about. We were literally spat at, sometimes physically assaulted, our free speech was repeatedly shut down, our equal access to public spaces denied, our voting rights stripped away, and our actions and character libeled at every turn in the mainstream and alternative press alike. No, I'm not whining. I went through worse from racist social dynamics as a child. But what struck me was how the treatment recalled to me much of that blatantly racist hostility I experienced early in life. The Atlantic quote is the gesture of carrying out previously threatened harm, if done only in a mock manner that creates a loophole for the Atlantic to escape any allegation of actual libel.

Libel and First Amendment: And you're wrong about libel law in the U.S., Griot. You can certainly sue for libel. First amendment rights, like all our constitutionally protected liberties, are limited at the point they unduly burden, restrict or harm the ability of others to exercise their constitutionally protected rights. Libel law in the U.S. turns on the question of proving harm, proving the defendant was not reasonable in believing the allegedly libelous claim was true, and proving it was not satirical, with a few other loopholes and caveats. This is what I have read about it, at least - I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. In any case, I mention potential libel only because Wikipedia policy on living bios explicitly refers to unsourced or poorly sourced contentious claims about a person, especially if "potentially libelous", as something to be removed immediately, without discussion or consensus. The policy puts all editors on notice that we are each responsible for removing potential libel whenever we see it.

I'm glad you agree the article needs filling out in the Activism section. Undue weight given to the 2000 election would make the 2000 election harder to understand, though, because Nader's activism in the decades prior set the backdrop for what happened in 2000. The 2000 election section can be brief if set in the context of a strong walkthrough of all that came before it. What's more, undue weight given to the 2000 election would give the overall impression that the Atlantic quote accurately weighs the importance of the 2000 election as half the influence Nader has had on America. I've shown that the historians could not have considered that to be half Nader's influence, so the view that it is half Nader's influence is just Atlantic editorial POV. The Wikipedia bio should not give weight to the 2000 election to a degree that reinforces that editorial POV. It should give enough weight to all aspects of Nader's activism so as to present a complete picture of what his impact on society has been. One objective measure of impact would be newsworthiness at the time of the activity in question, in reliable news sources such as the NY Times. Of the 5,767 articles mentioning Nader in the NY Times archives, 597 mention Nader and Gore from Jan 2000 to present, or about 11%. So give that much weight to the 2000 election in the bio. 190 mention Nader and Kerry from feb 2004 to present, or 3%. I still think that's too much by a factor of two or three, but I can live with that as a compromise based on the NY Times coverage as an objective measure.

Similar searches in the LA Times archives yields 469 out of 4563, or 10% mentioning "nader" and "gore" since Jan 2000, 169 or 3% mentioning "nader" and "kerry" since Jan 2004. This is very consistent with NY Times. Washington Post archives show 487 of 6454 mention "nader" and "gore" since jan 2000, or 7.5%, and 286 or 4% mention "nader" and "kerry" since jan 2004. Totals for all three papers combined: nader/gore since 2000 gives 1,553/16,784 = 9%. nader/kerry since 2004 gives 645/16,784 = 4%.

So I propose we shoot for 9% of the bio devoted to the 2000 election and 4% on the 2004 election.

I also respectfully request, Griot, that you agree to my proposed resolution for this dispute, that we include the mention of the ranking with the quote, but immediately follow it with heavily sourced qualifications clarifying the established fact that scholarship on Nader's impact on the 2000 election is complex and inconclusive, and that enormous documentary evidence exists proving that Nader's influence on society extends far beyond merely auto safety and the 2000 election. 16,784 articles spanning four decades in three of the largest most reputable newspapers in the world mention nader. To get an estimate of how much influence he has had apart from car safety and his 2000 presidential run, I ran this search on the NY Times archives - all terms led by minus signs mean the article does not have the word anywhere in it, case-insensitive:

+"Ralph Nader" -gore -car -auto -safety -spoiler -2000

This left me with 3,091 of the 5,767 articles, a clear majority. Restricting further to try to cut out all of his involvement electoral politics:

