Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [78]
Obama’s victory electrified the reform community. While no political liberal, his campaign had promised substantial change. Health care reformers were ecstatic to have a chance at real health care reform. Global warming activists thought they had elected a sexier version of Al Gore. And as Wall Street’s collapse threw the economy over the cliff, America was very eager to hear Obama, the neo-Brandeisian, attack Wall Street. (“I will take on the corruption in Washington and on Wall Street to make sure a crisis like this can never, ever happen again”;1 “We have to set up some rules of the road, some regulations that work to keep the system solvent, and prevent Wall Street from taking enormous risks with other people’s money, figuring that, ‘Tails I win, heads you lose,’ where they don’t have any risk on the downside.”2) If ever there was the opportunity for progressive change, this election seemed to promise it.
I was a strong supporter of Obama. Indeed, long before you likely had ever even heard the name Obama, I was a strong supporter of Obama. He was a colleague of mine at the University of Chicago. In 2000, Obama ran for Congress in the South Side of Chicago. The campaign was awful, yet after his defeat, Obama was optimistic. “It was a good first try,” he assured me. If that campaign was a good first try, I thought, then he had even less political sense than I.
Despite that defeat, however, I backed every Obama campaign since. In one sense, that’s not surprising. We were friends. But it was more than that. Like many who know the man, I believed there was something more than the typical politician here. I was convinced by Obama. More than convinced: totally won over. It wasn’t just that I agreed with his policies. Indeed, I didn’t really agree with a bunch of his policies—he’s much more of a centrist on many issues than I. It was instead because I believed that he had a vision of what was wrong with our government, and a passion and commitment to fix it.
That vision is the great orator’s summary of the argument of this book. In speech after speech, Obama described the problem of Washington just as I have, though with a style that is much more compelling. As he said, “the ways of Washington must change.”
[I]f we do not change our politics—if we do not fundamentally change the way Washington works—then the problems we’ve been talking about for the last generation will be the same ones that haunt us for generations to come.3
But let me be clear—this isn’t just about ending the failed policies of the Bush years; it’s about ending the failed system in Washington that produces those policies. For far too long, through both Democratic and Republican administrations, Washington has allowed Wall Street to use lobbyists and campaign contributions to rig the system and get its way, no matter what it costs ordinary Americans.4
We are up against the belief that it’s all right for lobbyists to dominate our government—that they are just part of the system in Washington. But we know that the undue influence of lobbyists is part of the problem, and this election is our chance to say that we’re not going to let them stand in our way anymore.5
[U]nless we’re willing to challenge the broken system in Washington, and stop letting lobbyists use their clout to get their way, nothing else is going to change.6
[T]he reason I’m running for President is to challenge that system.7
If we’re not willing to take up that fight, then real change—change that will make a lasting difference in the lives of ordinary Americans—will keep getting blocked by the defenders of the status quo.8
It was this theme that distinguished Obama most clearly from the heir apparent to the Democratic nomination, Hillary