That may be changing. Last year’s Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which now allows unlimited corporate spending on elections, seems to have woken up a sleeping giant.

I notice a lot more chatter among progressive leaders about it — a widespread recognition that without clean elections, we’re unlikely to win any of the hot button issues for which we fight. Polls show that over 80% of Americans think corporate corruption in politics is a major problem. And here in New York, clean elections are back on the policy table, with a large coalition of groups pushing for reform and Governor Cuomo going out on a limb to support the idea.

Now my west coast ally Gideon Rosenblatt, formerly executive director of ONE/Northwest (now Groundwire) has penned an article for the Huffington Post arguing that fighting for clean elections isn’t just a political necessity, but huge political opportunity. I think he’s right on. His money quote:

“As leaders in the fight to drive money out of politics, progressives have an opportunity to redefine themselves as restorers of American democracy.”

Or, as I might phrase it, “If progressives fight for clean elections, we can restore America’s greatness — and our rightful claim on patriotism and democracy.”

Thanks for a great articulation of an important idea, Gideon!

My friend Andrew and I spent a recent afternoon reviewing the games he invented a decade ago. My favorite was Spectangle. You win by placing colored pieces on a geometrical board, and carving out piece of territory. I was drawn to the game’s heavy reliance on strategy, and its similarity to my favorite game, Go — a game that has both expanded and deepened my mind.

Most successful games rely on a combination of strategy, luck and secrecy. Children’s board games rely mostly on luck, with the role of dice or spin of a colorwheel determining moves. Think Candyland — no skill involved at all, and nothing hidden from any player. Simple card games (War, Go Fish, Uno) also involve luck, but add the dimension of secrecy — that is, players hold their cards so that they are secret from the other players. A few games (Stratego, Mastermind) rely on strategy and secrecy, but no luck — play revolves around trying to unveil the secret pattern or hidden pieces, but those hidden pieces are set by a player’s strategy, not by chance.

The most universally appealing games blend strategy, luck and secrecy in a fine balance. Think Settlers of Catan or Risk, which involve complex strategy and planning, but also feature hidden hands of cards and dice roles. I’m a huge fan of well balanced games like Settlers, which was the first of a series of “German style” games published largely by a company called Mayfair. Though I will admit, I was stymied by Mayfair’s Russian Rails, whose board full of similar-sounding cities ending in “-ostok” totally confused me.

At the far end of the strategy spectrum, there are the games with no luck at all, and nothing hidden from either player. These are pure strategy games, or in combinatorial game theory language, “zero sum, perfect-information, partisan, deterministic strategy games.” Checkers is a basic example of such a game. Play is entirely determined by strategy and choice; and the only thing hidden is the other player’s thoughts. If constructed elegantly, such games have simple rules and parameters. Certainly this is the case with checkers. However, checkers is considered a child’s game because it suffers from parameters that are too restrictive — the lines of play are quite limited, and only one of four or five moves are ever possible. (Think here also of Connect Four or Othello.)

In more “adult” games, elegant rules are combined with fewer parameters or more lines of play. This leads to complex scenarios with many possible choices. In the West, the king of elegant but extremely complex games is, of course, chess. After learning only nine possible kinds of moves (one each for six pieces, and the special moves of castling, en passant and pawn promotion), players can play out millions of possible games, all dependent entirely on their own choices. In such a scenario, players with better strategies will almost always win.

In the East, however, the champion of elegant strategy games is the ancient Chinese game of Go. If pitted against each other, I would argue that Go is the superior game. Developed more than 2,000 years before chess, it is both far simpler, and deeply more complex. It has four rules, total. There is only one possible kind of move — placing a colored stone on a 19×19 grid, one stone per grid intersection, once per turn. That’s it. Within these incredibly simple rules, Go allows for not millions, but billions of game permutations. Maybe even trillions, I don’t actually know that the number is calculable. The best chess computer programs can now consistently defeat the best human chess players; the best Go programs can only beat intermediate Go players, and human masters easily defeat the computers. Chess represents a medieval battle; Go represents the whole war.

I first started playing Go during the California Recall Circus of 2003. I was pulling 100 hour weeks campaigning for Arianna Huffington for Governor (quite a crazy game in itself). Between blasting out emails and launching viral videos, I learned Go alongside my co-workers in the San Francisco office, courtesy of smartMeme genius Patrick Reinsborough. In terms of pure fun, it was the best campaign I’ve ever been on (sidenote lesson: long-shot campaigns have a LOT more leeway to innovate with fun experiments). But largely because of Go, it was also the best learning experience I’ve ever had on a campaign.

