We are too focused on national and presidential politics, where our influence is the lowest! To save the US's democracy, we need to put more of our time and energy into more local politics and to trust that the good we do will trickle up to affect national politics for the better. But it seems that the top political blogs are always chasing after the big national political issues and we follow suit.
If we had Strategic Election Reform then we'd have competitive state representative elections. This would attract more attention to our local issues and direct more of our activism to more productive areas than ranting about our president's "centrism". Instead of trying to fight pragmatism with fiery progressive rhetoric, perhaps we should demand that our President Barack Obama atone for his recent short-comings by using the bully-pulpit to push for 3-seated state assembly elections. After all, he wanted to bring them back in 2001(see link below).
It's a worthy cause, it's just not one of the pressing national issues of our time that tend to suck up most of the activist energy here at Daily Kos.
Obama wanted 3-seated elections in 2001.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
A 3-seated election is one where three seats, not one, are contested in a single election. In Strategic Election Reform, the election is the same as what we usually do: one candidate per party and one vote per voter. What's different is that there are two or three winners. If the top candidate beats the third place candidate by more than one-third of the total vote then (s)he wins two seats for her/his party and gets to pick a team-mate to hold the second seat. The third seat goes to the second place candidate. If the third place candidate does well relatively-speaking then all three of the top candidates win one seat each. This matches the percent of votes received by a party with the percent of seats won as closely as possible over all of the parties given that there are only three seats contested.
dlw