I floated this idea, years ago before the Voter’s Revenge website was created. (E.g., I mentioned it in 2011 at dailykos.com, here.) – Of course, there are already candidate pipelines and vetting mechanisms, for at least some mainstream Democrats and Republicans. E.g., Barack Obama’s experience meeting vital, well heeled Democratic donors, before he was fast-tracked for President, was described in the blog BlackAgendaReport.com. Though I failed to find the specific, relevant article I’d read there, after a brief search, you can get the flavor of this vetting from this quote from Awakening From Obama’s Seductive Spell.
However, contrary to complaints from a few disgruntled liberals, Obama isn’t a morally compromised, spineless individual, betraying his most cherished ideals. Quite the contrary, Street documents via exhaustive examples that Obama has been consistently to the right of center throughout his public career and is doing what he was groomed to do. It was the combination of a brilliant marketing strategy, beguiling rhetoric, and something approaching a cult of personality that put him over the top in 2008.
Why has all this occurred? You won’t find it in high school civics (or college) textbooks but the truth is that one doesn’t obtain the nomination for president without first being carefully vetted by our political, media, and corporate masters. Or, as Street quotes Lawrence Shoup’s apt phrase, this is the “hidden primary of the ruling class.” Only after being reassured about the candidate’s enthusiasm for advancing the corporate domestic and foreign agenda, does the funding and media attention begin to materialize and this is precisely what occurred with Obama.
Apparently, details of the Obama vetting by the rich will be found in Paul Street’s book The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power
While the Republican and Democratic parties have their donor base vetting processes to generate the ‘right’ candidates, Voter’s Revenge is intended to primarily to enable sincere populists and reformers, not deceptively branded neo-liberals like Obama.
Briefly, a Candidate Pipeline is a web portal that serves as a repository for people who believe they may want a career in government as an elected official. I.e., it is more for future candidates than actual, current ones. And the idea is twofold:
- Give the future candidates a place to blog about political issues; plus aggregate reports and links about the doings (speeches, debates, town halls, meetups, activist activities, etc.) of the future candidates. The future candidates can thus become known to constituencies over a period of years
- Make electoral threats to current politicians more credible, by decreasing the friction needed to run challengers. An elected official may scoff if they are “in the money” and well entrenched, when told that some of their constituents (i.e., a posse) will likely vote them out of power if some redline demand is not met. VERSUS receiving the same electoral threat, along with admiring words for 2 or 3 potential challengers who have been building a political legacy which is documented on the Candidate Pipeline for years, and are already known and respected by significant portions of their constituency.
So, we can conceive of a Candidate Pipeline as a stand-alone, independent political tool, just like we can conceive of Voter’s Revenge as a stand-alone, independent political tool; and furthermore, that both tools could and should be’ joined at the hip’ via embedding links and even content from the Candidate Pipeline within the Voter’s Revenge app.
Finally, we can point to a useful analogy. Having a stable of credible future candidates at the ready is similar to have well trained and maintained peacetime armed forces with logistical capability near – or within striking distance – of a potential future foe. It takes many years to spin up a significant, and capable armed forces. If you go to war with an inferior army, which is also at a logistical disadvantage from the get-go, then you should expect to lose your war.