Stephen Kaus on the Democrats' Independents-Wooing Strategy: Pre-Settling and Standing for Nothing

Leadership

San Francisco attorney Stephen Kaus on why he may well sit out the 2012 federal election: the "political Einsteins" surrounding Mr. Obama, as well as the president himself, appear to think that pre-settling for compromise will woo the all-important independents.  And the base can be taken for granted.

Pre-settling is standing for nothing, Kaus concludes.  It's standing for nothing but compromise. And so Kaus has ended up where increasing numbers of folks with whom I'm in touch, and where I myself, have ended up.  When the solicitations for support come in, I now ditch them.  As Kaus says,

I, for one, am unsubscribing to the incessant fund pitches via text and email from various Obama groups. They can come back for my money and my enthusiasm when they advocate something that I agree with.

It's not going to be a pretty campaign cycle, to say the least.  But, then, the future they're promising us through the ludicrous "leading from behind" ploy, through the cynical "long game" that never holds unambiguously to indispensable moral principles, and through the cynical "pragmatic" "pre-settling" and the pseudo-Niebuhrian moral "realism": that's not pretty-looking to many of us, either.