+"Ralph Nader" -ballot -gore -race -car -auto -safety -spoiler -campaign

yielded 2,149 articles remaining. But what are these articles about? Are they fluff? I searched for a sequence of issue-related terms, excluding each previous term in turn and adding another to avoid duplicates in subsequent searches. I started by excluding anything car-related right off the bat. Here's the sequence of searches and the number of articles hit in the pre-1981 archive search and the post-1981 search sequences:

"Ralph Nader" -car -auto +nuclear = 198 + 144 (pre-1981 plus post-1981, and same below)

"Ralph Nader" -car -auto -nuclear energy = 204 + 167

"Ralph Nader" -car -auto -nuclear -energy labor = 258 + 248

"Ralph Nader" -car -auto -nuclear -energy -labor trade = 187 + 275

"Ralph Nader" -car -auto -nuclear -energy -labor -trade safety = 175 + 113

"Ralph Nader" -car -auto -nuclear -energy -labor -trade -safety food = 120 + 95

For a total of 1,142 articles before 1981 and 1,042 after, = 2,184. There is a ten-word limit to searches, or I could have gone farther. For example, replacing food with freedom yields about 150 total, most referencing the Freedom of Information Act.

Please concede that the Atlantic quote is shown by scholarship to be unjustified in its blatant claim that Nader made GWB president (and is hence heavily POV), and that its implication that Nader's primary influence on society has been just car safety and the 2000 election is demonstrably false. If you can't concede that, then please present counter-evidence.

Please also concede the utter implausibility that the Atlantic's summary statement emphasizing Nader's role in making GWB president accurately reflects the judgment of the ten historians in ranking Nader the third most influential living American and 96th in all history, given that those same ten historians for the same article ranked GWB below comic books and Lee Harvey Oswald, who made #44 influential LBJ president, similarly low or lower. If you cannot concede that, please present counter-evidence.

Jautumn (talk) 15:42, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Section break 4

To find out if Nader made GWB president, just read the election results. There are two states that if you take out Nader, Gore would have won. Ok I know Gore won anyway, but without recounting Florida Gore would have won. Those two states are New Hampshire and Florida. No one can dispute that fact. Is this information widely known? No. In fact only a few know about the controversy of Nader's influence on the election, because most focus only on, but he won the popular vote (which means nothing in the US), or on, the supreme court gave GWB the presidency. Which is true, but it never would have come down to Florida had it not been for Nader's vote in New Hampshire, something that less than one in a thousand people in the US know. And what's up with repeating "and the fact that Gore actually won" 4,000 times. My recollection is that the current president of the US is not Gore, but GWB. Gore won the popular vote which counts for absolutely nothing in the US, other than matching campaign funds I suppose. Gore would have won in Florida, and be the president today if a full recount was completed, which was stopped by the supreme court, but Gore never requested a full recount anyway, so even if the supreme court hadn't stopped the recount it is highly likely that Gore would have conceded the election. 199.125.109.107 (talk) 02:58, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the Bush - Gore < Nader vote-count argument is shown to be overly simplistic in the five scholarly articles I have posted references to above in this talk page that examine the topic. Please read them, and my postings. Just looking at election results only tells you how people voted, not how they would have voted under different circumstances. Voter behavior is complex, especially when we're talking about the idiosyncratic behavior of 1% or 2% slices.

Moreover, the oft-cited exit poll showing that 47% of Nader voters would have voted for Gore, and 21% Bush if the race were only between Gore and Bush, also shows that 1% of Bush voters would have switched their vote to Gore, and 2% of Gore voters to Bush if the race were only between Gore and Bush, meaning Bush would have won the popular vote decisively had Nader not run because twice as many Gore voters would have switched to Bush than vice versa. National VNS 2000 exit poll results - search on the page for "only two" But these are national figures.

