Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [131]
Or, more accurately, an hour at any one sitting. For the magic of presidential campaigns is that they spread the messaging over a long period of time. The same point gets repeated—repeatedly. At first it isn’t heard. Or if it is heard, it isn’t understood. Or if it is understood, it isn’t acted upon. But after the ten-millionth repetition, in the context of the tenth or fifteenth primary, finally, the point is understood. In our multitasking way, we’ve become quite good at picking up a lot in tiny bites over extended periods of time. The presidential primary system was made for just such an attention span. Presidential primaries were made for Twitter.
Thus if we’re trying to imagine how to get the American democracy to demand the change necessary to remove this fundamental corruption from our government, Obama’s failure presents a difficult choice. We must find a way either to make a transformational candidate for president credible, or to get America to engage in politics outside the ordinary cycles of ordinary presidential elections.
Let’s start with the first: How could a candidate for president credibly signal to the American public that his or her exclusive focus would be to remove this fundamental corruption from our government? How could she make that the only issue that mattered? Or more precisely, how could she frame the issue so people recognized that though there were a million other issues that mattered more, this issue must be resolved first?
Here’s one path:
Imagine a candidate—a credible nonpolitician, someone who has made her mark in business, or as a creator, or as something that allows people to have confidence in her. The candidate enters a New Hampshire primary. The candidate makes a single two-part pledge: if elected, she will (1) hold the government hostage until Congress enacts a program to remove the fundamental corruption that is our government, and (2) once that program is enacted, she will resign.
What that program is, of course, will be a central focus of the campaign. We needn’t worry about the details here, though Roemer’s four principles would be an important place to start. And how we can trust that she will actually resign will be an obsessive focus of every news show from the launch until the election. But a credible candidate challenging the president with a single message of “change”—this time, change you can really believe in—would have at least a 10 percent chance of capturing the imagination of that single state.
There are more details to describe in this, but before I do, let me lay out the balance of the plan:
If that candidate did respectably in New Hampshire, then all bets would be off. Even a modest showing would spark an enormous amount of energy—both good and bad. Good, as more and more would be rallying to the plan of reform; bad, as a bunch of party loyalists on the other side would see this challenger as an effective way to weaken the other party’s candidate for president.
That latter fact then suggests the second part to this strategy: assuming it achieves some resonance and respectability, it will strike many that the plan should not be exclusive to one party. So then, imagine a second candidate—again, a credible nonpolitician, someone who has made her mark in business, or as a creator, or as something that allows people to have confidence in her—but this time from the other party. This candidate makes the same promise—she, too, will (1) hold Congress hostage until it passes fundamental reform, and then, she, too, will (2) resign once that reform