Since 2003 I have worked very hard in each election, both in my state and national elections, to get Democrats elected. In 2008 people across the country put an unprecedented amount of work into not only getting president Obama elected, but also in building a huge majority for the Democrats in Congress.
And, yes, a lot has gotten done in the past year. But overshadowing all that has been the monumental failure to get HCR finished. Yes, I know it's a big thing, complicated, etc, but we all know the truth of the matter is that whatever is the best we could get in December was also the best we could have gotten in July, had not Harry Reid (and possibly Obama himself) insisted that the whole process wait while we tried to get three Republicans to go along with us. Then, even after August when those three pretty much all thumbed their noses at the Dems, we still kept waiting.
And now they have waited so long that the whole thing might not happen at all. I am sick of feeling like a sucker. I think that rather than repeating the mantra of "primary from the left", we need to find a few key congressional districts and run organized independent liberal candidates there.
Yes, I know this is "risky", but I feel like we keep trying to get more liberal Dems elected, but then they just get forced to bow down to the Libermans and Stupaks. If we had even five true independent liberals in the house (or really even just one or two with the current margin on the HCR bill) those one or two people could wield just as much power as Liebermann or Nelson, because they would not be dependent on the Dem party machine for their next election.
I know people always repeat all the reasons why this kind of action is dangerous, but seriously, why have we been working so hard to elect people to a party that has consistently said our views aren't as important as the moderates'? The only way our views matter is if they people we elect to represent us are willing to hold firm to support them, and I think the only way to guarantee that is to get a few people elected who don't owe a party anything.