Jon: I generally agree with most of your postings, but I think your reply to Carrol does not fully grasp the political reality of this country. The political power in this country resides entirely with big corporations. Politics is, as Dewey aptly observed, only a shadow of that corporate power, and the attenuation of that shadow will not change the substance. If you take the big corporations out, there will be not much left of the United States, but that what will be left is plainly scary: Jim Crow cum fascist theocracy sprinkled with tiny liberal oases on the coasts.
In plain words, the United States is mostly big corporations, period. The usual leftist noise making (aka "organizing" or voting for Mr. Right) will not change that basic fact. All that left can hope for is helping to ease the corporate yoke a bit by voting Democratic. It is like the good cop /bad cop. Crying "uncle" to the good cop will not earn you freedom, but it will at least stop the beating for a while, and that is still a big difference.
Carrol and his fellow travelers must have inhaled too much in the 1960s if they think that the left can pull anything but a Nader in this country, let alone "establish a public voice of its own." They are not even "pulled along" by the DP - they are simply ignored, because they carry as much weight as the smoke they inhale.
That is, of course also true about vast segments of the public in general. The ruling class now has the means of pursuing any policy it wants without public support or even participation. With the fully professional army, an army of spin doctors able to neutralize any opposition, and enough crumbs falling form the elite tables to keep the disfranchised masses content - they do not need to mobilize public support most of the time. The masses may be polarized or perhaps accruing more left-leaning sentiments, as Teixeira and his number crunchers want us to believe, but they are mostly content, easily fooled and irrelevant - and thus not in a position to rock the boat.
The Bush coup d'etat is living proof of that - all they needed was four years which they gained by fraud to set a country on the course that cannot be easily reversed in the next 10-20 years. Now the Bushies do not need to be elected for another 4 years - they can safely retire to their Haliburtons and reap the benefits of the policy course they set.
Anyone who seriously think of changes that go beyond the usual attenuation of the shadow and easing the corporate yoke (which already makes a big difference) should think about breaking the backbone of the corporate governance system, which: (i) takes much, much more than making goofy noise in the streets and voting for nice guys, (ii) will most likely result in the breakup of the United States, since there is not much left in the US besides its corporations, and (iii) they results of that breakup will likely to be very, very ugly, not a "velvet revolution" to be sure. Not an easy feat to accomplish, indeed. I am certainly not holding my breath to see it coming any time soon.
Having said that, I think that Kerry in 2004 is the best thing any reasonable left-leaning person can hope for at this time, but I have no illusion that Kerry's - or anyone else's - election will change the nature of the US corporate state. Thos who seriously think that they can change the nature of that state by spoofing Kerry - are Trojan horses, clueless goofballs, or both.
Wojtek