What'll take to move the NDP from its current 20% in the polls to 25% in the next election

While I'll agree with you of the importance of Democracy as an issue at the moment, I'll have to disagree with you on the way to make progress on it.  Being a critic is not what wins you votes; presenting different ways of doing things is more likely to be successful.  And I think Jack Layton has a lot of credibility on the democratic reform issue, by the way.  Unlike Elizabeth May, who is running the Green Party as her

While I'll agree with you of the importance of Democracy as an issue at the moment, I'll have to disagree with you on the way to make progress on it.  Being a critic is not what wins you votes; presenting different ways of doing things is more likely to be successful.  And I think Jack Layton has a lot of credibility on the democratic reform issue, by the way.  Unlike Elizabeth May, who is running the Green Party as her personal fiefdom.

As far as boutique issues go, internal party political process is probably about as low on the public radar as you can go.  Outside of political junkies, I bet no one out there knows much about the degree to which May is or isn't running the Green party like a fiefdom.  Larger and increasingly unpopular and uninspiring mainstream parties using the status quo and colluding with the networks to limit the political debate in Canada is a much easier issue for Canadians to grasp and instead of using the issue to advance a debate on democracy in Canada, the NDP sided with Harper and created a massive public backlash in mid-campaign. 

The reason why democracy is not front and center right now and why electoral reform is a "boutique issue" footnote for the NDP is that they've done a poor job of building crediblity on democratic reform with the public.  It's too bad because there were signs that Layton 'got it' when he first became leader but for whatever reasons didn't stick with it and make an effort to build a non-partisan alliance. 

OO I think I agree with you 17 times... ;-)

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Well, of course you can win any argument if you twist the other person's words around.  Now why didn't I think of that!

Actually you did. You reduced my position on building non-partisan alliances to advance democratic reform and debate into "being a critic".

Closing for length