Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [129]
At some point, the dissonance begins to register, and Americans no longer even hear the claim. Or they hear it, but they hear it simply to confirm what they are already predisposed to believe: here is yet another politician talking about “change” who cannot be trusted as far as I can throw him.
Obama, I fear, was the last straw. Other candidates in that race, and in campaigns before, had made change an element of their brand. But Obama made it the core. It was what the whole campaign was about: change. A change from Bush. A change in the way Washington works. A change in the way politics is done.
Yet two years into this administration, and the word change feels like a bad joke. In critical domains of contested policy—foreign policy and the way we conduct the war, in particular—there has been no change. The role of money in campaigns? Absolutely no change. The way the work of Washington gets done? None.
I don’t mean to overstate the criticism. For better (my view) or worse (maybe yours), Obama is not Bush. There is plenty that is radically different today from four years ago, and plenty that is extraordinary about this man. (Think about his speech about race during the 2008 campaign, or his speech to the nation after the Arizona assassinations. Reagan has nothing on this incredible inspiration.)
Yet even if these past two presidents are not the same, it is fair to criticize the current president for not being sufficiently different. His campaign was the classic bait and switch: he attracted us in the primaries with a promise of something different from Hillary Clinton, but he has executed with the same playbook as Hillary Clinton’s.
This was a betrayal. It has consequences for more than Barack Obama. It has consequences for the politics that could make real change possible. After Obama, there are only two ways that a reform presidency might work. Each of these is unlikely, though one is actually happening as this book goes to press.
It is hard for this Democrat to accept, but in 2011, the reform party in America is not the Democratic Party. We had that moniker on January 20, 2009. Obama then fumbled it, and the Tea Party picked it up and ran. Earmarks were blocked in the 2011 budget because the Tea Party insisted upon it. There is an Office of Congressional Ethics, the only independent watchdog ensuring that members live up to the ethical rules, because the Tea Party insisted upon it. Whatever else that party does, it has done a great deal with these two changes alone.
As we enter the election of 2012, it is the Tea Party again that has the chance to insist upon a presidential candidate who will push for real change. And as this book goes to press, there is at least one candidate who is demanding the kind of change that I have described: former governor Buddy Roemer (R-La.). Roemer has focused his campaign on a single issue: the role of money in politics. He has committed to taking no more than $100 from anyone. He will take no PAC contributions. He will disclose every contribution regardless of the amount to any organization that wants to audit. “Free to Lead” is the slogan of his campaign. And his promise is to leverage the mandate he would receive into a demand to change Congress.
In launching his campaign, Roemer embraced four principles that must guide any legislation designed to restore independence to Congress. As he described these principles in a lecture at Harvard:
First, no system for funding campaigns should try to silence anyone or any view. This was the kernel of truth in the Court’s Citizens United decision. The fact that it is a corporation that is speaking does not by its nature make the speech any less valuable or important to our system of democratic deliberation. We need to hear all sides, especially the sides we’re least likely to agree with.
Second, no system for funding campaigns should force any citizen