Go’s lessons have helped define my strategic approach to politics, organizing, and in some ways, my whole life. After a week of mastering basic play, the lesson of Go suddenly popped out at me: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Or, more accurately, know when to dive into the small stuff and when to focus on the big picture.

In Go, it’s all too easy to get drawn into a small hand-to-hand combat battles. They happen constantly, and simultaneously, all over the board. But good players know when to abandon a close combat battle to take initiative on another part of the board. In Japanse terms, this concept is captured in the two opposing words “sente” (sen-tay) and “gote” (go-tay). Sente roughly translates to “initiative,” the ability to set the agenda and control the game flow. When you are playing sente, you force your opponent into gote, or defense. But when you are in a position of gote, you can often sacrifice a small battle to regain sente in another part of the board. And often, what seems like a sacrifice turns out to be a long term gain.

In my political organizing work, I always try to keep the sente / gote concept in mind. When hundreds of moves are possible but only one or two will produce the right outcome, the “players” with the best strategies will “win.” To be clear, I actually don’t subscribe to the popular metaphor of politics as a game. Campaigns have winners and losers, yes, but government isn’t sport. However, metaphors from games are often quite useful in navigating the irreducible complexity of real democracy, where real decisions affect real people. And Go’s metaphors are the best.

Which is why I’m excited about Andrew’s Spectangle. Like Go, the rules are fairly simple, but there’s no luck involved, nor hidden cards. The game play allows for millions of possible moves, in a way that would necessitate thoughtful strategies. Was it as fun as Go? Or as useful a metaphor? Unfortunately, I didn’t find out, because Andrew and I didn’t have time to play. We chose instead to have our scheduled discussion about political organizing and 4G technology. That seemed more “big picture” and “important” than playing a board game.

But was it? Given how much I’ve learned from Go, perhaps a game of Spectangle would have been the sente choice!

It’s a funny drug, politics. For much of the last decade, I wallowed in the political hangover of the Bush years. The progressive resurgence in 2006, followed closely by the Obama campaign in 2008, lifted me back to incredible highs. Since then, the post-Obama malaise left me (and so many others) dispirited again. You could have mistaken me for an on-again-off-again junkie — up, down, up, down.

Yesterday night, I got another huge high. In the New York primaries, I had a personal clean sweep — victory in every single race of importance to me. This is probably because I share my political views with the Working Families Party. And these days, what the WFP wants, the WFP gets. Last night, the party showed how their solid electoral organizing and progressive aspirations translate into concrete wins. Their power grows with each election cycle.

Here’s the rundown:

• Eric Schneiderman beat the odds to become the Democratic nominee for NY Attorney General. Eric is a lifelong progressive with the clout to clean up Albany. This was a hard fought race, in which the establishment “smart money” lined up behind his lame opponent, Kathleen Rice. They didn’t count on a wave of progressive primary voters riled up by the WFP.

• Reform candidate Gustavo Rivera unseated the most corrupt man in the NY State Senate, Pedro Espada, 62% to 33%. This was the Working Families Party’s top race. I threw them a house party to fund this battle, and I’m so proud that the few thousand I raised got put to such good use. Once again, the WFP proved its unique power to primary out bad Democrats. This victory is the most important blow for Albany reform since the WFP elected Daniel Squadron to the State Senate last cycle. The march towards competent, progressive NY State government continues!

• Progressive upper-East-Side Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney crushed Wall Street plant Reshma Saujani, 81% to 19%. What a blowout. Saujani was a media sensation because she ran on an unapologetic platform of defending the super-rich in her tony district. Apparently even the super-rich don’t feel the need to defend the super-rich. The “anti-populist backlash” is a phantom.

• In my neighborhood, Assemblywoman Joan Millman retained her well-deserved seat, fending off an ugly challenge from attack dog Doug Biviano. This was expected, but still satisfying.

• Also not shocking but very satisfying, State Senate crook Hiram “Slash My Girlfriend In the Face” Monserrate went down to his challenger, Francisco Moya. Like Espada, Monserrate was a regressive machine politician who has wrecked havoc in Albany. Good riddance.

• On the other side of the political spectrum, results were equally good for progressives. In New York’s Republican primary for Governor, Tea Party candidate Carl Paladino, a billionaire businessman from Buffalo, beat the mainstream GOP candidate Rick Lazio. This belies the huge rift in Republican politics this year — moderate Republicans and Tea Party activists at war — and bodes poorly for their success in November. To be fair, the Democratic candidate, Andrew Cuomo, is heavily favored to win the Governor’s race, whether he faced Paladino or Laizo. But the spin today matters, and the spin is that the GOP’s infighting will sink its chances in New York.

