In politics, what should be obvious is often obscured.
Hearing the statements of various Republican Party candidates for president of the United States, and statements or press releases issued by Hillary Clinton, Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, and other putative democratic candidates, I feel in my gut a great disconnect between their description of today's economic and political problems, and the actual existential reality of it.
Developing realistic political-economic solutions for successfully reducing income inequality is a formidable challenge for any candidate seeking to become president. And there are many more challenges beyond that, including unresolved immigration reform, the contentious renewal of the NSA's data surveillance program, the breakdown of trust between African-American communities and the police, the pollution of our elections by super PAC money released by Citizens United, and grappling with a foreign policy to defeat ISIS.
And, of course, contingent for any successful campaign that seeks to address all of the above is always the outlier threat of the agent provocateur; that person or persons who seek to exploit and corrupt legitimate political efforts to meet these challenges by their own self-serving, nihilistic violence and disruption.
To date, however, on behalf of progressive democrats, independents, African-Americans, Hispanics, college students and non-student young people, 18 and over, male, female, transgender, gay and lesbian, persons, no one is focusing on THE central issue that potentially can have an enduring impact, regardless of who is elected president of the United States: The initiation of a massive registration of eligible voters and increasing the magnitude of the actual turnout of those persons who have been registered to vote.
Just as in the years immediately following our Civil War and putative Reconstruction, the issue of voting rights and the exercise of the right to vote was paramount -- so it is to TODAY. It is THE issue affecting to any and all other domestic issues.
Voting rights "super Pacs" should be created for the express purpose of underwriting a massive, 24/7 registration of eligible voters and the planning of an election day strategy that will facilitate getting eligible voters to the polls. This should be done for intra-State elections as well as Congressional and Presidential elections.
Practically, this means that block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, precinct-by-precinct, county-by-county, state-by-state, massive national registration and get out the vote campaigns must planned and implemented. This should be done concurrent with whatever legal constitutional challenges have been or are initiated to enjoin or overturn the spate of new voter "eligibility" requirements passed by various County and State legislatures seeking to limit the time, date, and place of opportunities for persons, otherwise eligible to vote.
Registration and actual voting by persons eligible to vote are more powerful than any Super Pac financially funded by the Koch brothers. The massive exercise of our voting rights can ultimately provide the political power than can successfully affect the various pending programs now, and those, which will be, debated ad nausem by both Democratic and Republican party candidates
As I said, sometime the obvious can be obscured to even the "Best and the Brightest" political leaders.
Regrettably, ending the corruption in the leadership of FIFA's worldwide administration of soccer will not materially effect or achieve any of the solutions to urgent political problems within the United States.