In Florida, the exit poll shows Bush beating Gore 49% to 47% in a two-way race. It also shows 1% of Gore voters switching to Bush and 1% from Bush to Gore, and Gore retaining 97% of his voters while Bush only 96%. FL VNS 2000 exit poll results - search on the page for "only two" These figures only make sense if the 1% of Bush-to-Gore switchers was low and rounded up, and the Bush-to-Gore switching 1% was high and rounded down, and the difference between the Gore-to-Bush switchers and the Bush-to-Gore switchers exceeds the difference between the Nader-to-Gore and Nader-to-Bush switchers (or perhaps there were more Nader-to-Bush switchers than Nader-to-Gore switchers).

In New Hampshire Gore's defection rate to Bush with Nader out of the race is even worse, and he would lose 49% to 48% in a two-way race because 3% would switch from Gore to Bush but only 1% from Bush to Gore.

Note that these small percentages of idiosyncratic vote-switching behavior amount in real numbers to the same order of magnitude as Nader's total vote counts in each state and nationally. NH VNS 2000 exit poll results - search on the page for "only two" Why would so many voters say they would switch their vote btw Bush and Gore with Nader and Buchanan not in? Hard to say, but maybe they are part of the 40% of voters who prefer a party split btw the White House and Congress and they believed Nader would have coattails for Dem candidates down-ballot (as was proven true in Nader voters giving Cantwell her margin of victory in Washington Senate race). Maybe these voters were just really still undecided and changed their minds within minutes of leaving the voting booth.

Evidence in scholarly articles I've posted showing that as many as 30% of voters may have actually preferred Nader over Bush and Gore might help explain in some way why so many voters were undecided between Bush and Gore and reacted by switching from Gore to Bush and vice versa when asked what they would do without Nader in the race in the exit poll - perhaps it was because they really preferred Nader but couldn't decide which of Bush and Gore were truly the "lesser of the two evils". As I've stated in earlier postings in this discussion, I think Nader's potential influence on these Nader-preferring Bush-Gore swing voters is a much stronger argument for the notion that "Nader made GWB President" than the fallacious Bush - Gore < Nader vote-count argument. But admitting this would require admitting that Nader was actually a viable mainstream candidate for President in 2000, who according to one scholarly paper would have beaten Bush or Gore in one-on-one races against either one. Can you stomach this truth (Nader had enough voter support to stand at least a good chance of winning) and leave behind the worthless vote-count difference argument in favor of the more plausible pied-piper argument that Nader made GWB president by convincing many swing voters that there was no significant difference between Bush and Gore? Or do you intend to continue trying to limit this Wikipedia bio to the silence on Nader's influence that both sides of the debate have seemed to settle down on as some kind of polemical stalemate?

Jautumn (talk) 18:04, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Scolars love to make things up and find convoluted ways of proving them. If Nader had run head to head against Gore, I am assuming that you are positing that Nader would be the republican candidate? And head to head against Bush he would have been the democratic candidate? Both of those are like, oh and if he had been a first term president running for re-election he could have beet so and so by 30%. All of thes ar really making up a lot of but what ifs that are very implausible. Keep it Simple. Subtract the votes. Divide them up equally just to make it unbiased. Beyond that is total speculation. And remember, Gore would have conceded if the supreme court had not stopped the recount and only learned years later that he should have asked for a full recount, not just in the heavily democratic districts where he thought (incorrectly) that he could swing the results. 199.125.109.126 (talk) 20:52, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Jautumn, your assessment of one argument as "worthless" and another as "more plausible" is your opinion. I'm not clear what relevance it has to editing the article, though. There is a significant opinion holding that Nader's presence on the ballot attracted enough votes from progressives (who would otherwise have voted for Gore) so that, if Nader had instead chosen not to run, Gore would have become President with the electoral votes of Florida and perhaps New Hampshire. The Wikipedia article should report that opinion (even if you think it's worthless) without adopting it (even if I think it's spot on). Per WP:NPOV, we report facts about opinions. Of course, prominent contrary opinions deserve the same treatment. JamesMLane t c 08:23, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

The vote-count-subtraction version of the counterfactual, "If Nader hadn't run, Gore would have won because Bush's votes minus Gore's votes < Nader's votes in Florida" is perfectly valid as an opinion, but is worthless as a statement of fact because it is provably false. There is nothing barring anyone from believing something false - often such beliefs shape history. But the act of stating in an article as an objective fact something that is provably false is certainly without value to the Wikipedia, would you not agree? Now, I'm not saying it's provably false to say Gore would have won if Nader were not in the race. That's just uncertain, not provable either way.

