How to End Kucinich’s Career

Dealing w/Kucinich: Blogging to the choir VS. Firing Him in an Organized Way VS. Firing Him in an Unorganized Way

There are many pieces of democratic infrastructure that exist, or should exist, to help deal with Kucinich’s dive on healthcare. I will take it as axiomatic that Kucinich should now be targetted for removal from office, and won’t even argue the point. Actually, I don’t have time and energy to develop much of any argument. My goal is more modest – to just sketch out 3 possible responses, and to get people to start thinking about them. The options I point to don’t essentially depend on the Kucinich dive, or even Kucinich, at all. However, such framing is timely and quite useful.

There are many pieces of democratic infrastructure that should exist to help deal with Kucinich’s dive on healthcare. Some already exist, but many do not.

I will take it as axiomatic that Kucinich should now be targetted for removal from office, and won’t even argue the point. Actually, I don’t have time and energy to develop much of any argument. My goal is more modest – to just sketch out 3 possible responses, and to get people to start thinking about them. The options I point to don’t essentially depend on the Kucinich dive, but such framing is timely and quite useful.

1 – “Blogging to the Choir”

There is already considerable infrastructure in place for blogging. One can start a new blog from scratch, and get going literally in 30 minutes, or less. Even more easily, one can enroll in a pre-existing blog, and start blogging away.

The main problem with blogging to the choir is that blogs are self-limiting. Even if all progressive blogs were enlisted in the cause of throwing Kucinich out of office (an absurd scenario, given the recent kos incident), I rarely meet anybody outside of the blogs, themselves, which regularly consult blogs for political insight. Thus, unless the blogs can go beyond the occasional TV interview of a prominent blog guru, they will forever be limited to their current level of success, which was not enough to prevent the total (or near total) capitulation of the so-called progressive bloc in Congress.

2 – Firing Him (Kucinich) in an Organized Way

This, IMO, is where citizens should be putting most of their efforts. Right now, it would be difficult to “fire” Kucinich (i.e., primary him), in spite of the fact that his biggest supporters expected so much more from him. Humans build tools and infrastructure to make their tasks easier. Why is it so hard to fire crummy Congress critters? Well, clearly K-Street (the association of lobbying groups and facilitators in that area, not so much the street itself) represents a well-oiled bit of infrastructure to make corrupting Congress easy. OTOH, where is the infrastructure to make get rid of corrupted Congress critters easy? You know, the way it should be? There is a tremendous lack, there, as was (indirectly) noted, e.g., by Scott Crowder at firedoglake, in an article called A failure to plan is a plan to fail – a challenge to the FDL website.:

Instead of worrying about polls, or what the Dems should be doing or what Obama isn’t doing, we should be wholly focused on getting progressives past their primary challenges and replacing Conservadems on the ballot. But we aren’t.

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Where was coverage of the primary? Where was the grassroots effort to stop this guy from getting the nomination? Where was there even mention that this election was coming up?

Nowhere.

When did I first hear about him? After it was too late. This guy had already won his primary and where were the progressives? They weren’t online trying to raise grassroot support for a progressive candidate.

Failure to plan is a plan to fail.

I could mention some ideas for infrastructure, but this diary is more to challenge other people to come up with their own ideas.

(Blogs, of course, represent infrastructure, also. But they are clearly not sufficient to give us good government, or to keep Kucinich and other so-called “progressives” honest.)

3 – Firing Him (Kucinich) in an Dis-Organized Way

Unfortunately, barring a “dark night of the soul” experience by Kucinich, where he realizes that there are more important things than his political re-election, support by Obama, goodies for Ohio, etc., and he returns to his earlier, more principled self, I think he should be made an example of. We can’t construct missing democratic infrastructure overnight. (Though we could construct most of the pieces within a year, say, if 10 million citizens donated all of $10 plus 4 hours per month)

So, what could we do, individually, in a dis-organized way, so that his constituents know what a crappy piece of healthcare legislation Kucinich has said he will vote for? What can we do today (or, within a few days), to put ending Kucinich’s career on track? Again, the question I’m asking pre-supposes that such efforts have to go beyond the blogosphere.

I can think of a couple of low cost routes to pursue. And they both start with a blog (or website), but sure as heck don’t end, there. They mostly don’t depend on anybody else, though they’re a little easier if you already have posting priveleges on a pre-existing blog.

If you live anywhere:

Idea 1: Write a diary about Kucinich’s healthcare dive, how Obama betrayed us in so many ways, how Kucinich is now actually supporting Obama (instead of lambasting him), etc.

Run classified ads in college newspapers, giving the link to your diary. If you can afford it, take out a display ad, or a classified ad in a bigger, commercial newspaper.

Idea 2: Write a diary about Kucinich’s healthcare dive, how Obama betrayed us in so many ways, how Kucinich is now actually supporting Obama (instead of lambasting him), etc.

Run your own Google adwords campaigns, where you link back to your diary. Google adwords campaigns allow you to display ads that key off Google searches. So, e.g., you could have a campaign that keyed off “kucinich” and “health care”.

If you live in Ohio:

Idea 3: Write a diary about Kucinich’s healthcare dive, how Obama betrayed us in so many ways, how Kucinich is now actually supporting Obama (instead of lambasting him), etc.

Print the link on small pieces of paper, and pass them out at your local tea party and coffee party.

Idea 4: Write a diary about Kucinich’s healthcare dive, how Obama betrayed us in so many ways, how Kucinich is now actually supporting Obama (instead of lambasting him), etc.

Print out flyers, using a program that will write the numbers radially along the edge of the paper (or just hand write it, yourself). Cut ribbons into the edge of the paper, so that people can tear off the strip of paper, take it home, and punch it into their web browser. Post the flyers in foodstore bulletin boards, and the like.