Meet the Presidential Hopeful Who’d Quit After Signing a Single Law

The really important question is: How do you publicly fund elections? I support giving everybody a voucher they can use to fund campaigns.

Now, it’s true that there’s still going to be a problem of Citizens United. I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge we’ve got to address that constitutional problem too. But we have to address the statutory problem first.

How do vouchers create an attractive system of public financing — instead of spurring an arms race, with the special interests just ramping up their own political giving?
In my book, Republic Lost, I talked about a $50 voucher. A $50 voucher would produce, with full participation, $7 billion in election spending. Seven billion dollars is about three times the amount spent in the last election system for Congress. So it’s real money. And it’s real money that’s coming from, literally, millions of people.

It doesn’t directly address the super PAC problem. But the super PAC problem is tied intimately to the culture of corruption that’s produced by the ordinary funding system. Congressmen are so terrified of offending the super PACs, and so terrified of not having the money they need to raise, that they’re constantly bending over backwards to reward the people who are going to be in a position to benefit them.

If you began to give these congressmen some independence, some of them would still bend over backwards, but more of them will be like, “Finally, I can do the right thing. I don’t have to worry about what the petroleum company thinks when I start talking about the environment.”

Why President Larry Lessig? Why not back one of the other Democratic candidates in the race? Is it because they’re too focused on reversing Citizens United — either through a constitutional amendment, or, in the case of Hillary Clinton, through a promised litmus test for Supreme Court justices?
You could convince Bernie about what the right answer here would be. I don’t think Hillary has come anywhere close.

But the problem is not whether Bernie has the right policy boxes checked off. The problem is: Is it even possible for him to have a mandate powerful enough to win with this issue?

And that is what the referendum president is trying to do: to leverage a mandate in the system that an ordinary president could not have, so the ordinary president could then step in and have the mandate to do all the things that that president wants to do once he or she becomes president.

So spin this out for us – the scenario where you win. Right now you’re not even officially in the race. You’re waiting to crowdfund $1 million first?
We’ve launched this crowdfunding mechanism to get going. If we succeed and get into the campaign, it can have the exposure necessary to get to a debate. The debates will be an incredibly important opportunity.

Obviously this whole campaign gets framed in a way that it seems incredibly implausible. I think the hardest thing for people to grasp is that my candidacy is not a zero-sum game. Usually it’s either Hillary wins or Bernie wins. In my frame, it’s not either/or — it’s both/and. So fix the system first, and then let’s have Bernie. Or fix the system first, and then let’s have Hillary. Or fix the system first, and then have Elizabeth Warren, or Sheryl Sandberg, or whomever.

That is an important part that seems to be missing from this conversation.

So who becomes your VP? The person who comes in second in terms of votes? Or a name you pull out of a hat? You just mentioned a couple of people who aren’t even in the race.
I don’t propose any mechanical way to think about it. I’m more progressive than I am a New Democrat — so I like the idea of people like Bernie or Elizabeth Warren. On the other hand, I also like the idea of somebody who’s going to really excite the base’s imagination about what they could do as president.

There are very powerfully successful CEOs in America, especially women, who would also be attractive to the Democratic base. So the challenge is going to be to find the person who will make this all feel possible, that we’re going to win.