Last night, The New York Times reported that prominent campaign-finance reformer Lawrence Lessig is considering a Democratic run for president.
His civic-minded platform is simple, and his plan is rather curious. If he can raise $1 million in small donations by Labor Day, Lessig will run for president with the sole purpose of passing legislation-the Citizen Equality Act of 2017-that would make Election Day a national holiday, end gerrymandering, and institute a robust public campaign-finance system based on vouchers and matching funds. If elected, Lessig says he will resign after passing the act.
Lessig is comparing his candidacy to that of Eugene McCarthy in 1968, who ran a single-issue campaign against the Vietnam War because he feared the Democratic Party wasn't making it a prominent part of its platform.
The most prominent Democratic contenders-Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O'Malley-have all pledged their support of overturning the Citizens United decision. Last week, Sanders took it a step further and introduced legislation that would expand the public campaign-finance system to all federal elections.
Clinton and O'Malley have both voiced support for public campaign finance but have not come out with any sort of particular policy or plan.
Lessig is the former head of the Mayday PAC, a super PAC to end super PACs that support candidates who are committed to reforming campaign finance. The group's efforts in 2014 were largely unsuccessful. A couple weeks ago, I spoke to Lessig's replacement, Zephyr Teachout, about the presidential race and she made it clear that paying lip service on finance reform isn't enough.
"[I]f you are silent on private financing in elections and aren't actively supporting some model of public financing, that's a problem-you're a pro-corruption candidate," Teachout said.
It's interesting to note that Lessig has already targeted his most pointed critiques to Sanders's candidacy, whose policies and supporters are most comparable to Lessig's.
In an interview with Bloomberg's Emily Greenhouse, Lessig articulated exactly why he thinks he is a better candidate than the Vermont senator:
"Bernie is pushing a different equality. Bernie is talking about wealth equality, economic equality. And while personally I agree with much of what he says about the incredible harm that's been done by the incredible inequality that's been produced, the reality is: America is not united around the idea of wealth equality the way America is united around the idea of equality among citizens. So what I'm pushing is a big idea that I think could actually unite America-and what Bernie is pushing is a big idea that, while many of us in the progressive part of the Democratic Party love it, all of America does not love."
That's a bold assertion to make, and he places a lot of faith in the saliency of such wonky, unsexy issues like public campaign finance and gerrymandering. But if he ends up running, it will be worth seeing what kind of impact Lessig has on Sanders's surging momentum-and whether Hillary Clinton's campaign will even acknowledge his existence.