• In the same vein, Delaware’s Republican primary for US Senate has Democrats cheering. Ultra-conservative (and totally underwhelming) candidate Christine O’Donnell beat mainstreamer Mike Castle. Castle is the respected former governor who was a favorite to win the general election. O’Donnell beat him based on Sarah Palin’s endorsement — she’s apparently a fellow “mama grizzly” — and energy from Tea Party activists. Fortunately, she’s got little chance in November. The GOP establishment won’t put any money into this race, the moderate-to-liberal voters of Delaware will reject her, and the Democrats will be much more assured of keeping control of the US Senate.

Karl Rove has a bad political hangover this morning. Albany’s “business as usual” lobbyists feel like crap. Their political drugs were bunk last night. And that makes me very, very politically high.

It’s a brief taste of Larry’s experience visiting his then-girlfriend, now-wife Piper Kerman in a federal women’s prison. In 2004, Piper served 13 months for a non-violent crime committed in her reckless youth. Her book, “Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison,” will hit bookshelves on April 6. It’s an extraordinary read; go pre-order it now.

Larry’s piece tells the other side of the story — what it was like for him to visit Piper every week, to keep his life going while his lady love was behind bars. Not easy. As the prisoners say of their loved ones, “They do the time with you.” Read Larry’s piece to find out how.

The very next day, my wife sent me the op-ed below, written by her father for his local paper. Dr. Jay Kaplan has been advocating for reform for decades. It’s inspiring to see that advocacy take form in a well-articulated public statement.

Bravo, Dr. Jay!

Why We Need Health Care Reform
Jay Kaplan, M.D.

I am a primary care physician and have been practicing for almost thirty years. I have had the opportunity to experience the many changes in health care over these years. The very positive changes are offset by the fact that many Americans lack health coverage. This group of nearly 50 million people includes recent college graduates looking for their first job, workers who own their own business, the recently unemployed, day laborers, and a host of other people.

Without health insurance, a major medical problem can quickly lead to bankruptcy. Doctors are reluctant to care for the uninsured due to the great liability issues in this country. The inappropriate use of the emergency rooms by the insured and uninsured alike greatly increase the overall cost of health care.

The cost of health care insurance has increased yearly. The use of generic drugs, decreased hospital stays, and the expansion of HMO’s has failed to control health care costs. Insurance companies deny coverage for patients with pre-existing conditions that make many uninsurable. Reports show that Americans pay the most for health care in the world yet health care charts do not place us near the top with regard to outcome data. We must demand coverage for all and better efficiencies with decreased costs. Incentives for preventative care for all patients are needed.

Our technology in medicine is very advanced with CT and PET scans, robotic surgery and very sophisticated ICU’s. With all the state of the art machines, we lack in fundamental health information systems that link doctors to specialists to hospitals. Often our privacy policies prevent the transfer of this essential information. How efficient is our information system when we cannot even identify the patient’s primary care physician? Why are medical reports not automatically sent from the emergency room to the correct primary care doctor? Why are patients in the VA system going to the VA Hospital to obtain their medications and again to their local physician for medical care at a double expense to the health care system? Why does Medicare not cover a yearly preventative physical for the population who is most in need of preventative therapy?

Data generated by the Red Cross, life insurance companies and worker’s compensation companies are often not shared with the patient or his personal physician. This expensive data is lost in the system and more often than not, repeated.

Public programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and the VA system provide quality healthcare for the elderly, poor and members of our armed forces. These programs work but there are many inefficiencies. Why are all the health care providers aware of these basic problems but the people who make the laws are not? We all hear about the $1000 wheelchairs, the $100 canes and the $10 aspirins. I am sorry to report that the system is as bad today as it was 30 years ago.

We need more primary care physicians. I suggest asking all the medical students in training programs how many plan to spend their time working in an expensive, inefficient system with high overhead and increased liability. The crisis is noted by the lack of obstetric physicians in certain areas. The ER’s and walk-in clinics keep expanding. This is not an efficient way to provide coordinated healthcare. We must encourage healthy life styles, diet, exercise and smoking cessation. People have to be more responsible for their own health. Inappropriate lawsuits do not help the system.

If done correctly, we should be able to recreate a better system. Discussion, not obstruction will enhance the health care system for all of us.

