but what about my 3 steps?

but in 2000, there was still a difference. Ralph was wrong in 2000 because the Clinton years were, in general, good for the bottom 99%, and a good campaigner (which Gore was not) could have, and should have, used that framing to continue on to eight more years of center-left governance. CLEARLY there is a difference between the way Clinton-Gore governed and the way Bush-Cheney governed.

Do I blame people for voting for Nader? Nope. I never blame the voters for voting their conscience. I blame the Party and the politicians for not making a strong enough argument. And, I never said it was Nader's fault either. I simply said he was wrong. Factually speaking, there was no basis for his assertion that Gore and Bush would have governed in the same way.

In essence, however, although we disagree about Nader, I agree with your central point. No one candidate can really change the system, which was on life support before Bush and Obama, between the two of them, broke it completely.

So, we're back to how to change the broken system. The three steps I've listed above is the method I'd like to use in order to do it.

Honestly, the way I see it happening is to propagate it to enough people. Corrente is a great place where lefties of all persuasions gather, and can spread ideas throughout the blogosphere. Many people who post here either have influential blogs, or post in influential blogs. So, I put these suggestions here and hope people will take them and run with them.

However, there is no substitute for face-to-face contact, and this is where I don't have a lot of practical help to offer in terms of resources - I just have ideas.

I wish I had the money and time to be a full-time lefty group facilitator. I don't understand why all the pro-choice women's groups and all the LGBT rights groups don't join together to support the ERA, for example. I also don't understand why pro-choice groups and single-payer groups don't join together to promote Medicare for All. It seems to me that concrete policy goals should be the raison d'etre of any advocacy group, and that when there is a goal in common, the advocacy groups in question should join forces to promote it. Organization, critical mass, structure, funding - these groups already have everything they need.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to convince these groups to see their commonality and go forward together to accomplish their goals. Maybe talking about it here will help.

the left, recently, has not been interested in connecting with the voters, citizens, independents, whatever you want to call them but is MORE interested in crafting elegant, complex, and intellectual arguments, or positions

The left, recently, is more interested in fighting and winning the class war within their own side. Thus the relentless pounding on first, Clinton's supporters (bitter old working class women inter alia, who don't even, gasp, use the internet!), then trailer-trashing Palin, and now moving on to crapping all over Scott Brown's supporters and their trucks -- anything at all to avoid any substantive policy discussion. Really, if Palin and Brown didn't exist, it would be necessary for the left to invent them, with their current strategies.

If only the left's problem was overly intellectual responses to problems -- that's just a communication problem, and could be solved with some decent marketing. That's not what the left is selling these days.