… cruel RBC (Reality-Based Community) members point and laugh:
Americans Elect, the group that has spent the last two years securing ballot access for a yet-to-be-named middle ground presidential candidate, wound up running into a significant problem: Finding a candidate.
The group announced late Monday that no candidate has attained the level of support he or she would need to even be considered at the group’s online convention next month, and the deadline for candidates to qualify has passed. That leaves the group with ballot access in more than half the states — including many swing states — but no candidate to actually put on the ballot.
The group says it will meet Thursday to decide whether to press on.
The excellent Jim Cook’s stalwart reporting at the Irregular Times has been my go-to source for news of AE’s latest stupidity, as when he sticks a pin in the AE founders overinflated egos fact checks Kahlil Byrd’s May 15 statement:
… Americans Elect has not yet “gained nationwide ballot access.” The latest news release by Americans Elect on the subject, just a few days ago, declares that Americans Elect has ballot access in 27 states (source). Ballot access was gained through paid signature gatherers (source), not a grassroots wave of supporters…
Americans Elect also has not “fielded a credible, balanced, unaffiliated ticket for the 2012 presidential race.” That is why Kahlil Byrd released this statement. Three Americans Elect ballots have gone empty because no candidate has reached the required 1,000 votes of support in each 10 states for political insiders and 5,000 votes of support in each of 10 states for political outsiders (source | source). The closest any candidate came to reaching either of those standards was Ron Paul, who as of 5:00 this morning had obtained 48.9% of the required votes after months as a draft candidate (source)…
Kahlil Byrd declares that there are “millions of Americans who have supported AE” who want to “see a credible candidate emerge from this process.” If this were true, then there would be millions of Americans who acted to see a credible candidate emerge from the process by casting votes to put candidates on the Americans Elect ballot. There have not been millions of Americans casting vote in the Americans Elect process. The top ten declared candidates, put together, have only received 14,399 votes expressing support for their placement on an Americans Elect ballot (source) — and as Americans Elect points out in a recent e-mail, a single person can cast “as many [votes] as you like now” (source)…
[F]our days ago Roger Ryan made a motion and put advertisements up around the Internet asking people to second his motion to shelve the current official Americans Elect rules and let candidates on the Americans Elect ballot anyway. Fewer than 25 people have seconded Roger Ryan’s motion (source). If there really are “400,000 delegates” as Americans Elect dubiously claims, that’s an awfully low level of support — about the opposite of “universal.”
Professor Krugman, as is his wont, points out the obvious-to-those-not-getting-paid-to-be-obtuse:
Thing Falls Apart
…What went wrong? Well, there actually is a large constituency in America for a political leader who is willing to take responsible positions — to call for more investment in the nation’s education and infrastructure, to propose bringing down the long-run deficit through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. And there is in fact a political leader ready and willing (maybe too willing) to play that role; his name is Barack Obama…
Americans Elect was created to appeal to this class of professional centrists — which meant that it was doomed to go nowhere. Because outside that class, the large number of people who believe in all the good stuff the centrists claim to favor are, you know, going to vote for Obama. The large number of people who don’t believe in any of that are going to vote for Romney. All AE could ever have been was a distraction; and it turns out not to have managed even that.
Alec MacGillis at TNR has a photoshop I’m not gonna spoil, to accompany his post “Our Centrist Savior Misses His/Her Deadline“:
……The person who came closest to meeting the threshold was Buddy Roemer, the former Louisiana governor who labored mightily to win the group’s favor after being shunted rudely aside during the Republican primaries. But AE’s team had its sights set higher—among its dream candidates were Jon Huntsman, Jr., Olympia Snowe, Mike Bloomberg, Lamar Alexander, and David Walker (the former head of the GAO, for those of you who don’t keep up on those things.) Sadly, none of these scintillating figures decided to make the leap, despite occasional flirtation. And the group’s original champion apparently did not see fit to heed my exhortation to pull a Dick Cheney and take the reins himself.
Buzzfeed has, delightfully, compiled a list of quotes from various Very Serious Men… declaring that Americans Elect would revolutionize the political process and maybe even help decide this fall’s election. I can state proudly that I am not on that list, having been one of the first to cast a skeptical eye on the whole venture last fall…
Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly, nominates the same “saviour”, and suggests some possible running mates and a campaign slogan.
The Stranger‘s Paul Constant’s take as “Another Third Party Dies An Ignoble Death“:
The top two losers at the moment are former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer, and Rocky Anderson, who as near as I can tell has one very angry fan who loves getting into fights on the internet. I think if a Republican were to break with his party, say fiscal sanity is important but social issues are not, and run with a third party on the ballot in every state, that Republican would do very well for himself in November. I’m not saying Americans Elect would win the White House, but they could at least inspire the schizophrenic break that the Republican party sorely needs at this point. Romney’s biggest problem is that he has to try to shape all the various past leaders of the Republican Party—teabaggers, evangelicals, neocons—into one coalition, when the party needs someone to cut ties with all those groups and offer something different for the future. A third party would be the quickest, most efficient way to do that, but it’s not going to happen this year.
