I just realized that I misunderstood your notion of the strike from your earlier post. The recent one emphasizes a more focused strike by the professional campaign workers. That certainly does seem to have the potential to be more effective as you describe it.

The mischievous part of me wonders if that mightn't be the key to a Democratic landslide, since the consultants would be less able to "handle" the candidates when they should be calling the shots themselves. ;~)

Adorno thought it was ineffective.

The anti-war movement also despised the highly educated and objective Washington technocrat, epitomized by Robert McNamara, who was not moved by subjective, irrational emotions. McNamara was alleged to make decisions solely on numbers and probabilities and could not see individual lives or deaths as anything but statistics. The Vietnam body count was offered as an example of this objectivity.

Theodor Adorno, himself a Marxist, sharply criticised this trend in the 60's Left, which he called "actionism," defined as the belief that actions such as protests and strikes could change the political structure by themselves without being supported by solid theory and an organized program or party.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectual#Left-wing_currents

Brian Wilson made some sacrifices:

In 1987, while engaged in a protest of U.S. weapons to Central America, an action publicized in advance, Willson and other members of a Veterans Peace Action Team were blocking the train tracks at the Concord, California Naval Weapons Station. Due to a government policy decision, the train refused to stop, and the veterans were injured when the train did not slow down as they expected. Willson was hit, run over, and nearly died. Ultimately, he survived but lost both legs below the knee while suffering a severe skull fracture with loss of his right frontal lobe, among other injuries. Subsequently, he discovered that he had been identified for more than a year as an FBI domestic "terrorist" suspect under President Reagan's anti-terrorist task force provisions and that the train crew that day had been ordered to not stop the train to prevent any Hijacking attempts. Willson filed a law suit contending that the Navy and individual supervisors were given ample warning of their plan to nonviolently remain on the tracks, and that the crew had plenty of time to stop--which the subsequent official Navy report confirmed. Surprisingly, the train crew filed a law suit against Willson, requesting punitive damages for the "humiliation, mental anguish, and physical stress" they suffered as a result of the incident. Their suit was dismissed. Willson later agreed to settle his lawsuit against the Government and train crew for $920,000. He now walks with prostheses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._Brian_Willson

Even Thoreau wasn't opposed to violent action and the spilling of blood in some instances.

http://thoreau.eserver.org/theory.html

Beautiful comment - this seems to me to get to the core of it:

And the higher the stakes it seemed to me it became even more important to hew to my principles: in the real world.

If principles mean anything at all, this *must* be true. Again, I applaud and thank you for the entire comment.

Sorry J, that may be true in the abstract, but not for human beings in realtime. Can you claim truly understanding responsibility for 300 million?

Can you demonstrate any credible threat in realtime reality that endangers 300 million Americans. No. You can't. Not even in 2001,2 3 or 4. Not even today. Probably not even during the Cold War.

Shooter now:

Universal condition? The only universal conditions that immediately come to mind are death and taxes.

Before:

This is what seperates you from most people. You have carefully weighed, and accepted, death as part of your life. Brutally put, your fundamental job was to kill or be killed. Until that is ingrained, judging HOW to use that power can't happen.

Civilians have not gone through that process, most avoid it like the plague. Facing death is the most horrible aspect of existence for the average person. Huge institutions (religion) have been erected to deal with just that fear.

Which one is it? It's universal but unthinkable? Shooter is contradictable and usually does it to himself. He's full of shit and lacks any internal logical consistency. There is a good reason Glenn has advised us all to ignore Shooter on at least one occasion, but....

About 20 years ago, most cops put in their 20 years without ever having to pull their guns. That number has probably changed a bit. Blackwater syndrome. Any logistician can tell you that for every combat soldier on the front line, there are ten behind him in logistics and support. Many of those functions are now performed by private contractors but they rarely get any trigger time, either.

Jkalos... Torture is simply wrong.

So is homicide. It's even illegal. Yet we do have a class of homicide called "justified".

HOMICIDE, n.

The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homocide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another -- the classification is for advantage of the lawyers.

A.B.

