Let us assume that you wish to be pragmatic, as your introductory phrase that lays claim to the turf of realism suggests.

OK, then, as a realist, you must agree to avoid magical thinking and illogical constructions when evaluating your choices and reaching your conclusions.

problem #1: An action either has merit or it does not. Buying a candy bar on the basis that other people do it is absurd. Avoiding the purchase of a candy bar because others are frightened of it is also absurd. Voting (or not voting) for a candidate in a representative democracy on the basis of other people's fears is a refusal to cast your vote on the merits of the candidate.

problem #2: You have defined only two alternatives as reasonable, when in reality there are more than two alternatives. This exactly creates the conditions that you say you do not want ("we may not like ..."). To continue to create circumstances that are opposite of your desires is not reasonable.

problem #3: The challenge to "show viability" is, by your terms impossible. If your political landscape is a zero-sum game between Democrats and Republicans (who, incidentally, join hands to exclude other voices), then you are asking that someone outside your two alternatives prevail despite your opposition and the opposition of those who you claim would agree, while you support those with whom you do not agree. A candidate cannot be "viable" if all who agree with him or her are frightened into opposition.

problem #4: The idea that throwing away a vote is constituted by supporting someone with whom you agree is simply false.

I invite you to reason through substitution. Pretend that the civil rights movement has not yet begun. Do you present your "realistic" argument to those who want change?

Your argument is the rationalization of fear and a blind eye to self-harm.

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The article begins:

"Now that Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown has assured...one Republican vote....(blah blah)... it will be harder for Republican legislators to claim the proposal offers more evidence of the forward march of socialism in America.

But only a little harder.

Republican senators remain pretty much united in opposition to the financial regulatory reform legislation..."

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- This is all vintage Nichols & "The Nation": it attempts to give a "progressive" gloss to Democrats, by pretending it's only Republicans that oppose financial reform.

The only difference between the parties on the matter of serious financial reform is that while Republicans automatically oppose all Democratic proposals, the Democrats propose only fake & toothless reform. Each party thus has a different method of protecting Wall St & obstructing serious reform.

In this piece, Nichols finds it convenient to present the socialist approach in a positive light. He doesn't really mean it, though. Democrats are just as hostile to socialism as Republicans, and Nichols' real mission (as a charter member of the Fake Left) is shilling for Democrats.

As to the issue itself: certainly, the financial system should be nationalized, & organized to serve public need rather than private profit. The capitalist concept of banking for private profit has already proved itself a spectacular failure, as toxic to the world's economic health as the oil poisoning the Gulf is to its environmental health. Wall Street's continued existence is due only to the fact that it corrupted the entire political system so completely, that in its hour of desperate need in October 2008, both parties raced to fork over trillions of public dollars in a matter of 72 hours. Wall Street is a cancer feeding parasitically on the rest of society: it literally lives by devouring the "healthy tissue" of its host. // The "deficits" Congressmen are now beating their breasts over stem largely from the bailout, military spending, & various other handouts to the corporate rich -- all passed with support from both parties.

Another point Nichols doesn't mention: aside from nationalizing the banks, the ill-gotten wealth of the banksters should be expropriated, & returned to the society they stole it from. And harsh prosecutions are in order for a large number of banksters, with lengthy jail terms meted out, befitting their role as social criminals.

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Let me give you a friendly tip: your "analysis" is almost comically wrong, from top to bottom. You seem like a decent enough guy, but if you'd studied what you're talking about more seriously than you have, you'd be embarrassed to have written stuff like this.

You open with: "In defense of Democrats, they're engaged in the 'art of the possible'". To put it bluntly, Democrats can't be defended. They're con-artists & two-faced liars. There's nothing there to defend, & it's wrong to even try. The right thing to do is expose their hypocrisy & deceptions, not make excuses for them.

You assert that "it just so happens the Republicans get more of it from corporations and the wealthy." That's flat-out wrong: corporate money flow depends on the political context. Sometimes it favors R's; sometimes D's. It favored Obama in 2008, & it favored Clinton in 1992 (when the corporate state needed a fake "friend of labor" to push through NAFTA).

The "meat" of your argument is your claim that "the only change we need is to get the money out of politics. Dylan Ratigan recently proposed four steps (see huntingtonpost) to do exactly this..."

- There has been frivolous chatter for decades about "getting the money out of politics." Of course it's absolutely necessary to do that, but to pretend this can be done without a tremendous societal convulsion, rebuilding virtually every institution from the ground up, & re-organizing the entire socio-economic structure -- this is just more naive chatter.

When you talk about "the only change we need," you're saying that everything can be more or less left unchanged, except for this one "tiny little matter" of getting the money out of politics, & then we'll be fine. The very opposite is the case. Almost EVERYTHING would have to change. It would literally take a revolution to get the money out of politics. It would take overthrowing capitalism, because the capitalist state exists precisely to ensure the continued rule of the capitalist class. Having money as the centerpiece of politics is their guarantee of continued rule, & they will fight to the death to maintain this arrangement.

You're nurturing the innocent delusion that a capitalist state is going to sit by quietly and allow "We, the people" to take control away from the ruling class. There are a great many books by serious thinkers ranging from Marx & Lenin to Chomsky, which make very clear the real nature of the capitalist state. Compared to thinkers like those, Dylan Ratigan is a schlep and a nobody, whose claim to fame was that for a while, he was on a stock-market show on cable TV. His ideas about society are no more insightful than those of, say, half the people sitting in a bar in an average college town.

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"People do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void."

–(Maximilien Robespierre)

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."

-Karl Marx's 1859 Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy