where are the liberal, or even center-left, national politicians?

where are they?  sure, lots of wanna-believers got a chubby over obama's speech last night, but at heart, obama is a right-wing corporatist and only looks vaguely like a possible democrat because on one hand he's black, and on the other hand, the mainstream of the republican party is so far right that augusto pinochet looks like mayor bernie sanders in comparison.  fine, but where are the even vaguely liberal national politicians, the ones a little less vague than sanders or kucinich or franken?

who is out there advocating for a decrease in the social security retirement age?  or increasing the amount of the benefit in order to get the u.s. out of the social pension payout basement?  how about someone advocating or even campaigning for office on extending medicare eligibility?  tax reform?  since half the candidates are gonna lose anyway, why don't some of these seemingly no-chance campaigners actually run on some true-blue liberal policies, even in red states?  tax reform, not with the goal of making taxes more regressive, but instead with the expressed and clear goal of making the tax code more progressive and fair.  that sounds like a pretty provocative campaign issue, so why aren't some supposedly liberal money sources like soros or buffet backing these kinds of campaigns in order to get these progressive and liberal ideas into the national converstation in much the same way the coors and the mellons and the olins did in the 70's, saturating the culture with their insane and caustic conservative ideas until they didn't seem so poisonous and dangerous anymore?

the simple answer is that no money men have a vested interest in promoting this liberal agenda; their imperative is to maintain a functional status quo so they support the reliably servile democrats because they are much less twitchy than some of those gun nut teabaggers.  these ideas do have a huge audience though: most of the population.  it starts with getting the word out there.  if no candidates are running on union membership and labor rights as their primary issue, then that issue gets no play anywhere.  even though some liberal candidates will lose, most at first, a concerted effort up and down the political system will get these issues in the conversation and will start to move the center of the debate away from the far-right positions of barack obama and mitt romney and more in the direction of the center-right positions of bernie sanders and dennis kucinich.

there are so many easy, self-evident liberal issues that would soon be sure-fire winners if they had champions in the game: trade policy, labor policy, tax policy, foreign policy and endless wars, national healthcare, education, science.  finding candidates for any and every office in the country to run on these issues is a necessary and useful first step.