It is this common sense prudent view of the matter, in fact - that it is really uncertain whether Gore would have won had Nader not run - which is upheld by the divided and complex conclusions in the scholarship, and by the admittedly bizzare but verifiable vote-switching results of the exit polls, that 199.125.109.126 would have us reject as false in favor of simply assuming as fact that subtraction proves what voters would have done.

As I said, I understand that many people believe this falsity, and we should report that they do, but it is false nonetheless and while we need not state it is false in the article, we need to be careful not to imply that we think it might be true. To be clear, again, what is false is the supposition that the subtraction proves that Gore would have won without Nader - it's a fact that the subtraction proves no such thing. What is not false but an open question is whether Gore would have won without Nader in the race, hence also whether Nader "made GWB President" by running. Clear enough?

But all that is a digression in response to nitpicking at bits of my postings, and I thank you for asking what relevance it all has to editing the article. I offered the plausible pied piper line of reasoning to prove that the Atlantic's claim that Nader made GWB president is tenable, and that we cannot assume that the Atlantic's reasoning behind it is the fallacious vote-count argument that is commonly attached to the assertion. The pied piper line has also been fairly commonly used to criticize Nader's run and we should report that as an opinion as well.

We need to let the Alantic have its say, even if it is very slanted against Nader, but we need to take strong measures to prevent any appearance that the Wikipedia is endorsing the Atlantic's point of view.

The fact that the 96th influential ranking was arrived at by scholars seems to lend scholarly objectivity to the Atlantic's slanted summary statement accompanying that ranking, but I have shown above that the statement directly contradicts the scholars' rankings and hence cannot be an accurate summary of their reasoning. So when we attribute both the ranking and the quote to the Atlantic, we need to be careful to be very clear that the ranking is verifiable but the summary statement is POV.

And there are three parts to the summary statement's POV - the first, that Nader made cars safer, is subject to some dispute but not much; the second, that Nader made GWB president, is subject to intense dispute and is verifiably uncertain; the third, the implied claim that nothing else Nader has done played a significant factor in his ranking 96th most influential American in history, is provably false - partly by the fact that the historians' other rankings show they don't deem president-makers generally (e.g. Lee Harvey Oswald, Ross Perot) terribly influential, partly by the fact that 4,500 NY Times articles over a thirty year period say Nader did indeed do many influential things in the thirty years between his initial work on auto safety and the 2000 election.

So I've offered a compromise that I think is win-win. We state the ranking, along with other rankings, and the quote, but with a qualifying statement immediately following it that is heavily sourced to five inconclusive scholarly papers on the "Nader made GWB Prez" question, and a qualifying statement right after that clarifying that the Wikipedia knows Nader has done many influential things besides his work on auto safety and the 2000 election. This is only natural to say, of course, as a lead-in to the rest of the article which will of course discuss far more than Nader's work on auto safety and the 2000 election, and since the article already lists a whole bunch of organizations he founded that have nothing to do with auto safety or the 2000 election. I'm all for giving prominent billing to the Atlantic's POV, as long as we give equally prominent billing to the Wikipedia's NPOV on the same specific topics right beside it and not in footnote. Would you agree this is balanced and reasonable and in the best interest of Wikipedia and its readers?

Jautumn (talk) 10:42, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

You seem to be suggesting that our article should quote the Atlantic statement, and then immediately follow the quotation with a barrage of contradiction and counterargument. I don't agree.

