Because it’s never a bad time to point out what a horrible idea Americans Elect is, here’s Gail Collins on “the worst new trend of the political season“:
…Perhaps you have not yet focused on Americans Elect. It’s a new-generation political movement that aims to rise above the petty forces of partisan bickering and choose a presidential candidate, along with a running mate from a different party, at an online convention in June. As a reward, the winning team will receive a presidential ballot line in every state, along with some very cool online technology with which to run their campaign. It’s similar to “Project Runway” except for the most-powerful-job-on-the-globe part…
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[T]he whole Americans Elect concept is delusional, in a deeply flattering way: We the people are good and pure, and if only we were allowed to just pick the best person, everything else would fall into place. And, of course, the best person cannot be the choice of one of the parties, since the parties are … the problem.
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Getting a presidential ballot line in 50 states is really, really difficult. To do so, Americans Elect has already collected nearly 2.5 million signatures around the country, using the deeply American tactic of paying people to do it.
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The source of the money is a little murky. Some names have been made public. Some haven’t. Byrd says that’s not a problem because “the candidates don’t know who the donors are and the donors don’t know who the candidate is going to be.”
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If the Americans Elect candidate does make a big splash in November, we will have discovered yet another part of the presidential elections process that loopy billionaires could purchase out of their petty cash. Tired of financing right-wing contenders for the Republican nomination? Buy your own ballot line…
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The thing that makes our current politics particularly awful isn’t procedural. It’s that the Republican Party has become over-the-top extreme. You can try to fix that by working from within to groom a more sensible pack of future candidates, or from without by voting against the Republicans’ nominees until they agree to shape up.
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Otherwise, no Web site in the world will cure what ails us.
Apart from the political shenanigans of people with more money than sense, what’s on this evening’s agenda?
Handy
Profound!
Baud
Yeah, right.
Anthony
You know bipartisanship is great and everything but we have a 12th amendment for a reason, a split ticket is a pretty shitty idea.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anthony: Aaron Burr?
David Koch
Why don’t all the fringe naderites who want a 3rd party just take over American’s Elect?
belle
back when I had more money than sense, I donated to the Pine Ridge Community College, in South Dakota. you still can.
it paid for nurses in training, computer classes, and new buildings.
on the whole, a much better investment, in my humble opinion.
Observerinvancouver
If the American Elect idea has legs, maybe you all will have to figure out a way to require that a winning candidate has to have a majority of the votes, not just plurality. Even if that means having run off elections.
dmsilev
I love the Onion: Romney To Travel Back In Time To Kill Liberal Versions Of Himself
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
I agree completely. I mean, I believe in fighting the right tooth and nail, but they don’t scare me anything like the way Americans Elect does.
I can deal with going back 50 years as a country, I don’t want to do it, but I can take it. Letting Tom Friedman select our next president…I really will leave the country if that happens, and I don’t say that lightly.
Merp
efgoldman:
Yeah. I don’t think they could make a profit on it, but they were guaranteed at least to get the money they paid back.
The piece is better than nothing, but the “omg billionaires getting on the ballot” concern trolling is about twenty years and one midget Texan too late.
And it perfectly tees up an argument about getting money out of politics, which for some reason Collins pusses out before she gets to the money shot and ends with some generic Republican bashing. Which is great, don’t get me wrong, it should be much more prevalent. But in this specific context more germane worthwhile points could have been made.
Plus she takes a swipe at Iowa caucuses. They are awesome.
dmsilev
@efgoldman: Yeah, there was. The pitch, so to speak, was that “no one donor would give more than $10K”, and therefore all of those early million-dollar donations from Wall Street types would be regarded as loans, to be paid back from smaller donations.
“Donate to us so we can give money back to rich guys”. They really *are* Republicans.
PurpleGirl
Not going to think of politics for a few hours — going to sit down with some yarn and a hook and make a gauge swatch for my next crochet project.
Baud
Americans Elect is to political parties what the Church of Atheism would be to religion.
Merp
David Koch: they have rules about who can select people to be considered to get on the ballot/vote for the people to be on the ballot.
They took steps to mitigate different groups just saturating the voting to make their guy win.
Schlemizel
bet on it – these douchebags will nominate either a libertarian or someone from the D side for the top spot. The goal is not to carry even a single state, the goal is to suck enough votes from Obama to give Willard a 41/39/18 win. They need someone with a Nader like ego and a nice face.
Citizen Alan
@David Koch:
Are there any actual Naderites left in the world outside of the revenge fantasies of frustrated Gore supporters?
Bruce S
“No website in the world will cure what ails us.”
Bad news for Balloon Juice!
