Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [79]
The “anybody” here didn’t include the thousand or so in the audience, who moaned in disbelief as Clinton lectured them about what they could “seriously believe.”
Instead, Clinton’s vision of the presidency was much like her husband’s (though, no doubt, without the pathetic scandals). She saw the job of president to be to take a political system and do as much with it as you can. It may be a lame horse. It may be an intoxicated horse. But the job is not to fix the horse. The job is to run the horse as fast as you can. Clinton had a raft of programs she promised to push through Congress. Nowhere on that list was fundamental reform of how Washington worked.
I was therefore glad, not so much that Clinton had lost (she is an amazing politician and, as her time as secretary of state has confirmed, an extraordinary stateswoman), but that Obama had won. For, as this book should make clear, it was my view, too, that the critical problem for the next president was the corruption we’ve been exploring here. Not because corruption is the most important problem. But because corruption is the gateway problem: until we solve it, we won’t solve any number of other critical problems facing this nation.
I thought Obama got this. That’s what he promised, again and again. That was “the reason [he] was running for President[—]to challenge that system.”10
Yet Obama hasn’t played the game that he promised. Instead, the game he has played has been exactly the game that Hillary Clinton promised and that Bill Clinton executed: striking a bargain with the most powerful lobbyists as a way to get a bill through—and as it turns out, the people don’t have the most powerful lobbyists.
As I watched this strategy unfold, I could not believe it. The idealist in me certainly could not believe that Obama would run a campaign grounded in “change” yet execute an administration that changed nothing of the “way Washington works.”
But the pragmatist in me also could not believe it. I could not begin to understand how this administration thought that it would take on the most important lobbying interests in America and win without a strategy to change the power of those most important lobbying interests. Nothing close to the reform that Obama promised is possible under the current system; so if that reform was really what Obama sought, changing the system was an essential first step.
The reason should have been obvious in 2009. In the very best of times, the Clinton model of governing will only have (very) limited success, so long as the current system of campaign funding remains and so long as markets in America remain concentrated. Reform shifts wealth away from some existing interest. That existing interest will therefore have an interest in fighting the reform. Indeed, if there were only one such entity with that interest, we could calculate quite precisely how much they’d be willing to spend to avoid the reform: whatever the status quo was worth; they’d be willing to spend up to (the net present value of) that amount to avoid any change.11 As Kenneth Crawford put it during the New Deal, “Their bird is in the hand and they battle to keep it.”12
So, for example, imagine there were only one oil company in the nation: if the net present value of being allowed to ignore the cost of carbon in the products that oil company sold were $100 billion, in principle, that oil company should be willing to spend $100 billion to avoid being forced to internalize the cost of carbon in the