Devil's Dictionary

Better to just say it's completely and totally ineffective as a general policy. Than you can just ignore Shooter and his Jack Bauer fantasies.

ondelette said, "Why have a handler for a job you can do better yourself?"

The handlers have their place. Certainly they are necessary for the nuts and bolts of campaigns at the tactical level. Many of them, like my own boss, are extremely smart and have an incredible amount of campaign experience that no candidate can begin to match.

But candidates like John Kerry have to ultimately be responsible for themselves. They have to overrule their handlers where necessary. On the most important matters, they have to set the goals and let the handlers do what they're good at, figure out the means.

On something like torture or whether or not you are going to give a moral cretin like George Bush a pass for lying about WMD and starting an illegal war of aggression, you shouldn't need handlers or polls to make your decision. Some values are too fundamental to be traded off. Do you hear that Hillary? Do you hear that Nancy? Harry?

Other questions are simple common sense and knowing how to stand up for yourself in a street fight. How in the world could John Kerry both not attack Bush for being AWOL during Vietnam while simultaneously not fighting back against the Swift Boat scumbags? How in the world could we decide to run a pacifist convention that failed to indict Bush only to watch the Republicans predictably attack us with impunity at their own convention? Remember that bastard Zell Miller?

One sad thing I have learned in a life in politics is that many of our political leaders just are not the greatest people in the world. Some are. Most are ok as people. But most are gladhanders to a significant extent -- many to a large extent. I did not enter the business with any naive notions about the depth of character of the average politician but I have to say that, as naturally cynical as I am, it turned out to be even worse than I expected. The selection mechanism in place simply is not designed to recruit the best people.

The truth is most of our political leaders simply are willing to be handled. One thing I have always found amazing is just how much they are willing to have words put in their mouths. The consultants design their message usually with only rudimentary contributions from the candidates themselves. The candidates might -- I emphasize might -- set a few parameters in terms of some issue positions, and they might exercise a veto over some suggestions, but as far as actually writing some of it themselves or deciding which issues they will emphasize and the words they will use to convey their message -- that is for the most part done by the handlers.

The consultants have altogether too much influence and the wrong incentives. The consultants' primary goal is to take maximum credit for victories and to not be held accountable for losses. This biases them toward safe, conventional wisdom campaigns. If a candidate, like a John Kerry, loses a conventional campaign, the consultants will never be held accountable. There will be a hundred other reasons why it was either inevitable or the candidate's fault, not the consultant's. On the othe hand, if the consultants were to recommend bucking the conventional wisdom and their candidate lost, they would be held accountable. It's not the worth the risk to them. They have literally millions of dollars of their own personal income riding on not being held accountable.

The candidates are also guilty of lacking the moral fiber to stand up for principle. All too often they are concerned exclusively with re-election -- the party and principle be damned. They are mostly a bunch of independent operators rather than a team. And the consultants have no incentives beyond the candidates' own individual incentives. In the end, most candidates are looking out for themselves and the consultants care only that their candidates not lose in a way that they can be blamed for. The interests of the party and principle are only a small part of the equation.

That is why a general strike that included people who work in the offices of these consultants could be so powerful. There are just a handful of consultants --probably no more than 10 -- who handle all the big campaigns, make the most important decisions, and who are responsible for setting the conventional wisdom. They exercise a huge and unaccountable cartel power over the party.

But most of them run small firms with 20-30 people working in them, including maybe 3 or 4 senior people who are worked to the point of exhaustion. If just 1 or 2 of their senior people and, say, a quarter of their junior staff were to threaten a General Strike in about July of 2008, they would be in an even worse position than GM facing a UAW strike because there is only one election day and only 16 weeks before it arrives. Their operations would be severely threatened. The campaign assembly line would be severely slowed down and there would not be enough time to hire and train scab labor. The consultants would be sweating the fact that they can't deliver to their campaigns and the candidates would be sweating the fact that they might lose as a result -- and that is something they actually care about.

Between losing tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of progressive voters, and their time and money, as well as losing some percentage of their campaign infrastructure, a General Strike among progressives would force the Democratic Establishment to listen.