And my personal guru Charles P. Pierce warns (reminds) us what’s really at stake here:
“Good and qualified people simply aren’t willing to subject themselves to the poisonous environment that exists today,” said Mark McKinnon, a Republican political strategist who also sits on the group’s Board of Advisors.
Oh, balls. McKinnon owes America a millennium’s worth of getting flogged with barbed wire by flame-tongued demons in political purgatory just for his part in inflicting C-Plus Augustus on an undeserving nation. AE was going to be the channel through which he slimed his way back into national politics. That was pretty much what the whole project was — a way to launder hedge-fund money into a political wet-dream run by people trying to launder their reputations.
The last great hope for the project was David Walker, who’s spent a decade being the front man for “Pete” Peterson’s endless attempts to get the financial-services industry’s hooks into the Social Security trust fund. As it happens, “Pete” and his foundation had their annual Catfood Soiree in DC this week… It is plain that we’re all rounding into another extended period of deficit hysteria again, despite the popularity of the blog’s basic economic theory — Fck The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money.
…[I]t’s really what Americans Elect was all about — “centrist” economic “solutions” that would give the Pete Petersons of the world their golden dream of pumping Social Security money into the Wall Street casino and casting the elderly and the infirm onto the tender mercies of the private health-insurance market. And all of this in the middle of a soft recovery from a disastrous recession. If there was ever a time when the country needed “centrist” solutions less, and a vigorous and raucous class-based debate over who should profit from the American system, it’s right now. Americans Elect died from neglect, which was all it ever deserved.
Cato
Unity ’08!
Mike Goetz
OT, but semi-related, Fox News has Obama up 46-39 on Romney, winning with women by 55-33, with overall approval of 49%. CBS/NYT had Romney up 46-43, and winning women by two points.
Somebody be wrong.
Mike Goetz
@Cato: @Cato:
No Labels!
Spaghetti Lee
What time is it? It’s point-and-laugh time! Somehow it’s even more ridiculous in retrospect than it was at the time. A bunch of cocktail-party-going pooh-bah millionaires decide that the president really should be at their beck and call, and that the president should obey a bunch of ideals that appeal only to them, and go on a massive propaganda blitz to convince people who couldn’t give half of a rip about “centrism” to support their candidate to be named later, instead of the two guys who have actually been running for president for years.
This is farce as politics. You could seriously make a good comedy of errors out of it. Maybe Kevin Kline as Thomas Friedman?
Cato
I’m honestly shocked this hasn’t been hijacked by the Paultards yet, actually. Don’t they always win internet polls?
Ron Paul: President of the Internet.
Spaghetti Lee
@Mike Goetz:
Polls this far out don’t matter.
Warren Terra
“400,000 delegates” and 14,399 votes (representing fewer than 14,399 people)?
What to make of a “party” that counts as a “delegate” someone who’s better than 95% likely not even to “show up”, when “showing up” consists only of clicking a button online?
Hell, Nevada had twice that many people show up to its Republican caucuses, in person, to select delegates.
Pathetic.
David Koch
¿gary johnson¡
lacp
Screw it. For ’16 I’m going to be the candidate of the Revolutionary Broderist Party. Rise up, wankers of the world!
amk
So verity, the victory!, is back ?
Roger Moore
@Cato:
Paul is their number one vote getter. The problem is that American Select is so lame even the Paultards haven’t bothered trying to take it over. That or they believe, probably correctly, that Paul won’t be appealing enough to the big money backers and the rules will be changed to keep him out of the running if he ever gets anywhere close to the nomination.
David Koch
this was inevitable.
as Krugman likes to say, “once you go black, you never go back”
El Cid
Never fear — respected former centrist leader George W. Bush is coming out with his book on how to do the fixin’, you know, of the economy type stuff.
H/T Krug-Man.
slag
@El Cid:
Lemme guess…Tax cuts. Tax cuts. And…tax cuts.
Oh yeah…and let’s privatize Social Security and Medicare while we’re at it.
Success!
Yutsano
@El Cid: And irony joins Generalissimo Franco in sweet sweet death. Or unlimited corpotate cash. I forgey which.
texascowgirl
@El Cid:
Awesome. We can compare Bush’s plan and Rmoney’s plan and see how much they are alike.
You think maybe Bush is really an Obama plant injecting himself into the public eye at a time when Rmoney would least like him to and the GOP is trying to pretend he never existed?
VICTORY!!11!!1!
Jay C
@amk:
That’s VICTORY!!