Amir Khalid
I’m still not convinced this Americans Elect isn’t just a bunch of self-overrated pundits and rich political naifs. Does the general pubic in America even know about them? My impression is that they’ve been pretty much off the radar for political non-junkies.
It’s great that they’ve bought themselves a ballot line in every state, but they’re going to look silly if they can’t put a plausible name on that line. Have they even begun the process to choose America’s Next Top Presidential Candidate yet?
Jeffro
i do love the thought processes that must have gone into designing Americans Elect…
…”Let’s see, how do we install a moderate Republican as President when few exist and none can get through the primary/nominating process, and when we can’t bring ourselves to vote for a Democrat (also known as…a moderate Republican)?”
“Oh, and also how do we get our seed money back?”
SiubhanDuinne
I can’t help myself, I really really like Gail Collins. Yeah, I know she did that Doctor-Faustus-with-the-Devil thing of agreeing to “dialogue” or “debate” or whateverthefuck with Bobo now and then, but I’m not contractually obliged to read those “conversations.”
But AFAIAC, any columnist who can work in a dog-on-roof reference every time she mentions Rmoney (and she’s mentioned him a few dozen times now) is okay by me.
David Koch
@Citizen Alan: well, Nader and the greens got 901,148 votes, 4 years ago. That’s more than enough to take over american elect. But while the 3rd party types love to talk, they’re to0 lazy and stoned out to actually do the hard work of organizing and canvassing.
RossInDetroit
@SiubhanDuinne:
I like Gail a lot. Her writing is 10X sexier than MoDo’s head shot. She writes clearly and plainly, getting to the root of an issue with minimum folderol. Contrast that with most of the rest of the NYT OpEd page.
Jason
Americans elect is Thomas Friedman’s third party radically centrist wet-dream vanity project. It’s enormously positive in that it promises to waste the time and money of a whole class of milksop centrist DINOs and “Moderate Republicans” — you know the type, socially liberal, but financially conservative insofar as they just wish the parties would go back to the time all that small government rhetoric was just symbolic for the rubes while both parties colluded the serious business of blasting out massive deficits and protecting the elite class with vital subsidies on paperclips. The Reagan era, in other words. They’ve been spooked by Boehner’s chicken game on the deficit ceiling and now they suspect the Republicans are at the point they really will drive the country off the cliff to satiate the Teahadists. At the same time, they don’t want to associate with the dirty fucking hippies in the Democrat grassroots. The solution is a “third party” with mass appeal among trust fund babies and New York Times columnists that at its current rate of growth will attract 0.01 percent of the vote by 2313. Just hoping that they can get Joe Lieberman to sign up.
jl
An important point in American Elect’s favor, is that there is a good chance that no one will notice it, especially if the economy keeps improving.
Just want to be fair and balanced.
Keith G
@SiubhanDuinne: Don’t apologize. All humans (and especially those involved with politics) have a mixture of strengths and weaknesses. Some folks around here tend to forget this. Collins can do some very good work. As can E J Dionne.
Edited
RossInDetroit
A. E. strikes me as a vanity venue for people who think they’re too pure to dirty their hands with traditional politics. It’s not the Democrats and the Republicans that are causing all the squabbling, dealing, compromise, temporary alliances, betrayals and disappointments in American politics. That’s just how it’s been since the beginning of time, everywhere. That’s real politics. Polling people online is great for picking American Idol contestants. But a pop singer doesn’t need a platform, fundraising base and campaign machinery. A bunch of people on their couches watching speeches on their iPad and clicking to vote isn’t going to provide that. Political parties, hot mess and all, do.
Tonal Crow
Americans Elect will conduct the first election in which computer viruses are qualified to vote. They’re selecting their nominees via an internet convention. Sweet…if you’re a hacker or an agent of a foreign 3-letter agency.
kay
The word “on the street” ( from the bloggers who joined AE only to be inside it, are delegates, etc) is that AE have given up on a ticket/ candidate and instead are trying to force both parties to adopt centrist” ideas in their platforms/ candidates.
So a much less ambitious goal, and a niche that is already filled by 90% of paid pundits, not to mention that Democrats already have “centrist” candidates, so it’s bullshit, to boot.
The absolute best description I have ever heard of AE is, “a cart parked in front of a horse, forever”
dmsilev
@kay: That’s sort of silly. Absent a candidate who offers the possibility of drawing away substantial numbers of votes from one side or the other, what sort of leverage does Americans Elect have over anyone? Beyond, as you point out, offering a prefab set of Indian cab drivers for Tom Freidman to quote.
