http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1995-12-12/news/1995346001_...
FTA:
"We listened to all the calls in and out of Washington," says one former NSA linguist, recalling a class at the Warrenton Training Center, a CIA communications school on a Virginia hilltop. "We'd listen to senators, representatives, government agencies, housewives talking to their lovers."
Obama was being surveilled as well, before being elected:
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/06/19/podcast-show-112-...
Which means Obama may effectively be a puppet (if you compare his promises and reality, it sure looks like it). And that would then mean that no future President would be able to start limiting the growing corruption, with the NSA in power.
Effectively? Nobody gets the backing of a major party for his nomination, donations, etc, without being thorougly screened and vetoed that they'll "do the right thing" to continue supporting several interests (partisan, financial, political, etc).
It's not like parties do all this gerrymandering and political games to then allow some loose canon President to realy change the system.
In that sense, they are all puppets, even without surveillance coming into play.
Where can we find these parties? When last I checked, we had two parties that share a common high-level agenda and which generally agree on the majority of issues (to the point where people have basically forgotten that there could even be any debate on such things).
Exactly. The problem is that the public accepts the status que as correct on numerous issues. If their were an issue where a significant portion of the voting public had a different view, then I would expect a one of the political parties to adopt that view to gain voters from the other.
I agree that a two party system is far from ideal. The main problem is that if every one who disagrees with the current position on issue X is already firmly committed to their own party for unrelated reasons then their is no pressure. The traditional solution to this problem to focus on primary elections. Unfortunately (for me), a group of Republicans have recognized this, and managed to affect significant change by focusing on the getting their views through in the primaries. In the long term (I hope) this will self correct as it damages the Republicans in the main election
Or you know, they can shape popular opinion to only care about secondary issues (which politician said what on TV, Obama's birth certificate, the debt ceiling, gay marriage, tax cuts, Hilary vs Palin, etc) which the parties pretend to fight out on, while agreeing on all important issues or slightly skewing from the same general direction on them...