Though kinda hard to discern in as botched-up a half-assed Fail Parade as Americans Elect has turned out to be. SRSLY, in this day and age, when any run-of-the-mill internet poll can be freeped into lopsided irrelevance in a couple of days by a handful of dedicated trolls – this big-bucks, big-deal nationwide “Third Way” organization can’t even cobble up a credible Presidential candidacy OVER THE GODDAMNED INTERNET??
Heh indeedy…
BethanyAnne
Well, I actually like Buddy Roemer, so I’m vaguely sad about this. I don’t have any love for American’s Elect – I don’t know much about them. I do wish more folk wanted to get money out of politics, as that’s Roemer’s main issue. But it looks clear that very few folk agree on that – or at least very few agree enough to not support Obama.
Suffern ACE
@Roger Moore: The problem is that if AE had pushed harder to garner votes, paulistas would have pushed back and then they would have had the embarrassing situation where they either deny him the ballot if he doesn’t decline or he declines their nomination.
BethanyAnne
@BethanyAnne: And, you know, working with American’s Elect is sort of the opposite of Buddy’s stated goal. Hmmm.
jl
@Spaghetti Lee:
I agree. This far out, certainly any one poll means nothing. As I said in previous thread. I think now is about the time most voters even get started just paying attention and making up their minds.
I think polls start meaning more around beginning of July.
If you get on a poll aggregator like TPM’s, click the option that allows you to see all the individual poll results. You can see when the pollsters think it is worth it to do a lot of polls with likely and registered voters. And that is three to four months before the election.
Edit: So, what makes me guardedly optimistic about presidential race is that Obama has held a consistent lead over last few months when you stratify but adult, likely and registered voters. Most of the variation has been due to different mix of those three groups in whatever polls happen to come out. I figure it’s a good sign Obama does so well when we has had so much negative attention from GOP primary and lack of positive news coverage.
Edit edit: and for Congress, no telling what will happen yet in terms of public opinion, so only thing to go on is who is more vulnerable wrt to seats up, and measures of voter enthusiasm, which is not much this far out.
malraux
@BethanyAnne: Buddy Roemer is the guy so unappealing that he lost to a straight up klansman and a guy who campaigned on the promise that this time he wouldn’t get caught stealing from the state.
Gin & Tonic
@jl:
Holy shit, it’s Labor Day already? Where did the summer go?
amk
@BethanyAnne: You should read up on saint romer’s past.
Suffern ACE
@malraux: Lets go with uninspiring rather than unappealing. Stand with Buddy was ok. STAND WITH BUDDY! It wasn’t.
jl
@Gin & Tonic:
I think the economic and polysci research is that people start make up their minds now, but they don’t realize that they are making up their minds, in the six to three months before the election.
Labor day is when they know that they have made up their minds and you start to see it in the regular published opinion polls.
I believe research that shows that in many aspects of life, people decide, or are in the process of deciding before they are consciously aware that they are doing that. By the time they are conscious of having made a decision, they have been working on it for awhile, and the decision has already been made some time in the past.
Edit: you might disagree. But I believe it, and that is why I am glad to see the GOP showing signs of dysfunction right about now. Good timing, IMHO.
BethanyAnne
@amk: Didn’t say he was a saint. Said I wanted money to buy less control of politics.
jl
One exception, I will believe a poll taken right now that says the voters have, and will have, zero interest in American Elect.
Edit: Unless they can come up with a Clooney/Kim Kardashian ticket (in any order), or Brajolina (not sure I spelled that right).
some guy
epic flail 1.1
Pete and his crew will be back in 2016, and unindicted crooks like Tim Geithner will be working diligently (boring from within is the term, methinks( to keep sharpening the point of the spear.
go Team 0.001%, go
David Koch
Letterman goes off on bush and the iraq invasion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=t-wKLIljbSg
Roger Moore
@El Cid:
I know! I know! We’ll inflate a giant asset price bubble. That always works to get the economy going again.
Gex
@El Cid: That man is hilarious! I heard he gave a speech on human rights the other day. The Onion can shut down and bow to their master.
Jeff Spender
In better news, Max Payne 3 is pretty damn awesome.
I was one of the rare people that really liked Max Payne 2, so…anyway, it took the story in an interesting direction.
Roger Moore
@Gin & Tonic:
FTFY. I’m convinced that a large fraction of true swing voters go into the voting booth not knowing which lever they’re going to pull.
Spaghetti Lee
@Roger Moore:
Might be apocryphal, but I seem to remember reading a study where a certain percentage of votes pull the lever for the candidate whose name is first on the ballot, and that the names are random rather than alphabetical for that very reason.
Mnemosyne
@BethanyAnne:
I see you came up with exact same question I was about to ask: how does Roemer’s “get big money out of politics” stance jibe with running as the pet candidate of a handful of millionaires?
