The left must take Obama down, and BE SEEN to take Obama down

Yes, Obama losing would be a good thing. Obama and the current Repubs on offer would be even better.

Even a D who could only be counted on to make things marginally better(especially one beholden to the activist left that allowed it to defeat Obama).

So I'm personally holding out for a primary challenge to Obama. Marginally better would help a lot for people on the margins.

Just so he loses. No one should get away with all those lies and broken promises to people who trusted him and depended on him to do the right things. He crushed the fragile hope that was just beginning to bud.
Add to that, his illegal war in Libya, a war without our consent. He should lose just so future presidents know they can't get away with doing that.
Anyone who is clearly aware of all the harm Obama has done to our country and still votes for him, simply because he/she is afraid of the future, might as well give up his/her right to vote. A cowardly vote is worse than no vote at all.
There will be no one on the Democratic side to challenge Obama, but I want to make sure a Republican challenges him, and that's why I'm going to caucus with Paul. I want Obama to face someone who will challenge him on the wars, civil liberties, and NAFTA. If Perry or Romney win the nomination, they might as well make just get together with Obama and make it an Obama/Perry or Obama/Romney ticket. Their views are indistinguishable.
At any rate, no matter what, I hope that Obama loses, because he doesn't deserve our votes, he has not earned out votes, and he is too unprincipled and too dangerous to govern.

I'm all for that!
But that doesn't exactly redeem the left, I don't think. Unless they stay home in massive numbers.

Losing would be okay. But clearly losing because of an insurgent 3rd party (or independent) challenge from the left that gets, oh, say, 15-25% of the popular vote would be so much better.

Some of Sarah Palin's Ideas Cross the Political Divide

something curious happened when Ms. Palin strode onto the stage last weekend at a Tea Party event in Indianola, Iowa. Along with her familiar and predictable swipes at President Barack Obama and the “far left,” she delivered a devastating indictment of the entire U.S. political establishment — left, right and center — and pointed toward a way of transcending the presently unbridgeable political divide.

She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).

Yes, the margins are important. It's one of the reasons the NRA is so effective. What else makes the NRA effective, though, is that they actually exercise that control by voting their interests. NRA disaffection with a candidate will likely correlate strongly with whether they vote for that candidate or not. I don't see any such relationship among progressives.

Less than three percent of voters chose Ralph Nader in the 2000 election. That turned out to be enough to throw the race to Bush, but it clearly wasn't enough to impress the Democratic elites that they couldn't continue to ignore progressives without paying a price. I suspect the reason they were not impressed lies in the phrase "turned out to be enough". It was enough, combined with vote suppression and Al Gore's ineffective candidacy.

However the disaffection is expressed this time, I suspect it will have to be more than that to get the Democrats to change, or to give some third party hope that its time has come.

I think DCblogger's response below is a good answer, which is that this time we're in an economic downturn. Unfortunately, that's a correlation that applies generally to the voting public, too, not just progressives.

oh why are you using that 9.6 figure? Please consider Hugh's numbers as a humane, much more accurate. At least use the BLS U6.

**head bangs on walls and keyboard***

Or words to that effect from Emma Goldman.

On the crippled Greens or other emergent left-ish party -- the FIRE sector's pockets are deep enough to keep them off the ballot in too many states for them to have any kind of chance, via Dem lawsuits bankrupting their campaigns...not to mention the pervasive propaganda machines that saturate the "news" media, which would paint them as flakes or "idiot liberals" or "smoking something" or "fuckin' retards" etc.

And the establishment's tactics would not be limited to such "honorable" methods, certainly.

As for any left-ish Dem being the nominee -- once again, the FIRE sector controls the cash and the media. If you want to know who the nominee is going to be, and who the eventual winner will be, you don't need to read, listen to, or watch anything but OpenSecrets.org. Remember George McGovern?

Even if there is a successful primary. A Republican administration would be even worse.

I think strip mining the country and moving everything to emerging markets was their goal all along, and the process is almost over. There already is nothing left.

We're just fighting over scraps at this point.

I think the battle of 2012 for the left should be in local races; look what is going on in Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, and of course Wisconsin. These happened because local races were lost.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not for waiting, we need to act now. But we have so few resources, we can't fight multiple fronts simultaneously, especially if our enemy has a billion in the bank, and we don't.