Earlier quoted context omitted.
the internal politics of the DNC ...which is not actually part of the government. I expect political parties to have internal politicking, which is somewhat bad. But ultimately parties are private organizations that are subject to quite different laws and obligations than parts of the government.
I'm going to disagree. Both Republican and Democratic parties are effectively part of the government. If you get legalistic, you've got me, legally they're not. But the too-entrenched-to-fail nature of the two parties makes them part of the government. I'll give the example of the Colorado gubernatorial election in 2012. The Republican status quo candidate totally flamed out in the primaries, leaving a weird, not-qui…
a. Democrats and Republicans are guided by very different moral philosophies - the kind of thing that courts eschew dealing with as 'political questions' because which one you plump for depends less on reasoned argument than on which basic premises you adhere to. As inherently political entities, it's irrational to demand they hew to some objective standard of political behavior as if there were a knowable truth of conduct that transcended politics.
b. Fringe parties are always running colorful candidates for high-visibility executive positions and then complaining than the system is exclusionary when they inevitably fail against better funded and organized opponents from parties with long track records (whether or not you approve, at least you sorta know what you're gonna get). This is a crap strategy and the idea that the fringe party should get some sort of help in the next election cycle for having shown in a previous one is mystifying to me.
The path to power in the US is through legislative capture. That's how the Tea Party hijacked the GOP - not spontaneously but as the culmination of a long, focused effort. Conservatives chose to worth within the framework of an existing party. Leftists have attempted to do the same in the Democratic party but frankly they're not that good at entryism as a political tactic, lack a coherent alternative to liberal capitalism, and so end up demanding change while being unable to articulate a plan for how to achieve it. You will see a redoubling and refinement of these effort sin the next few years. but if you don't want to work within an existing party, then the next best thing is a party that focuses on legislative representation like the Working Families Party, whose principles I only partly agree with but whose tactical instincts are excellent.
c. Brokerage (as in back-room political favor-trading and negotiation) is an unavoidable components of representative democracy and wishing it away is like asking it to only rain at night. If you want to change this then you need to think about changing the basis of of the political system itself. For example, one could have election by sortilege, where legislators were chosen involuntarily, like jury service. Or we could move away from producing laws like books authored by committee and adopt Wikiism, such that instead of legislative debates we have edit wars on the legal corpus. The main problem with Wikiism (or Social Coding or Participativism or some similar autology) is that implementation in the real world lacks authoritative grounding or operational consistency, which is probably why you don't see many corporations using this model to carry on business.