“Americans Elect” 2012 — Did these Guys Think at All before They Floated their Deflated Balloon? — Or Were their Motives Less Pure than Portrayed?

03 May 2012

Introduction — apparent stupidity can be interesting

What passes for blatant dumbness coming from allegedly intelligent people interests me.

Being that we all know that Life is perverse, and more often than not stacked against our trivial efforts at creating meaning, why is it that we so often go off not even one-half-cocked?

Take the example of “Americans Elect” — and its lack of influence on the coming 2012 presidential election

In creating Americans Elect, supposedly rich and smart anonymous donors threw presumably millions of dollars away in a poorly organized effort that screamed failure from its inception.

Haven’t heard of Americans Elect?

That is exactly the point.

“What is Americans Elect, Pete?”

Americans Elect was intended to be a non-affiliated, online presidential primary.

It supposedly will present Americans with an alternative presidential slate in the November 2012 election.

Historian Timothy Garton Ash explained (in August 2011) how this was to work:

Americans Elect intends to use the power of the internet to give effective voice to that majority who declare themselves deeply frustrated with the Washington duopoly politics of polarisation and gridlock.

Through online debate, nomination and voting, it aims to have identified, by 21 June next year [2012], a credible centrist candidate for president, with a running mate who must be from another party (or an independent).

Instead of the polarising dynamic of American politics, the hope is to produce an irresistible magnet in the middle. Democrats and Republicans will then have to come back to the centre ground, where consensual, pragmatic answers can be found.

It is hoped that the winning pair could reflect the online voting of perhaps as many as 30 million Americans.

That idealism seems to have fallen on its face

When you go to the Americans Elect website today, you immediately recognize that this effort was designed and executed by political ignoramuses.

The organization’s inadequacies as applecart-upsetters spans a spectrum that a competent high school candidate would easily recognize.

First, take a look at Americans Elect’s candidates

You can see the list, here.

This assemblage of mostly unknowns includes:

Buddy Roemer — described initially only as, “former governor”

Rocky Anderson — “former mayor”

Michealene Risley — “activist”

Laurence Kotlikoff — “professor”

T. J. Ohara — “CEO”

Mike Ballantine — “other”

Mr. Ballantine’s “other” is fall-down laughable. Here is a guy, who wants to be president, who cannot even think of a word to describe himself.

The most obvious problems begin with the candidates’ anonymity and with America Elect’s stunningly inept presentation of them

Of this list, the only one that relatively attuned “politicos” will recognize is Louisiana’s former governor, Buddy Roemer. As of this morning (03 May 2012), Americans Elect showed Governor Roemer in the lead with 4,373 supporters.

A handful of political addicts might recognize former Salt Lake City mayor, Rocky Anderson. He is in second place with 2,647 supporters.

Everyone else on the list is a national nobody, no disrespect or lack of appreciation intended.

And even if Internet visitors take the time to wade through Americans Elect’ understated and inadequately written website, they still will not learn much about these people.

There are more subtle criticisms — what English journalist Paul Harris said yesterday

The sad, depressing truth is that AE successfully built an operation that could actually deliver an alternative candidate – and no significant American political figure showed up to take advantage.

Mr. Harris thinks it was a mistake for Americans Elect to keep its list of rich donors secret. They appear to have come from the financial sector, which is suspicious in itself.

Second, Harris believes the organization made a mistake in agreeing to pay off these high-roller loans with small citizen donations collected afterward. Why would the average American want their political donation to funnel directly back to an unnamed One Percenter?

He also thinks that Americans Elect’ centrist political premise is erroneous. Just because Americans despise the status quo does not mean they are moderates.

Harris ultimately concludes that a top-down effort a political reform in the United States is doomed to fail. In other words, if you build it, they won’t necessarily come:

But there is a greater problem . . . . It centres on the fundamental principle of AE: build it and they will come. It turns out that is not true.

Creating a pre-existing structure for a desired political outcome appears to be a poor substitute for actual organic growth springing from the concerns of ordinary American voters. Top-down strategies just do not have the same impact as bottom-up.