Roger Moore
@Spaghetti Lee:
I have a sneaky suspicion that I wound up on the Executive Committee of my collective bargaining unit at work for exactly that reason. On a ballot of six people, the three who came first on the ballot were elected and the three who came at the end were not. It made me suspicious that people were just checking the first boxes on the list rather than thinking their choice through; after all, who would vote for me if they were thinking about it?
Suffern ACE
@jl: Brajolina? Great name for a superhero I think.
amk
@Mnemosyne: roemer is just born again sloganeer. Except for chris hayes, no body gives a shite about him
Beavis
@David Koch:
Thanks for the link. Letterman was great. Brian Williams is a dick.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
It’s Brangelina. And, yes, I am ashamed of knowing that.
amk
US files civil rights suit against Arizona sheriff, alleging pattern of intentionally denying Latinos their constitutional rights – Reuters
Narcissus
Brajolina is Alfred Molina wanking in a brassiere.
Narcissus
Don’t act like you don’t want it.
Schlemizel
I joined AE just so I could screw with them. It didn’t work nearly as well as their own mega-fail and it wasn’t as much fun as I had hoped.
Obama is currently their 4th biggest vote getter though so there is that.
But how stupid are these monied clowns behind AE? If I was funding it I would have already had a list of 2 or 3 guys I wanted and 1 of them would have been the winner. There would have been a lot of press releases during the voting, the sort of horse race crap our media loves. Of course Paul would have a strong showing, just not strong enough.
If I claimed 500k members the final vote total would put my 1 & 2 guys totals near 300k with Paul around a 100k and a field of also rans near 50k all together & about 50k not voting (seems natural you don’t want 100% as it would make people suspicious). There would be much hoopla & the “convention” would move to run my 1/2 ticket (I’m thinking Roemer/Bayh or close to it).
Elizabelle
@David Koch:
Letterman was great.
Brian Williams is a douchebag. “Sideways …”
Beavis got there first, but jeebus.
Thymezone
AE is almost as big an EpicFail as Markos Moulitsas’ “Netroots.”
In my mind, Netroots’ legacy will always be the stunning 42% voter turnout in 2010 and the Tea Party takeover of the House of Representatives. Nice job, you hipsters, you. Oh, and you turned your over-designed website into a shit distribution system for every crank on the internet who doesn’t have enough sense to hang around rightwing blogs and websites.
Thymezone
Oh, and Buddy Roemer. Look, we drove Ross Perot out of politics for being a whiny voiced little prick with exactly three prepared messagettes that he repeated over and over until you wanted to kill yourself. And now we have done the same thing to Roemer, for the same reason. Good Christ, please make him go away.
Uncle Cosmo
@Thymezone: The Great Orange Satan may have its problems, but it sure as shit isn’t responsible for 2010. Kos is worth about 100,000 carping assholes like you.
Thymezone
@Uncle Cosmo:
No, actually, those 100k carping assholes are all posting at DKos. Other than some good front page material, that’s about all they do over there. It’s a giant pile of useless shit. Markos is a fake. He knows nothing about actual grassroots politics, the first three rules of which are, Get Out Your Fucking Vote. Using phony populism and leveraged small coalitions, a bunch of lunatics took over the US House of Representatives while DKos became a haven for firebaggers and whiners. My user id over there is 25094, which is just short of 8 years old. I am pretty familiar with it, and you are dead fucking wrong.
SRW1
American Elect – How privilege shrivels the mind.
rikyrah
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MONEY?
just asking
cause grifters gotta grift
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Thymezone: Mine’s somewhere in the 50k range. Haven’t been back there since 2008 in any serious way; I go, read, am appalled, leave.
Three observations:
1. Every word you wrote is true.
2. Every candidate Markos has ever tried to get elected has lost – badly.
3. The commentariat over there I find even more repulsive than right-wingers. At least the righties believe in something and have a coherent ideology. If we could forcibly institutionalize crazy people 94% of Kos’ commenters would be posting from an asylum.
Thymezone
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
My favorite, of many, examples of the Epic Fail of Markos and his book club grifter-blog: His big contribution to the ACA (healthcare reform) fight: “Kill the bill.”
Can you imagine, the idiocy of that position at the critical moment in the fight for the bill? 75 years of trying to get reforms, and because it’s not the ideal version that the asshole Markos wanted, the guy says “kill the bill.” Even if there were not twenty other reasons to detest him and his site, that would have sealed my lifelong disgust with him, for me, right there. I still shake my head over it. Amazingly self referential and completely insensitive to the potential impact of his stupid words. Millions of uninsured people, that’s what the stakes were … and are. A horror of huge proportions for families across this country. “Kill the bill.” Oh yeah? Kill fucking Markos, that’s what I thought.