Our article should present the basic facts about Nader's 2000 and 2004 runs. It should then note that seasoned politicians in both major parties believed that Nader's candidacy would help Bush vis-a-vis Gore and vis-a-vis Kerry: Democrats tried to keep Nader off the ballot, while Republicans helped his petition drives and donated money. The article should also report that many Democrats blame Nader for Bush's becoming President, and it should summarize the grounds for that view; the breakdown of the votes in Florida is the most commonly cited argument, but there are others. Finally, the article should report the most notable rejoinders to that opinion. The scholarly articles you cite are probably much less notable than the Naderites' attacks on the electoral system (they say that Gore really did win, despite Nader, but was cheated out of the Presidency) and on Gore (they argue that Gore would've won if only he'd swerved hard left and tried to pick up a few of the Nader voters, or if only he'd done this, that, or the other thing differently). Full exposition of all the opposing arguments belongs in the daughter article, but there should be some information here.

Our article should not assume or assert that the exit polls are dispositive. It's notable that Nader himself, on his website, cites an exit poll that suggests his candidacy did indeed give us Bush. I personally suspect that the exit polls understated the damage Nader did to Gore. The polls were conducted in an atmosphere in which Nader had been excluded from the debates and in which Democrats had tried to keep him off the ballot and had heatedly denounced him. Many of the Nader voters were probably motivated by that general hostility; they reciprocated it by saying that, without Nader on the ballot, they wouldn't have voted or would've voted for some other third-party candidate or would even have voted for Bush. In practice, however, if Nader had never run, that hostility wouldn't have been generated. It's quite plausible to argue that the Nader voters, being mostly leftist, would have split heavily for Gore, much more heavily than the exit polls suggest. I'm not arguing that this opinion about the exit polls be asserted in the article; I'm saying only that the article should not assume that the exit polls of those who voted for Nader were completely accurate as to what would've happened without Nader on the ballot.

As for the Atlantic quotation, it clearly doesn't belong in the introductory section. I don't feel strongly about putting it in the text. We need to present a fair survey of the differing opinions about Nader. We can't come close to including every notable comment that's been made about him. The Atlantic assessment merits consideration for inclusion, but so do many others, and we have to pick and choose while doing so fairly. Depending on what the overall mix looks like, I could go either way on including this particular comment. JamesMLane t c 08:37, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Actually, it was the people who voted for GWB, that got GWB elected president. The blame Nader thing was mainley created by the Democrats. GoodDay (talk) 15:48, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

I have a response, but unless anyone objects I'll save it to post after the holidays. Good cheer, everyone, see you next year!

Jautumn (talk) 18:04, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

GoodDay, welcome to this discussion. Please read what has come before. I at first thought as you did but after researching and analyzing to try to see from opposite POV, I found that the "Nader made GWB Prez" claim is plausible. Technically, it's the electoral college, not voters directly, who make people US Prez. But such a literal reading of the Atlantic quote is unfair - clearly it means to say that among various causes, Nader bears primary responsibility overall for making GWB prez. And that claim is plausible, to some extent due to theories like JMLane's that Nader voters were more Gore-leaning than exit polls suggest, but much more strongly due to evidence that Nader may have had strong influence on as many as 30 million swing voters (which does suggest Nader was the primary influence that prevented a clear Gore victory among the core contested one-third of the electorate, not just one among many influences affecting a couple million voters on the fringe).

Thank you, JMLane, for your helpful response. First a note dovetailing on my response to GoodDay - I agree with you exit polls are only one way to analyze elections, and every method has its limitations, which are also measured and debated in the scholarship. That's precisely why no speculation on election what-ifs can be anything but POV. To clarify, I never intended any of my exit poll observations to be included in the article - that would clearly violate NOR. My purpose was merely to point out that what-ifs are subject to many unpredictable variations - the exit polls state by state and nationally show this odd 1-3% phenomenon of voters saying they would switch their vote from Bush to Gore or vice versa in a two-way race, and the order of magnitude of this strange vacillation is the same as the entire Nader vote. Perhaps an adaptation of your Nader-exclusion-resentment theory could explain this - voters preferring Nader but voting for Gore say they would have voted Bush instead in protest if Nader were not in the race - and a third to a half as many preferring Nader but voting Bush say they would have voted Gore in a two-way race, perhaps protesting because Buchanan were not in the race? The proportions seem right - same study showing Nader was preferred by 30% of voters also showed 12% preferred Buchanan. So maybe this vacillation would also disappear if, as you suggest, Nader had never entered the race in the first place.

But my main point is that you can't expect every 1% slice of the electorate to conform to common sense what-if speculation, or even statistical models, because 1% is always lower than the margin of error of survey data those models rely on (I guess a large enough sample for another order of magnitude of accuracy would be cost-prohibitive). And were Nader never in the race at all, the dynamics of the race would have been significantly different, especially over the last two or three months of the campaign, so who knows what would have happened. Nader recently claimed on Hardball that studies show he got Gore to win more centrist swing votes by pushing him to use stronger populist-progressive rhetoric. I don't know what studies he's referring to, so I don't know the reasoning. But it's plausible too. There are almost limitless plausible theories to explain 1-2% shifts in behavior, all nearly impossible to prove or disprove with great certainty.

My proposed text only looks like a barrage with in-line cites (ref tags don't work in the talk page), much better as numbered refs. Still, I see your point that it's argumentative, and I'm fine with it not in the lead (as is Griot, now) but originally Griot and two other editors from the March discussion felt strongly about it being in the lead so I was trying to make it work there. What do you think of a Recognition section? Griot and various-IP are okay with that but Griot wants to keep mention of scholarly work in footnote. Griot, I encourage you to clarify your current position in this thread if I am mischaracterizing. In a Recognition section, how about:

"In 1999 an NYU panel of eminent journalists ranked Nader's book Unsafe At Any Speed no. 38 among the top 100 pieces of journalism of the 20th century. In 1990 Life Magazine , and again in 1999 Time Magazine , named Nader one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th Century. In its Dec 2006 article on the "100 most influential Americans" in history, in which its ten invited historians voted Nader 96th, The Atlantic Monthly stated: "He made the cars we drive safer; thirty years later, he made George W. Bush the president." (For other views on Nader's 2000 presidential run, see the relevant section below and [link to daughter article on Nader's 2000 run].)

I've adjusted the wording from my earlier proposal so that it's clear that the historians voted on the rankings and the Atlantic published the rankings and made the statement. With that, I am satisfied that my qualifying statement contradicting the implied thirty-years-non-influence claim becomes unnecessary. I don't want to argue with the Atlantic's POV in the article. I just think it's very important not to imply that the ten historians decided Nader didn't do anything significant for thirty years, because there's no evidence in the Atlantic article that the historians did decide that and some evidence that they didn't. The only thing we know for certain about the quote's origin is that the Atlantic published it.

And then, in the 2000 election section after balanced selection of notable POV's are presented, I propose we add the following:

Scholarship on the 2000 election is inconclusive about Nader's impact on the outcome., ,, .

I've shortened the sentence to make it as NPOV as possible.

To address the general concern that too much weight not be given to the 2000 election (prominence is fine, such as mention in the lead section because it's of more current interest than older stuff, but not undue proportion in the article as a whole vis-a-vis Nader's overall lifetime impact on society), I have proposed that we follow (roughly, of course) the proportion of articles mentioning Ralph Nader that are about any given subject in the combined archives of three major newspapers: NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post. This proportion comes to 9% for the 2000 election, 4% for the 2004 election. Given that we already have a daughter article for 2004 election, and will have one for 2000, I hope this seems fair. My own view is that the 2000 election is 3-5% of Nader's notability, and Griot thinks 50%. The newspaper archive analysis I conducted suggests 9%, and I wouldn't feel it was overwhelming the rest of his career if it were as high as 15% for 2000 and 10% for 2004. Still, I would hope we'd keep both shorter than that and leave most details to the daughter articles. I do intend to mine through the NY Times archives and supply good sources and succinct summaries of Nader's other areas of influence, so I don't mean 15% of the current length of the article, because it will be longer once I replace the ugly list of organizations with real text. What do you think of that proposal?

And yes, I can be succinct when summarizing as opposed to analyzing and discussing things - please see the paragraph I added to Activism on Nader's work against nuclear power for an example.

