> A fourth would be trying to organize Democrats
> into 'breakaway' groups who would challenge the
> relevant public officials to get with the program
> or lose support. This, incidentally, would be my
> own political preference, but nobody's really up
> to it.
McGovern already tried this, and we know the results. The parties of Wall Street are money-driven franchises, not mass popular parties in the non-US sense of the term, so reforming the Dems is like pushing on a string. It doesn't matter how many caucus votes you get, only a long-term, membership-based organization, with powerful roots in trade unions, micropolitical movements, and Left intellectual and aesthetic traditions, can really change things in this country.
I'm not sure why you seem to think that there are residual grains of decency in a party which spawned the AFDC horror, welfare deform, assorted missile strikes on impoverished 3rd World countries and luscious capital gains taxes for Wall Street, to name only a few of the crimes of the Clintonites. Realpolitik is neither real nor especially political, it's simply conforming to the status quo; any genuine Left opposition (let alone threat) to the rentier hegemony has got to take the risk of making its own mistakes and fighting its own battles, instead of assuming that nice shiny politicos from the DNC are always preferable to the flat-taxers. In 1998, the Republicans are merely larval Democrats, who haven't yet figured out that the state exists in order to ensure that the rich get richer (but generally do, once they get elected).
-- Dennis