… 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…