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By Root 943 0

good and evil. Incumbents are deeply risk-averse. They are quick to position themselves to avoid a fight. And so if this campaign could launch in a convincing and transparent way, many would shape-shift. They would position themselves in a manner that avoided any potential challenge. Much of this peaceful war could be fought before even a single virtual shot was fired.

The advantage, too, is that this may be the most effective technique against the so far least-engaged party in this debate, the grass-roots Republicans. Citizen-owned elections are an extremely popular idea among both grass-roots Republicans and Democrats. Indeed, in a number of polls I’ve seen, the idea is more popular among Republicans than among Democrats. That’s because, for many Republicans, the idea of special-interest influence is the corrupting force in government today. Everything they complain about is tied to that idea.

Beltway Republicans are different of course. The party of Tom DeLay had to make some pretty awful deals with the devil in order to raise the money they needed to win. They’ve developed a fairly complicated, cognitively dissonant account that justifies selling government to the highest bidder.

Outside the Beltway, citizen Republicans aren’t similarly burdened. Citizen Republicans care about the ideals of the party. And those ideals resonate well with the objective of removing the influence of cash in political campaigns. Citizen Republicans identify with those who attack systematic corruption—government that organizes itself to hand out favors to the privileged so as to strengthen its own power. Just such large-scale corruption is precisely the evil that small-government Republicans seek to fight.

Thus, these peaceful terrorist candidates in Republican primaries could help break the partisan logjam that has blocked this reform from moving in Washington. Just a few victories may be enough to move the leadership of the GOP to a more principled position.

Critical to this strategy is that while these campaigns are waged in partisan primaries and, in some cases, as a third party in a general election, the platform for this campaign must stand beyond partisanship. Everyone within this peaceful terrorist conspiracy must sign on to the same basic principles. To leverage the campaign effectively, everyone must point back to the same basic principles. In Republican primaries, the reason these principles matter may be different from the reason in Democratic primaries. But the principles must be the same.

So how many would it take?

Let’s pick a round number: Let’s say we’re looking for three hundred. A hundred for each party in key state primaries. Then a hundred in reserve for the general election.

Those hundred in each party need not enter every race, of course. There are lots of incumbents already credibly committed to key reform on both sides of the aisle. But they would enter every primary where the incumbent was not committed. In some states (small states with committed incumbents), that would mean we would need no candidates. In some states, we would need lots of candidates. But overall we would need a platoon of citizen candidates committed to one election cycle, to stand on a single platform, to restore the possibility of democracy in America.

What are the chances this could work? Let’s be wildly optimistic: 5 percent.

So then, what’s next?

CHAPTER 19

Strategy 3

An Unconventional Presidential Game

In his first press conference after his “shellacking” in the 2010 congressional elections, President Barack Obama said this about his party’s defeat: “We were in such a hurry to get things done that we didn’t change how things got done. And I think that frustrated people.”1

Count me as Frustrated Citizen No. 1. I’ve already explained why “chang[ing] how things got done” was so important to our democracy. I’ve already described why I believed Obama intended to make that change central to his administration. That he didn’t is an enormous failing of his presidency, at least so far.

And the failure is not just for