Tim pulled off a ballsy, smart, inspiring act of environmental civil disobedience. He needs $45,000 to close the deal. He’s gotten $21,614 in donations in the past 4 days. I bet you’ll give your $25, too, once you hear his story. The facts:

On Election Day 2008, the Bureau of Land Management announced that it would auction off drilling rights to huge swaths of land in Utah, near Arches National Park. Beautiful country, up on the auction block to the highest oil company bidder. Not pretty, but pretty sneaky — they thought an Election Day announcement would fly under the radar screen, and the oil companies could snatch up the public land without anyone noticing.

Conservationists noticed. They (including my good friend Celia Alario) quickly started a campaign to keep the lands wild. They raised a ruckus, they challenged the BLM, they created Facebook pages. But the auction didn’t get derailed.

So a group of 200 protesters showed up at the auction itself. Tim was there. But instead of holding a sign and shouting, Tim checked himself into the auction … as a bidder. He got paddle number 70. When the auction started, his civil disobedience started. He didn’t shout. He didn’t lock himself to a table. He didn’t throw his size 10 shoes at the auctioneer and call him a dog. He just bid.

And won.

Tim ended up “winning” $1.7 million of leases, or about 22,500 acres. It took that long for the authorities to realize that the unaffiliated, 27-year-old newcomer was buying EVERY SINGLE PLOT. When they did, federal agents stopped the auction. They took Tim into custody. He may face federal charges.

But before that, he has the opportunity to actually buy the land. Or at least put down deposits on it. That is, if we help him.

Tim needs $45,000 for the first round of deposits, which he and his lawyers have agreed is the best way to keep the land drill-free. Why did I give him my $25? Mostly to reward his brilliant, ballsy creativity. And also because if folks like me think that wild lands should remain wild, there are times when we need to put our money on the line.

In fact, I could imagine a whole new wave of online eco-activism sprouting up around BLM auctions. One could use an application like PledgeBank to gather thousands of dollars in pledges for wild lands. Then an agent representing the pledgers would attend a BLM auction. If that agent won an auction, the pledgers would fulfill their obligation to buy the land. And voila, the land stays free.

Not a bad idea, right? I nominate Tim DeChristoper to be our agent!

Read more, and pony up your $25, at Bidder70.org.

On Saturday night, after a great meal and perhaps a little too much wine, we started making toasts. One of those toasts turned into a semi-silly, semi-sober, semi-sonorous singing of This Land Is Your Land. The song came straight from our hearts. For a group of Gen-Xers steeped in irony and not given to public displays of patriotism, it was an unusual moment.

Right after the singing stopped, one of the singers felt an unexpected swell of emotion. The feeling was so strong, he told us later, that even though it was nearly midnight, he felt compelled to call his father. He got his Dad on the phone, and immediately thanked him. See, his Dad (and Mom) had immigrated to the U.S. from Columbia when he was three years old. They fled harsh violence, and sought opportunity. In many ways, a classic America story, reflected in the histories of so many millions of us.

For much of his life, our friend had taken his adopted country for granted. In fact, as a committed progressive, he had long felt critical of America’s shortcomings, especially under the Bush administration. But at the moment of singing This Land is Your Land, something broke through, a swell of pride and thankfulness. He couldn’t hold back from thanking his dad, for allowing him to grow up in a country where the son of a Kenyan father and Kansan mother could become president.

This story stays with me, because I feel it too — pride, mixed with thanksgiving. I feel proud of my role leading Vote Today Ohio, and helping to elect our first African American president. I feel proud of America, for choosing hope over hate. And I finally feel the words that I sung on Saturday, that I’ve sung hundreds of times before — this land is my land.

Yesterday afternoon, a throng of activists gathered at Fox News headquarters in Manhattan to protest Fox’s racist coverage of the Obamas. From comments like “baby mama” to “terrorist fist jab” to “lynching party,” Fox commentators have set a pattern of using racial slurs against the Obamas, in a thinly-veiled attempt to make them appear like outsiders in their own country. It’s offensive to Black Americans, and to all Americans.

The protest contingency was led by someone who has inspired and entertained me for years — hip-hop legend Nas. Ever since Fox’s Bill O’Reilly started attacking Nas on air, Nas has fought back, hard. Yesterday, he teamed up with ColorofChange.org and MoveOn.org to deliver 620,127 petitions to Fox, calling on the network to Stop the Racist Smears.

Video of the event:

I had the privilege of running the ground operations for the event. Despite many variables and deeply hostile Fox security, we pulled it off without a hitch. The major media coverage was fantastic (search Google News for “fox nas” for a taste).

