How many fundraising e-mails did you get?

Did you delete them without reading them?  Did you actually make any contributions?

This is what democracy looks like now.

Enter to Win: Who doesn't love a shot at winning something? Ted Cruz invited supporters to "come shooting with me." It was free to enter the contest to win a shooting outing with the Texas senator, but Cruz told supporters: "After you've entered, make a generous Shoot With Ted contribution of $35, $50, $100 or more to my campaign." Jeb Bush threw a $3 contest promising that three winners would get a photo of Bush and his father "battling it out on the tennis court," signed by both the candidate and the former president.

Fake Deadlines: Tuesday's end-of-quarter fundraising deadline is the real deal. The candidates all have to report how much cash they've raised during the quarter and then face judgment on what those numbers say about their viability. But, hey, why wait for a real deadline when you can make up one? Marco Rubio's campaign urged supporters to help raise $44,000 in a day in honor of his 44th birthday. Columba Bush asked people to contribute to her husband in the first 24 hours of his campaign because "everyone is watching to see how much support we have out the gate."

Pivot Off the News: Republican candidates turned last week's Supreme Court rulings in support of the president's health care law and same-sex marriage into a barrage of fundraising emails. One Rand Paul subject line on the health care ruling: "I'm afraid this is bad news, Fellow Conservative." Rick Santorum took aim at the gay marriage ruling in a fundraising email urging supporters to help rescue America because "the relentless liberal agenda knows no pause." $100, please.

Family Affair: Candidates trot out glowing endorsements from spouses and kids to gin up cash. Rick Perry's wife, Anita, told supporters: "He's the most principled man I've ever known" — and please donate to "have a front row seat to history."

Size Matters: Big contributions are nice, but the little ones add up — and can say something about the depth of support for a candidate. Bernie Sanders made a decidedly lowball pitch as a way of making a statement in his Democratic campaign. "Stand up to the Super PAC attacking us by making a $3 contribution to our campaign today, and send a powerful message that you have had enough of the billionaire class buying elections," he wrote.

Don't Ask: Sometimes, it's nice to check in with supporters without hitting them up for cash. Supporters are more likely to keep opening a candidate's emails if it's not always about the money. There's no purchase necessary to enter Hillary Rodham Clinton's contest to win dinner with the Democratic candidate, for example. And Carly Fiorina's campaign sent out a chatty email from her friend and former business colleague Deb Bowker describing the Republican candidate as "a strong, determined, optimistic woman with a heart filled with a passion for service." There's no "ask" in either email. But recipients will surely be hearing more.

Since we also have a municipal election going on in Houston, some of us also got a daily boxcar load of e-mail solicitations from mayoral hopefuls, council candidates, and even judicials running for office in 2016 (some of them are trying to scare off primary challengers).

Nobody seems the least bit embarrassed by all of this money-grubbing.  A recent NYT poll showed...

• More than four in five Americans say money plays too great a role in political campaigns;
• Two-thirds say that the wealthy have more of a chance to influence elections than other Americans;
• This is true across the partisan divide: Republicans were almost as likely as Democrats to favor restrictions on campaign donations;
• Despite all this – almost no one in the poll ranked money in politics as the most important issue facing the country.

So what's it going to take the change it?  I just don't believe that voting for the same old people in the same old two parties over the years has done much to fix it, despite what few mumblings are being uttered.  Do we just keep on bumping down the road with a flat tire and nobody in the car willing to stop and get out and change it?  That's not what we teach our teenagers to do: ignore your problems, hope they'll resolve themselves.

There are other better options on your ballot; we just need more people to come to that realization and stop perpetuating the decay.  Because what we've been doing in the past isn't going to produce a result any different than what we have previously gotten.  Definition of insanity and all that.

The two things that will keep Bernie Sanders from the Democratic nomination (part one of two)

(Before I get to Supreme Court decisions from last week -- good overall,  but "pro-life" conservatives still get to keep their hazardous chemicals; the ones they like to inject into condemned prisoners, and the ones they want us all to keep breathing -- this post, drafted a week ago, needs to get published before the march of time updates the topic.  To the premise in the headline, then...)

One of the two things, to the surprise of many I'm sure, will not be the questionable intelligence of the average American voter.  They seem to be coming to the realization that Democratic socialism is, in fact, what they believe; they just didn't know it was called that.

There will be some Red scaring going on.  It just won't be coming from Republicans, unless and until -- my keyboard to the FSM's ears -- Sanders upends Hillary Clinton's all-but-sure-thing and wins the Democratic nomination.

The two significant hurdles he must overcome to do so are practical and procedural.

