Thursday, Jan. 15, 2009
Advertisement
Q&A: LAWRENCE LESSIG & JOE TRIPPI
The Small-Donor Election After Obama
New Campaign Asks Voters To Apply Financial Pressure On Congress To Pass Reform
Joe Trippi and Lawrence Lessig have joined forces to create Change Congress, an effort to reduce the influence of special interests in government. Trippi, a Democratic strategist whose innovative use of the Internet ignited grassroots support for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, and Lessig, a Stanford law professor and leading Internet policy expert, met with Atlantic Media staff on Jan. 9 to talk about their new campaign. Excerpts of the conversation, edited by NationalJournal.com's Theresa Poulson, follow. Visit the archives page for more Insider Interviews.
NJ: Tell us about your new initiative at Change Congress.
Lessig: Today we launched an effort to complement a group of activists who are trying to relaunch what we now call citizen-funded elections. So the idea is to take traditional public-funded elections and marry them with [Barack] Obama-funded elections and produce a proposal that both has a public-funding component and also a small-donor component, so any individual can give up to $250.
And we launched today a strike campaign asking people to pledge not to give money to any candidate who doesn't support this citizen-funded effort. The idea was to begin to create pressure to get this agenda item moved high on the list of things Congress is going to consider over the next year. We expect a bill's going to be introduced from [Democratic Illinois] Sen. [Richard] Durbin's office that will come close to this. And we believe there's an enormous opportunity to do this. Polling taken by Lake during the election showed that 70 percent of people -- actually more Republicans than Democrats -- supported exactly this kind of proposal, a proposal that said no lobbyist money, small contributions, public funding. We think this is the time to make it happen.
Trippi: I think it's important that we're not saying [to] a member who's taking PAC money or any of this stuff that was in the system, "Stop taking that money." It would be great if they would. But it's basically just agreeing that they support citizen-funded elections. If they do, then, through this cycle, we would encourage everybody to contribute. If they refuse to, though, won't agree with it, then what we're saying is, we now have the power to stop, by just withholding, by going on strike, not giving to candidates who are not supportive of citizen-funded elections, of making this change, of making this reform. Let's go on strike.
What that does, too, is it means the only money they would be getting, if we all did it, is the money of special interest PACs and other money. They'd be sort of sitting there exposed, if you will. That's the only money they'd get. It's really about taking action. What we know now is that when hundreds of thousands, millions of Americans, agree to work together to make change, they can. We're trying to encourage that and light up a movement to put the pressure on that gets this passed in the next year or so.
NJ: Why would members of Congress, who have gotten elected in the current system, want to support this and expend political capital to upend the system as it is now?
Lessig: Well, one reason is that members are increasingly recognizing that a huge chunk of their life is spent in this miserable existence of raising money. And as the arms race continues, this is only going to get worse. So this Congress is one of the freshest Congresses in the history of the last 100 years. Everybody who's coming to this Congress, as they begin to see the way the system works, is going to be outraged and disgusted by it.
Increasingly, people like Durbin, for example -- Durbin was not a supporter of public funding originally, but he's become a supporter because, as he puts it, he's tired of subsidizing networks. He spends all his time raising money so he can give the money over to the networks so the networks can run his campaign ads. We ought to have a system where congresspeople can do what they're elected to do, which is to represent their citizens....
Another big reason is that, I think, congresspeople need to recognize that the institution of Congress is the least-respected institution in our federal government. Even at the lowest of the Bush administration, Congress was still below. In July and August, Rasmussen reported 9 percent of the American public had a "good" or "excellent" impression of what Congress was doing. That's probably fewer people than supported the British crown at the time of the revolution.
So this Congress has to realize that it's a bankrupt institution. And one way to fix that bankruptcy is to restore trust. And trust here is people's belief that Congress is doing something other than just doing what the money people say, what the puppeteers say here. In my district, 88 percent of people believe money buys results in Congress. The only way to break that is to adopt a system where nobody could plausibly think that a reason a congressperson did what a congressperson did is because of the money.