Like many online activist projects, AE put the cart before the horse. . . . AE appears to have neglected the power of real-world organising. The movement has to come first; then, the structure will grow from that.

Mr. Harris’ top versus bottom analysis misses the point — most basically, you cannot expect to make a dent on the public’s consciousness, if you do not bother to advertise and manipulate

People often don’t know what they think, until “you” tell what to think.

For example, commercial advertising comes from the top. The only door-knocking arrives through television and radio. Advertisements are designed to (often deviously) manipulate opinion.

More often than not, however, the recipients of these craftily implanted opinions will think that they dreamed them up themselves.

In this regard, Americans are already genuinely sick of both political parties. But they lack a mechanism with which to meaningfully register their opposition to political business as usual.

Were we presented with machinery that had a realistic chance at changing the status quo in a favorable direction, many of us might take advantage of it. Enough, perhaps, to gain us a plurality-elected president.

Consequently, unlike Mr. Harris, I do not think that Americans Elect mistakenly read national opinion. The problem was not that Americans Elect mandated from the top down. It was that the organization failed to:

(a) inform people that the reform mechanism they provided existed

and

(b) that the mechanism was worth taking advantage of.

If no one knows who you are, why would you expect them to come to you?

Americans Elect waited too long to do anything effective to publicize itself, its process, or its candidates.

I suspect that all of journalist Harris’ objections to the Americans Elect concept could have been overcome by engendering some public enthusiasm in support of its proposed mechanism for change.

The organization’s donors could have recruited celebrity endorsements and active ongoing publicity from them. They could have persuaded some nationally known politicians to consider leaving the havens of their respective parties in order to mount a campaign that might actually have been good for the country.

Alternatively, Americans Elect might have built a name-recognition campaign based on national advertising, just like the purportedly despised political action committees [PACs] sponsor.

Here, in contrast with Mr. Harris, I do not think that groundswells of public opinion necessarily create the structures with which to implement reforms. Witness the Occupy Movement. Occupy has not generated anything of workable substance. This is, in large part, because its amorphously organized subsets have no real idea how to mechanically effect political change in a system primarily organized to benefit moneyed interests.

Consequently, top down is not always bad. It just needs to be heavily financed and intelligently strategized.

In regard to strategy — why did Americans Elect squander the opportunity to ride on the entertainingly asinine Republican Party nominating process?

Americans Elect appears to have no strategic or tactical sense. The organization should have been actively engaging the country, during the Republican Party’s hotly contested primary process.

The Republicans’ delightfully crass display of shouted stupidities and lopped intellects would have served to highlight the contrasting intelligence and practicability of two or three soundly chosen Americans Elect candidates.

What should have been a strategically obvious invitation to ride on the Republican Party’s money and publicity appears not to have occurred to the anonymous people, who direct Americans Elect.

In consequence, today, despite Americans Elect’ ostensibly laudable purpose, the entity’s apparent incompetence at hell-raising makes it improbable that it will have much effect on the November election.

The moral? — If you don’t have money, you certainly need brains and persuasive abilities

The fundamental problem with Americans Elect is that it made no apparent effort to become widely known.

Admittedly, publicity costs money and/or requires enough mental acuity to persuade other people to lend their considerable efforts to yours.

Perhaps Americans Elect falls short in money and political skill.

Alternatively, given the probably admirable competencies of the organization’s funders and founders, I wonder whether they now simply recognize that they can buy political influence more easily elsewhere.

Our alternatives in assessing Americans Elect seem to fall into two categories:

(a) an idealistic reform attempt that was mounted by strategy-lacking political nitwits

(b) One Percenters who decided that their influence-acquiring ploy was not worth competently following to completion.

I do not think this formulation is too cynically drawn. Ross Perot had no trouble at all in gaining national recognition, in a very short time, as a third party candidate in 1992.

It is difficult for me to accept that the people behind Americans Elect would not have evaluated Mr. Perot’s effort then (and again in 1996) as a model.

PeteFree.com

“Americans Elect” 2012 — Did these Guys Think at All before They Floated their Deflated Balloon? — Or Were their Motives Less Pure than Portrayed?