I don’t think it’s intentional, but your response is kind of troll-like, so I’m done…
Yeah, I didn’t see where what I said had anything to do with what you were asking me to answer for, so, maybe I’ll say that in a way you appreciate differently in another thread on another day. Be well. -offers handshake-
Yes, that’d be great, but as you also said, the Tea Party got off the ground because it was so well funded. And because it got a lot of attention from the corporate press, even when only tiny crowds showed up. Both methods are surely much tougher to achieve for any similar insurgency from the left.
It’s like that time Nader got excluded from a presidential debate (he couldn’t even sit in the audience); how can the further-left-than-Dem left get any traction when it has so little money and isn’t allowed on the big stage? I think all of that is much more significant than the (supposed?) lack of consistency of worldview among the left.
That’s a really good point, although as @Cowicide pointed out, Obama was elected partially through a grassroots effort to fund his campaign. I don’t know the proportions off-hand but IIRC, small individual donations made up a sizable chunk of his campaign funds. Plus I’m talking about electing people to local offices and state legislatures more than national offices so the amounts of money required are comparatively smaller.
I don’t think there’s much to suppose about the lack of consistency of worldview between the far left and the center left. The center left is, at this point in history, the closest thing in the US to a truly conservative faction (in the original sense of the word) whereas the far left is, as it always has been, rather more utopian and revolutionary. That’s a big gulf in my opinion and I don’t think there’s much hope of getting left-leaning candidates elected anywhere for anything without support from the center left.
That said, I think there’s also a good case to be made that there’s simply too much money on the other side of the scales for even moderately leftist candidates to get any sort of foothold in the US political system. Part of the problem I’m having is money will tend to go to viable candidates and its hard to think of what a candidate that could appeal to both center left and far left would look like. Obama probably did the best job of this in my lifetime – I tend to think he was more popular with the far left than Clinton was, for example – but as was already discussed that didn’t seem to work out too well for either contingent.
You seem to be discounting the system’s apparently infinite ability to corrupt
Not at all, it’s the human condition and will always be the bane of any and every human institution. If you show me a plan impervious to all forms of human nature, I’ll show you a pipe dream.
Lawrence Lessig has accomplished so much more in his career than Obama did pre-2008, the comparison is not even close. His emphasis on getting rid of corruption in our system is something which I think can cross progressive - libertarian - conservative lines and lead to a real achievement
I agree with you.
I see you said something along those lines in a following comment. I hope you understand that this overall effort is much more critical than “finding and vetting a presidential candidate”.
I think it’s symbiotic. Multiple flanks. But if we want significant change, we’re going to need some of our own on the inside instead of continuing to beg corporatists to work against thier own nature for us. It’s time to get bold and quit asking the wrong people to represent us.
I suspect @Cowicide and I agree on the desirability of the sorts of changes sought by the Tea Party but I tend to think they were actually successful in disrupting the status quo (just in an undesireable way).
I do agree. I also think destructive (undesirable) effects are easy while truly positive change takes vastly more intelligence, strategy, effort and fortitude. It’s relatively easy to flood institutions with boneheads that lack the smarts to be a real threat to the established power structure.
That’s why in some corporations you’ll see a lot of dullards who easily get promoted to middle management. They’re usually smart enough to follow and pass on orders, but not intelligent enough to upset the status quo apple cart above them, and that’s just the way a corrupt, sloth upper management likes it.
Lackeys and dullards will always be greeted with open arms by a corrupt establishment. Just watch 1960’s Batman villains with thier stooges. 
But that’s also why we can beat them.
I think this is also problematic because I think part of the Tea Party’s success
I don’t think the Tea Party has had any success. All they’ve managed to do is thrust people into office that tend to work against common folk and end up only benefiting the elite (indirectly or otherwise). Harming government to help it work against average Americans isn’t success, it’s a catastrophic blunder.
We should learn from the Tea Party mistakes, not emulate them.
