The people stupid enough to not understand what it means are the people who think the existing cabinet is the best thing since sliced bread.

My concern about what they seem to be doing here is that it's not going to be a shadow (or whatever) cabinet at all. Understand the desire to brand populist and avoid looking "elitist," but is it actually a [***] cabinet if it includes "everyday people"? Sounds like they have something else in mind.

A parallel cabinet is to showcase potential leaders from your opposition party & show how they would offer a better vision for the country. Once you make it a miscellany of people telling stories of hardships and/or criticizing the admin — sure it could be effective, but it's something different.

It sounds like Ken Martin's idea is some of A and some of B, and I think that's right, as A can't be fully implemented here. Pres & VP can't be shadowed effectively by people who might lose the nomination to very different candidates, who might also pick very different department heads if they win.

No that is true, but if there are too many voices as part of this “people's cabinet” then it's not really the same thing at all. My concern is it could be another instance of folks proposing ways D leaders can organize opposition and their turning that back around as a thing for “the people” to do.

Well, the people do have to be the ones to organize the opposition in this case. Everyone we elected, in retrospect, we elected with a normal government in mind, even if we saw part of what was coming; and only a fraction of them are adjusting usefully to the new roles they've been thrust into.

Then just call it "Parallel Cabinet"?

Yeah like I'm very much a left leaning person and the first time I heard the term earlier this year my instinctive reaction was to imagine like a shadowy conspiracy whose plans involved a lot of knives and silenced pistols