Reply #176: Replies:

[smartvoter]

As to oil dependence, my view is it's more tragedy of the commons w/ respect to recent vehicle-purchasing trends than knowledge of dependence. Money takes a while to catch up with one's mouth (or knowledge, as the case may be).

More importantly, your post gets to the heart of a major challenge we face right now -- overcoming disinformation. The right wing, through years of demonizing the term "liberal," has been able to sway a certain portion of the public to equate the opposite of liberal as being reasoned, or balanced. Many politicians on our side of the spectrum attempt to duck the term, effectively empowering those who call themselves conservative. The irony is that virtually all the rights and safeguards we rely on in this society were "liberal" causes -- voting rights, labor laws, safety, etc. My personal view is the only way we are going to overcome the right wing is to punch back, and to do so hard -- a position that tends to draw both praise and dissent when voiced out here (perhaps demonstrating the complexity of the challenges we face).

But I genuinely worry that unless we get election safeguards in place, it doesn't matter who we run. Setting aside bizarre election outcomes and explanations, the other side is opposed to safeguards for a reason. I think it's because members fall into one of two categories -- they either know there is hanky-panky taking place or, keeping in mind that you don't need a grand conspiracy to sway votes in computerized recording and tabulating mechanisms, see the same evidence we do and suspect they could be benefiting in some way and don't want to mess with a "winning" system.

Again, I realize many disagree, but I don't think there is any realistic way of measuring the true viability of candidates until the well-documented vulnerabilities of our election system have been addressed. Who knows what it will take to get real momentum behind these safeguards -- perhaps another election outcome that is the statistical equivalent of winning the lottery -- but it seems that until we can trust that our votes are being counted correctly, arguments about whether or not we are floating the best candidates are moot.