Jautumn (talk) 13:06, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

I see that protection has been lifted, and 199.125.109.107 has made a good start in trying to incorporate edits flowing from this discussion. I've revised what she/he added to the 2000 election section as follows: I attributed the implied "votediff" POV since it's presented as John Peirce's POV in the cited source. I fixed the "seven other candidates" argumentative sentence, which only cited FEC election results and asserted the apologist argument as if fact - thus violating NOR and NPOV. I attributed the POV with a Michael Moore cite. I added reference to an article by Manning Marable, who is notable within left and scholarly circles, making the case that Gore cost himself the election. I added a cite and quote from Eric Alterman dismissing apologist arguments with the view, supported by scholarly evidence I've cited on these talk pages, that Nader had uniquely strong influence on the electorate in 2000. And I clarified the final statement citing the scholarship to make clear it is referencing scientific discussion, and that those sources of verifiable fact show no consensus on whether Nader actually tipped the outcome of the election to Bush.

Jautumn (talk) 17:29, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I'm going to "be bold" and try the Recognition section that Griot and various-IP had earlier agreed to consider. I agree with Griot's statement last March that relegating the Atlantic ranking and quote to the 2000 election sticks out like a sore thumb, because it's about Nader's career as a whole - the ranking obviously, but also the quote's implied claim that Nader did nothing of significance for thirty years. I also agree with Griot that separating the Atlantic's ranking from its accompanying statement in the article is obtuse, and, I think, a violation of NOR. The Atlantic took pains to marry the two tightly, and it owns both. Based on close reading of the Atlantic article itself, I've carefully attributed the ranking to the historians and the quote to the Atlantic, but they are still one combined statement by the Atlantic and, published as such, they should be referenced as such, or it alters their meaning as published. In various-IP's original proposal for a Recognition section she/he also stated it should be for both positive and negative recognition, and the Atlantic ranking plus quote combo is both, so it belongs in the Recognition section.

I think this really strikes a balance between editors who feel strongly that at least half Nader's lifetime influence was his 2000 election impact and that the bio should feature the controversy over his role in that election very prominently, and those who believe his impact was minimal and want to keep coverage of it minimal. That's obviously a very difficult chasm of editorial judgment to balance across when it comes to judging undue weight in the bio, and I still can't think of a better basis for weighting than the percentage of the 16,000 articles in the NY Times, Washington Post and LA Times archives that mention Nader. But admittedly giving a median-type weight, however justified, to a given topic tends to marginalize the high-weight view more than the low-weight.

So I think this works because it gives the high-impact/high-weight view an additional nod by referencing a highly influential magazine's expression of that view. Giving slightly greater prominence to the "Nader made GWB Prez" view in the article, as long as we strongly clarify we aren't taking sides, also balances the fact that by citing scholarly sources that ultimately support by their inconclusiveness the plausible deniability of Nader's responsibility for tipping the election to Bush, we unavoidably take more wind out of the sails of the "Nader made GWB Prez" view than we take out of its negation. Juxtaposing this with two other highly influential magazines' pre-2000 rankings of Nader that contradict the Atlantic quote's implied claim that Nader did nothing of great influence for thirty years also gives a flavor of how perplexing and controversial a public figure Nader has been, and that the Wikipedia isn't taking sides. I'm not opposed to including quotes from the Time and Life rankings, but I can't find them.

I think the overall effect is to give a good reflection of the on-going debate about Nader's influence, motives and impact, while not detaching his more recent controversies from the context of his past controversies. I also think the Time ranking in the lead gives undue weight to his pre-2000 recognition, and why put Time in the lead but the Atlantic buried in the body and Life and NYU nowhere at all? The Recognition section serves a very useful balancing role and I thank various-IP for suggesting it.

I've also changed "Many blame Nader for throwing the 2000 election to the Republicans and George Bush." to just "Many blame Nader for throwing the 2000 election to George Bush." because there's no cite given, nor one I can find, for the POV that Nader tipped any race other than President to a Republican, in fact Dick Gephardt reportedly gave Nader credit for just the opposite in the case of Maria Cantwell in Washington and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin.Will Nader Matter at All? And I've moved the revised sentence down to become the topic sentence of the next paragraph.

Jautumn (talk) 05:57, 13 January 2008 (UTC)