Perhaps more than economic advice is needed, Doug. His platform reads more like a left laundry list than a coherent political programme. It is basically an old, and compromised imho, approach to politics as a shopping cart: find out which items are most popular with a particular audience and put them in the basket.
This approach is one of the main reasons why liberals have been losing big time to right wingers during the past twenty or so years. Most people outside hard-core ideological camps are not looking for a smorgasbord of bits and pieces from their own political agenda, but for a vision, meaning, moral values, and leadership. Right wingers understand that and have been able to meet that popular demand with their own variety of vision, moral values and leadership.
But the liberals and lefties still do not get it. Their strategy still involves mainly two old and trite tactics. First, they react to the right wing initiatives, which not only puts them in the highly disadvantaged position of fighting a war on the opponent's terms and turf, but also project a broader image of lefties being reactionaries not visionaries, defenders of the status quo rather than leaders into the future.
Second, they try to win popular support by what I call "populism of the fools" - or embracing a set of seemingly popular economic issues hoping that it would earn them popular support. This "shopping cart" approach to politics implicitly treats people as self-interested, materialistic monads capable only on pursing their narrowly defined economic interests and thinking only of filling up their bellies. This assumption stands in a sharp contrast to the lofty ideals of community, solidarity, responsibility, cooperation etc. which the liberals and progressives ostensibly profess. Most people can sense that contradiction and interpret it as hypocrisy.
Personally, I do not see it as hypocrisy but as the inability to formulate a program that:
(i) provides people with a weltanschauung instead of a smorgasbord of hot button buzzwords, a coherent moral-intellectual frame that allows them to understand and interpret issues;
(ii) a sense of meaning who they are rather than what they stand against (e.g. at least 10 out 15 McReynold's policy points are against something rather than proposing something new),
(iii) a sense of direction rather than a wild goose chase after distractions thrown in by the detractors, an approach that is proactive and visionary rather than reactive and defensive.
Despite its impressive brain power and intellectual superiority, the liberals and the left have been unable to formulate such a program. The right-wingers have. It does not matter that their program is a bunch of the same old lies based on stereotypes flavored with religious superstition - but it is the only commodity available in this department, so it sells.
I think that the Greens have been particularly bad in this area. Democrats at least are trying to create such a programmatic weltanschauung - which often resembles a watered down version the Republican model: strong America, leadership in the world, technological progress, freedom and opportunity for all, blah, blah, blah. But at the very least it offers some, even if myopic, vision and some, even of shortsighted, sense of direction.
The Greens, by contrast cannot offer even that much - their messages project negativism, roll-backs, devolution, defeatism, moving to more primitive rather than more advanced forms, etc. Their inability to leave a mark on the US politics lies not just in their general flakiness, but more importantly, their inability to say something truly meaningful, to offer a coherent program that can create a new meaning.
Wojtek