The protest started at 2:00, but didn’t crescendo until 11:30 that night. Fox, in true Fox fashion, refused to accept the 620,127 petitions. Wouldn’t even let us step foot on Fox property. We organizers didn’t expect such a flat out refusal. But then another idea struck — if we couldn’t deliver the petitions to Fox, why not take them to where they could have even more impact … the Colbert Report.

Nas was already scheduled to appear on Colbert to promote his new album, which just hit #1 on the charts. Instead of talking beats and rhymes, Nas took the opportunity to turn up the heat in his well-known feud with “Poppa Bear” (Colbert’s affectionate name for Bill O’Reilly). And since Fox had rejected our 620,127 petitions, Nas brought them to the Colbert Studio, and actually made them part of the set.

Yep, Nas and Stephen Colbert conducted their interview sitting on the ColorofChange petitions. Could you dream up better placement for a protest prop?

Lesson: Fox shot itself in the face by not just quietly taking our petitions and hiding them in a dumpster. Instead, our message got amplified to every Colbert viewer in the country, and made Fox look like the race-baiting antagonists they are. A media and organizing coup!

Move over, MoveOn — a Pakistan NGO is crushing your petition record.

As of this post, the Yeh Hum Naheen Foundation has collected 8,33,069 petition signatures from Pakistanis who are vocally reject terrorism in all forms. The Say No To Terrorism petition was launched by a coalition of popular Pakistani singers, artists and celebrities, bankrolled by a moderate Pakistani financier. It’s a multimedia blowout campaign centered around a catchy song – kinda like “We Are the World,” but against terrorism, not hunger.

I’m struck by the sheer size of this effort. Eight million is an EPIC number. Google tells me that the largest petition ever collected reached 22 million (though I can’t figure out what it was). The Say No To Terrorism petition seems likely to challenge, and possibly break that record. Compare this to the average online petition here in the states. A hugely successful online petition will get a million signatories. MoveOn’s entire list is about 3 million. Say No To Terrorism has more than doubled MoveOn’s entire list in a week.

Granted, the Foundation has hired 6,000 “volunteers” to canvas Pakistan and collect signatures. That should keep the numbers streaming steadily in. The multimedia hype in Pakistan is apparently huge, so the campaign’s visibility is penetrating deep. And the ask is pretty impossible to turn down. Who WOULDN’T sign a statement against terrorism in a terror-wracked nation?

Still, this is an attention-worthy number, a true outpouring of public sentiment. Like the most successful online organizing campaigns here in the states, this effort has clearly hit perfectly fertile ground at a perfect time with a perfect message.

The big question in my mind is, what will the Yeh Hum Naheen Foundation do with its huge list? Do they have any online organizing experience? Savvy? Should they be getting advice from Avaaz and MoveOn?

Expect to see this story break in the American media soon.

(NB – as of July 26, the petition count has reached 23 million. Crazy!)

Darcy Burner, a progressive congressional candidate from outside Seattle, has long been a favorite of the netroots crowd. On Tuesday, Darcy’s house burned down. To the ground. Lost everything. Her husband, son and dog survived. The cat died.

Having worked on a heated congressional race like Darcy’s, I wouldn’t be surprised if a tragedy like this ended her candidacy. Campaigns can take a huge personal toll. Fires can take a huge personal toll. Together, those tolls could be too much.

But Darcy ran out of her house wearing this t-shirt:

That logo on her shirt is programmer code for “end war.” Six small characters that proved, even at her most vulnerable moment, that Darcy is both an anti-war crusader AND a big nerd. In other words, the perfect fit for the netroots blogger crowd.

Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas picked up on this image and used it to start a firestorm of fundraising for Darcy. He wrote, “Darcy is a huge netroots sensation because she is truly one of us — a former Microsoft exec who is a geek at heart … Darcy needs to raise about $150,000 this July … and everyday she takes off makes her campaign budget that much harder to hit. That’s about $5,000 a day. And that’s why I’m joining with bloggers nationwide to ask our readers to contribute what they can today, to help give Darcy the breathing room she needs to tend to her own affairs without worrying about neglecting her campaign.”

As of today, the effort has netted almost $100,000 through Kos’s “Orange to Blue” Act Blue page, including $100 from me. I ponied up because the Congress will be a better place with Darcy in it. But also because I appreciate innovative, interesting online organizing asks. I especially appreciate times when progressives rapidly respond to emotional moments, and harness powerful, touching narratives to advance our agenda. Bravo to the Kos community for getting beyond dry, intellectual arguments and creatively going for the heartstrings. If we did more of that, maybe we could /war a little sooner!