NJ: Wouldn't you say, though, that this means they'll have to spend more time with more individuals raising money?
Trippi: No, they have to spend more time talking to people. It creates what democracy should be about, which is a representative, or someone who wishes to be a representative, having to talk in the neighborhood, in the district, to more and more people. You do that and people think what you stand for makes sense and they want to contribute $25 to you, and the candidates who can't do that will fail....
Now, when you put the two of them together, public-funded and citizen funding, put them in combination, the person in that race who's capable of connecting with more people in the district, more Americans connect and want to contribute $250 or less, that person may have an advantage over the one who can't do it but does get some support from public funding. It's likely that that person is going to win. There's going to be an imbalance there, but the reason they're winning is because they're connecting with a lot more people, they're connecting on issues. We think that's better for the democratic process.
Lessig: So even if it's the same amount of time, it's at least time spent back in the district talking to your constituents as opposed to time spent here talking to lobbyists. But I don't think it is the same amount of time, because the public funding component of the citizen funding is a significant chunk of money. So you're taking a significant chunk out of the need to be raised from the candidate. The only thing you're going to be talking about is how do you raise the small-donor contributions. The small-donor contributions in the Obama style are contributions that are coming from people being excited about the campaign and contributing through the Web. Obviously, Obama didn't go shake every hand for $100 contributions.
NJ: But every candidate isn't like Barack Obama. There is a sense that built into the superstructure of our political system at this point is a bias in favor of Democrats for small donors. Both of you are Democrats. Is this fair to Republicans based on how politics is structured now?
Lessig: When fundraising was through direct mail, Republicans beat Democrats. So now we have the first generation Internet, or second generation -- Joe's was the first -- Democrats are better than Republicans. But this is not rocket science. And it's not like anything that's any advantage right now is going to survive two or four years. So I think it's a fair system. We don't have any patents or monopoly rights over the technology or the ideas.
NJ: By instituting a system that relies on the power of persuasion and mass appeal, doesn't that give an advantage to candidates who are flashy and can move a crowd, as opposed to candidates who might be nerdy and wonky but are very serious in their ideas? People are more apt to respond to emotional appeals than to rational appeals.
Lessig: Look at [Democratic Rep.] Bill Foster, who won the open seat in Illinois, one of the most technologically savvy -- guy can actually write code, real scientist -- a pretty nerdy guy, but he ran a campaign very much like Barack's and succeeded in exactly that. I don't think necessarily it's about flash. I wouldn't even say Barack was terribly flashy. What it is about is making somebody dependent upon the voters in the district. If you read the Federalist Papers, the one dependency the federalists loved was dependency on the voters in the district, dependency on the people. Every other dependency they're constantly criticizing and bemoaning.... So I think Joe's exactly right; it's about creating the right kind of relationship. Tie them back to the district and make them care about what the district is.
NJ: How do you get from today's launch to passing legislation on this in a time of enormous crises and lots of other priorities?
Lessig: One, the system seems to give us an endless stream of corruption stories, and with each corruption story, we have an event, and we hit our list and every list we can and point out, "Look what's going on."
The second thing that's going to happen is, despite all the optimism around Barack's programs, there's going to be an enormous struggle to get what he's proposed through Congress. And as that struggle matures, organizations like Maplight are going to be putting out regular reports: "This vote stopped health care, people who voted to stop health care received three times the amount of money from pharma as those who voted to go forward with health care." And when those facts come out, that goes out to the list as well.
After a while, more and more people begin to be convinced that, "OK, my important issue is health care, my important issue is global warming. But I begin to see that until we solve this corruption issue, we're not going to get to solve these other issues at all." So, we want to constantly hit people with what we know is going to be a stream of events that will force them to recognize that there's something fundamental that has to be fixed.