Sanders is fighting for the right issues, but without campaign finance reform, every issue worth fighting for is going to face an almost impossible uphill battle.
Amazing but true!
Obama's ideas were never made very clear during his campaign. It was all "hope" and "change" and not a whole lot on policy specifics.
He then went and implemented the same neoliberal bullshit that George Bush pushed with a slightly different flavor.
Now we have a Nobel peace price winning president who regularly orders extrajudicial assassinations and prosecutes anyone blowing the whistle on the runaway national security/military-industrial complexes. So much for "the most transparent administration in history," the guy who was going to close Gitmo and stop the serial wars all across the Middle East.
Lessig should throw his weight behind Sanders if he wants to have an actual impact.
As it is, if he takes even a few votes away from Sanders he could end up giving away the primaries to, well, Clinton, who isn't going to do anything about campaign finance.
Progressives need to learn that being divided with people who basically agree with them is how they lose elections.
* campaign reform: "how can you discuss anything when your counterpart is crooked?"
* climate change: "how can you discuss anything if your house is underwater?"
* fracking: "how can you discuss anything when people are causing earthquakes?"
* poverty: "how can you discuss anything when people are dying of hunger?"
* etc etc
One should be humble enough to support the candidate that is the closest to one's personal pet argument, but who also has a chance to actually get elected. Lessig has no chance whatsoever, simple as. He wants hard to be a Nader but clearly lacks even the moderate mainstream popularity Nader had.
Support for people who aren't likely to win the general election at least shows what issues are important to voters, forcing them to give some concessions to those issues in order not to lose their base to third parties and independents. That's the real power of supporting people like Lessig and Sanders, even though they clearly won't win. Supporting someone you disagree with more just because they're likely to win is truly "throwing your vote away" - it's working against your own policy preferences to give more votes to someone who doesn't even need them.