1. He must begin to draw minority voters to his campaign and message.  He cannot win the primary, much less the general, if Latino and African American voters don't begin to peel away from Clinton.  This is her greatest strength; the two largest minority Democratic voting blocs know her and love her.  In this post a few days ago, I linked to the suggestions that Sanders is not experienced in making appeals to voters of color; Vermont is, after all, 94% Caucasian.  In recent days he has played up his own 'son of immigrants' story, he's always had the right position on their economic concerns, and his appeals are getting a fair hearing and a receptive audience in places like Nevada.  But black voters do not, for the most part, know him nearly as well as they do Clinton.  That may be changing.

Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign is already enjoying success that few could have predicted. Bernie is a big deal. Well, OK, if you’re a white progressive he’s a big deal.

Otherwise, you may have no idea who he is, according to reporting (last week) in the New York Times. The Times‘ Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin write that “black voters have shown little interest in [Sanders]” and that “[e]ven his own campaign advisers acknowledge that Mr. Sanders is virtually unknown to many African-Americans, an enormously important Democratic constituency.”

But as his presidential campaign gains altitude and attention, Sanders may be on the way to securing the most difficult black progressive endorsement there is: the blessing of Professor Cornel West, one of America’s leading public intellectuals. Celebrity is rare in American academe, but the eccentric West (along with MIT’s Noam Chomsky) is something of a superstar scholar. He’s our Slavoj Žižek, but with far better hair and a sense of fashion.

Speaking with Grit TV’s Laura Flanders in early June, the black academic icon was asked by the host if he will be supporting the increasingly popular candidate for president.

“I love brother Bernie,” West replied. “He tells the truth about Wall Street. He really does.”

There's plenty more there about West's numerous and harsh objections to Obama, his lack of enthusiasm for Sanders's not speaking forcefully enough about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza (the red flag for American Jews of both liberal and conservative inclinations), the distinctions between neoliberalism, actual liberalism, democratic socialism, and the like.  With all of that said and read, West could be the black symbol of economic and social justice authority that Sanders needs.

Though he’s become something of a pariah in black academic circles, West is still a captivating and rousing speaker and Sanders could perhaps use West on the campaign trail. He might not be someone Sanders brings along in Iowa or New Hampshire, but once the campaign trail swings south and to the cosmopolitan coasts, West might be a valuable voice in places Sanders’ unpolished, heavily Brooklynite earnestness doesn’t work as well. And Sanders could be the candidate West thought he was getting in Obama.

There's also the recent endorsement by rapper Killer Mike of Sanders, an encouraging development.  Bottom line reading today: Sanders simply cannot win the Democratic nomination without attracting significantly more minority voters than he currently does.  Update (7/8): Others are picking up on this.   

But even if that happens...

2. The Democratic party insiders/super delegates/elected officials must be driven back from rigging the game in Hillary Clinton's favor.  Bernie has essentially no institutional support -- not a single Washington Democratic elected official has endorsed him -- at the moment.  And the institution is likely to harden against his presidential bid as he gains additional traction.

Update (7/8): No one should operate under the remotest of illusions that, as long as Sanders is building momentum toward the Democratic nomination, his supporters will consider any "what if he doesn't make it" options.  And 'Democratic institution' -- as Gaius Publius at Down with Tyranny carefully dissects -- includes the corporate media, particularly the New York Times.

The clearest example of the ramifications of being an actual outsider in the run for the presidency isn't the extreme party disunity in 1972, nor the retooling of the nominating process after George McGovern was swamped by Nixon that year.  Even when Eugene McCarthy was crowded out in '68, there were so many other dynamics in play that McCarthy as stand-in for the slain RFK was ultimately usurped -- not by Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the ultimate nominee who had avoided the states' party primaries altogether -- but by McGovern himself at that memorable Chicago convention.

Go all the way back to 1944 -- when Henry Wallace was pushed out of the vice-presidency, replaced by Harry Truman in smoke-filled room negotiations -- and reacquaint yourself with how the corporate interests of the Democratic Party react when they feel threatened, and then hope history doesn't repeat itself.  As it did more recently with the TPP trade bills' back-and-forth, down-and-then-up votes.

The Wobblies had it right, more than a hundred years ago.

Here's more from the NYT on what Sanders needs to do to win, and here's HuffPo's Bob Cesca with five "nearly impossible" challenges.  He counts fundraising first.  You should already know how I feel about that; you definitely know how Bernie Sanders feels about it.

In Part Two: What should US progressives do if Sanders falls short of the Democratic nomination and subsequently endorses Clinton, as he has promised to do?  Should we fall in... or fall out?