Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [130]
Third, no bureaucrat in Washington should be in the business of deciding how much any campaign for Congress deserves to get. We can’t have a system where government decides the allowance that challengers to the government will get to wage their challenge. Instead, it is the people who should decide how much anyone should get to run his or her campaign.
And finally, any system must permit—indeed, encourage—individuals to give at least a small amount of their own money to support the campaigns that they believe in. If Barack Obama taught us anything, it was the extraordinary energy and importance that would come from getting millions to commit at least a small amount. Politics is not passive anymore. The Internet has made it possible for everyone to have skin in the game.2
These principles are consistent with a number of programs to fund the independence of Congress. They are consistent with the Grant and Franklin Project. And if Roemer succeeds in his campaign, and translates these four principles into law, the fourth American revolution (after 1776, 1800, and 1865) will have been achieved. Roemer’s would be the most important presidency since FDR.
There are, however, two significant doubts that will dog Roemer’s campaign. The first is practical: Can a candidate raise enough money if he takes only $100 from any citizen? The pundits notwithstanding, no one knows the answer to that question. No doubt in 1980 it would have been impossible to fund a national campaign on such meager resources. But in the Internet era, whole governments are brought down with less real resources committed. It is perfectly plausible to me that if Roemer becomes credible, his low-budget campaign could take off, launched not so much by expensive campaign ads, but by the energy that built Facebook and Twitter.
Yet in the quintessential catch-22, because most believe you can’t win a campaign with contributions capped at $100, they won’t credit a campaign with contributions capped at $100. The view “he can’t win” makes it likely “he can’t win,” even if a majority of souls would support him were they convinced he could win!
A different kind of credibility, however, is a second significant doubt. Not because Roemer lacks credibility on this issue: He was elected governor of Louisiana on a similar platform. He made reforming Louisiana government his primary task. Instead, the lack of credibility here goes back to Obama: Will America even entertain the promise of yet another presidential candidate that he (or she) is going to “take up the fight,” as Obama put it, to fundamentally change the system? Are we Charlie Brown? Or have we finally learned that Lucy will always pull the football away?
It is impossible to answer that question just now. But the very possibility that no candidate could convince the American public that he or she was credibly committed to fundamental change forces us to look further. Is there another way to use the presidential election cycle to leverage fundamental change into our government?
Losing the president as an agent of change is a huge loss. Presidential elections are important to focus America, and not just because the president is the president. But instead, because of the primary system, presidential elections have the chance to overcome a fundamental problem with American politics today: attention span. We were once a nation that listened to multiple-hour-long speeches by our politicians.3 We’re now a nation that can’t stomach more than thirty seconds