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Do you think that we have gotten into the same disconnect with voting? That voting socially now in the Peoples’ mindset is more important than voting individually?
I think a herd mentality is a part of human nature and most of us are afflicted (myself included). But, there’s also the beautiful, non-conformist part of some of us that enables new, good ideas to get slowly injected into the herd and help society in breaking its own destructive ruts.
The ironic thing I’ve noticed is that the elite have made a very prolific effort into getting a large amount of the American public to fear and disparage solidarity. There’s become a solidarity against solidarity based upon conditioned, mutual distrust. We are increasingly conditioned to blame each other for our collective woes instead of looking upwards at the elite who are pulling the strings.
It’s time to make voting dangerous again. If voting wasn’t feared by the corrupt status quo, we would never see all the concerted efforts in voter disenfranchisement that’s happening today. Probably the only plus side to voter disenfranchisement is that it plays thier cards and shows us how much they still fear a voting public… if we’d only look.
Obama’s mistake against his corporatist handlers is that he showed us (if we look) that we’ve got voting wired for a progressive agenda. What we need to do now is subvert the candidate selection process. I fully expect the elite to ramp up thier efforts to disenfranchise that process as we make the push to bring an outsider who is a true threat to the status quo, but that’s a given and will just further play thier hands and expose where thier weaknesses are.
I’m actually thankful in a sense that there is such a concerted effort at voter disenfranchisement. If they didn’t fear our voting at all, that would be a terrible sign that they’d already subverted the process so badly that the representative democracy within our republic was completely dead.
But, it isn’t. Not yet.
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Absolutely agree, though I wonder if it’s “increasingly” the case. Seems to me that successful elite wielding of “divide and conquer” strategies has ALWAYS been the case in the U.S. Its mutations (racism, sexism, classism, etc.) just take on different forms as time goes by.
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Wow. Just… wow.
Thanks for proving that even when the truth is laid out bare as far as what a lying, reneging scumbag he is, there are always plenty of fawning apologists on hand to fall for the same lies.
Any other presidential turds you’d like to polish for him?
“Thanks to his unconstitutional spying and obstruction of justice, we know know how much action is needed to safeguard our civil liberties!”
The only thing his administration has shown the rest of us is that theres no shortage of suckers when it comes to politics.
Your other factual statements are quite moving enough. That was laying it on a bit too thick. for me.
When history remembers him, I hope it remembers not only his lies, murders, and failures, but also how he made US citizens of all ages hope and believe in change again, to believe that they can make a difference, only to drive them into even deeper despair when they realized they had been fooled once again.
They did make a difference. A heck of a lot of liberals got elected alongside him. Twice. Obama didn’t drive anyone anywhere. If I seem not very disappointed, maybe I voted for him and I am a realist about what one pretty decent guy could get done. Strong start, fairly crappy middle part, hope for a strong ending.
But you seem to really hate him as a man, is that fair to say? That’s unfortunate if so. He is only part of the problem. The energy you waste by attacking his character is also part of the problem, as I see it.
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Wow. Just… wow… … fawning apologists
As we speak I’m raising money for Obama’s re-election in 2016.
You should go back and read my post. Crediting Obama for inadvertently showing us how to subvert his corporatist handlers does not equal fawning nor being an apologist for any of his despicable actions after he took office.
You should have got a clue from the “disgusted”, " disheartening", “massively funded by our enemies”, “flaked out” parts up there or the fact that I’ve referred to Obama as evil in boing boing threads even before he got elected.
If referring to someone as a disgusting, evil flake is fawning over someone, then I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree on what that word means. The point of my post had very little to do with Obama and everything to do finding a strategy to find candidates that are not going to act like Obama once they get into office.
Sorry for the confusion, but next time you really should read someone’s words a little more carefully before flying off the handle and barking up the wrong tree.
But Cow, unless you want to see Obama melted down in Mount Doom, you’re an appeaser.
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