I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

I listened to KPFK out of LA a few moments ago, and the discussion intrigued me. It requires some thought, and off the cuff, I am not sure I have the answer.

Maybe you do.

During the last election, there was a big push on by the Greens to get votes. People that might have been sympathetic to the Greens went for Kerry, though, because they feared giving the election to Bush by default if they split too many votes off from the Dems. The Greens hoped that they could garner a reasonable showing, something north of 8%, and that this would send notice to both parties. At the last moment, the Greens wanted to shift the vote to Kerry, but to lean on him, if elected, to cleave to some of their agenda.

The strategy seems to have largely failed.

So the question now is this: What does the Democratic party do moving forward? Do they reform, as we saw with the conservatives under Goldwater? Do they reinvent themselves? Do they renew themselves?  I don't know with what....

Or do we come up with something altogether different? The Dems have several coalitions, like the Repubs, but the Dems can't mobilize theirs the way the Repubs can. And I would have thought the Repubs' coalitions were terribly polarized, perhaps to such an extent that they couldn't hold together. But the laws of attraction prevail, especially for highly charged situations: they are holding together. The Dems, on the other hand, seem loosely bound by historic ties to labor and race, feminism and the working class, with some centrist and middle class agendas now in play. But there doesn't seem to be any uniting factor in there.

So, on the radio, the discussion leaned towards getting more and more independents in government ( not necessarily Greens) at the lower levels and working upwards, grassroots fashion.

Though the feasibility of this strategy appeals to me, there is a hugely elongated timeline required before sufficient inroads can be made at higher levels of government.

The salient question is what to do right now? How to re-energize this party, and get away from candidates who have to be so centrist to appeal to everyone that they essentially stand for.... nothing? How to move things forward, away from backwards conservatism?