RossInDetroit
I have a bone to pick with the NYT editors over this one. There has to be a better conjunction than ‘at’ to describe something that’s going to happen in the most geographically dispersed way possible.
kay
@dmsilev:
I think the idea is they have ballot access in 50 states, so that’s the leverage.
They could, concievably run someone, is all I can figure.
They thought they would build it and someone (the candidate) would appear, but that didn’t happen, so now they just send Christine Todd Whitman out to whine about Bowles-Simpson.
Election law blogs follow AE and then several people joined it only to get inside the process and see what’s up.
It’s been fun to read, because the bloggers are brutal.
They issue all these “rulings” on the site, and the delegates can never figure out how to object.
Ballot access was considered valuable, but apparently it’s not that valuable w/ out a candidate, platform, or constituency.
Hence, cart before horse.
West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.)
A bit off-topic (but this is an open thread)… I see that the MSN.com home page has a survey to see how many people will watch Katie Couric and how many will watch Sarah Palin on tomorrow’s morning news shows. The number of people who say they will watch Palin? Wait for it… 27%. That number again!
SatanicPanic
Gail Collins is pretty good sometimes. Oh, and fuck Americans Elect. Rich people are generally incompetent, ignorant assholes at anything they didn’t make their money in, and sometimes they’re incompetent, ignorant assholes at that too.
Tonal Crow
The last I heard, Buddy Roemer was running for the AE nomination. On a recent NPR broadcast, an interviewer asked him briefly to describe the declared candidates for President. He described Mitt Romney as “honest” and Obama as “ineffective”, then said that Ron Paul’s only good idea was to abolish the Federal Reserve. I kid you not.
priscianusjr
@RossInDetroit:
El Cid
We are not real. The world is not real.
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Drug dealers and users are stealing Tide brand laundry detergent in order to sell it so it can be used as… laundry detergent.
Soon police will be on the lookout for poor people who seem just a little bit too clean, their clothes inappropriately laundered, their colors too bright while the whites are too white.
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[Note: Presumably the black market only operates in cold water, and it’s best to engage in black market Tide transactions only with other dark colors.]
mainmati
@SiubhanDuinne: Gail Collins has long since scooped Maureen Dowd as the best snark + intelligent analysis on the NYT editorial page. She’s great. As for Americans Elect, it is simply a Naderite-like vehicle for defaulting the election to the GOP.
Third parties are never going to work in the USA because of the structure of the voting system (winner take all + the ridiculous Electoral College).
The US Constitution is an 18th Century experimental design. The vast majority of post-colonial developing country states and post-Soviet states rejected the US Constitution as a model because of its slavery, male, property only and divided government paralysis aspects. Most picked and chose the good parts. The Second Amendment, amongst others, typically didn’t make it.
The US needs a Constitutional Convention. Is that ever going to happen? Not in my lifetime.
opie jeanne
@dmsilev: Another “tell” is that they had to hire people to get the petitions signed. We noticed when we lived in Orange County, CA, that they always did that, and that the Democrats had volunteers for their petitions.
mainmati
@SiubhanDuinne: Gail Collins has long since scooped Maureen Dowd as the best snark + intelligent analysis on the NYT editorial page. She’s great. As for Americans Elect, it is simply a Naderite-like vehicle for defaulting the election to the GOP.
Third parties are never going to work in the USA because of the structure of the voting system (winner take all + the ridiculous Electoral College).
The US Constitution is an 18th Century experimental design. The vast majority of post-colonial developing country states and post-Soviet states rejected the US Constitution as a model because of its slavery, male, property only and divided government paralysis aspects. Most picked and chose the good parts. The Second Amendment, amongst others, typically didn’t make it.
The US needs a Constitutional Convention. Is that ever going to happen? Not in my lifetime.
priscianusjr
@RossInDetroit:
Tonal Crow
@mainmati:
A Constitutional Convention would be perilous in anything like the present political climate. ETA: OT: from all the dupe posts, I see that I’m not the only one experiencing excessively slow page loads here. John?
C Nelson Reilly
@El Cid:
I don’t care who you are now that was funny
Snarki, child of Loki
I look forward to voting for ‘Hank, the Angry Drunken Dwarf’, after he wins the Americans Elect nominating poll.
butler
@Observerinvancouver:
Shoot, we don’t even have that now. You can lose the popular vote and win, so long as you take a majority of the Electoral College. And when it comes to the EC, a plurality doesn’t cut it. The Constitution already requires a runoff in the event of a plurality, except that the voters don’t get to participate because its a crazy en-banc election where each state’s representatives in the House Voltron together to get a single vote. Meaning my state and her 55 representatives have the exact same power as Alaska’s 1 rep.
Thankfully this could only come about if American’s Elect actually won at least 1 state, which I find dubious. Though they could play spoiler for one party or the other.
priscianusjr
@mainmati:
dww44
@RossInDetroit: Absolutely the truth. I am on a one woman campaign to get her added to my woefully short on liberals and women local editorial pages. There’s currently a ratio 6 conservatives to one liberal, he being Eugene Robinson. They insist that the nothingness that is Lenore Skenazy counts as a liberal.
Yutsano
@Snarki, child of Loki:
Ron Paul is going to be the AE candidate??
JoyfulA
Whenever the next newbie asks what a totebagger is, you can refer them to the comments on Collins’s very nice column. She deserves better.
kay
@dmsilev:
This is one good read on AE. There are others if you want to delve deeply into the weeds. Election law people love this shit, because it touches on all the mechanical and practical election issues: how to get ballot access, how to vote, campaign finance, etc. IMO, AE is really popular with tv pundits and Thomas Friedman and election law bloggers, so they have a limited base. 150 people or so.
The concept doesn’t make sense to me, within our system of government. The Vice President doesn’t have anywhere near the power the President has in the US, so the “balanced ticket” idea is a sham. If Ron Paul is the President and some centrist Democrat is the VP, is that supposed to be even-steven? What are we, idiots? “Okay, so long as it’s balanced!”
There’s no congressional arm, so all this does is cement the idea of the CEO President, “managing” his or her employees in Congress, and I think that’s a really tragic way to look at our system. If you believe the President is the CEO, you are going to be disappointed in US politics. Inevitably and immediately.
It’s a huge pain in the ass, three branches, and Congress is broken, I admit that, but is the solution to hire a CEO? I think they have to reorganize us as a corporation first, then hire the CEO.
The Other Bob
There is no problem with America that throwing the southern states out of the union won’t fix. We don’t need Americans Elect.
Thatgaljill
@Baud:
I’m actually doing some graphic design work for Michelene Risley who is one of the Americans Elect candidates and we had this conversation the other day. They truly have no way of connecting with the people who have pledged their support for them via the AE website. No way to ask those supporters for donations, send issue papers, etc.
What they do need is 5,000 clicks in at least 10 states to get to the next stage. It’s a cumbersome process to get registered to do it, but there are some grassroots activists like Michelene out there trying to get some messages heard. I don’t think any of them really believes they’ll be taking the oath on 1/20/13, but they are out there making a bit of noise.
Gary
@RossInDetroit: That should be “through” an online convention.
Dave McMahan
Yes, Buddy Roemer is the leading declared candidate at Americans Elect (which allows you to sign up for free and nominate/support a candidate to be on the ballot in all 50 states). I recommend you support Buddy. He grew up on a cotton farm, then went to Harvard at the age of 16. He was a conservative Democrat who voted on Reagan’s side alot, so he was a natural to switch to Republican (now, he’s Independent). He served as Louisiana’s Governor, but has been in the private sector the last 20 years, starting and running three successful businesses (including a $750 million bank which took no bailouts and foreclosed on no one ). He’s a 68-year old grandfather who had no desire for politics, again- but says the country is on the wrong track.
Our DC politicians are funded and steered by wealthy campaign donors profiting off our “Ponzi-scheme-like”, “financialized” / “Wall St. Investment Banker-led”, “Fed-Treasury-abetted” system and off of the “Global Economy” (short-term profits feeding off the American people as consumers, not producers). These elites (such as the big shots and owners of Goldman Sachs, GE, etc..) have made (and are continuing to make- “thanks to the Fed giving them $16.1 trillion in secret bailouts , 2008-2010 as reported by the GAO–and counting- of zero-interest loans and “toxic assets swaps” and the SEC-regulated FASB in April ’09 allowing them to massively over-value their ‘underwater’ assets”) huge profits off this “race to the bottom” as the middle class gets poorer.
Roemer knows the “games” these people use and how to fix America (“stop the corruption”, “stop the financial greed”, “put the banking and finance communities back on a ‘short leash’ and ‘solid ground’ ” and “put America back to work- getting the capital back behind production”). Roemer says, “DC’s not broken- it’s bought and paid for”. He wants to kick the big money out of politics and won’t take a donation over $100.
One, street-wise definition of “insanity” is to “keep doing the same thing and expect different results”. We have been “bouncing back and forth” between these modern, “Wall Street Investment banker-financed”, “free trade” globalist Republocrats and Demicans, now for twenty years (of course, the “mainstream”, dinosaur media always tells us, “they’re the only realistic ones to choose from”).
It’s time “We The People” take over this country, again with a candidate like Andrew Jackson or Teddy Roosevelt. Check out buddyroemer.com and americanselect.com instead of just complaining all the choices suck !