Harvard University Professor Lawrence Lessig’s quixotic presidential candidacy ended on Monday — surely before most voters knew it even existed. Maybe because the point of his run — the need for “campaign finance reform” — has already b🔯een proved false.
For years, many on the left have been prophesying the republic’s doom. A dark and Orwellian future, they said, would be the ultimate effect of the Supreme Court’s decision in Ci𝔍tizens United v. FEC. Yet the 2016 presidential electionඣ decisively debunks this.
From moderates like Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet to liberal firebrands like Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro,ꦏ the idea that America had mortgaged its future to corporations was the dominant Democratic response to Citizens United. As he often does, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) captured his fellow liberals’ sentiments perfectly when he asserted that “democracy in America is over.”
Lessig joined the bandwagon, warning that the United States as we know it is imperiled by an infusion of corporate ꦜcash into the political process and the proliferation of super PACs. “The government we have is not a democracy,” he claimed in September.
Lessig’s crusade has led him to virtually abandon his chosen profession of teaching, a calling he once denigrated as “tinkering on the margins of the small arguments.” He has since dedicated his waking 🌠hours to getting mon🌠ey out of politics.
Parꦓadoxically, Lessig’s initial approach to achieving this outcome was to flood the political system with money. In 2014, he founded his own political action committee, Mayday PAC, which spent $10 million in that cycle but only saw a handful of the candidates it supported elected or returned to federal office. Then he tried running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
The good professor is s๊o fi💎xated on this menace that he failed to notice the rationale for his candidacy imploded.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker suspended his campaign while the coffers of its aligned PACs remained flush. About 64 percent of Walker’s total campaign haul of $7.4 million came from donors who contributed over $200. Similarly, just eight weeks before former Texas Gov. Rick Perry dropped out ofꦯ the race, those PACs loyal to his campaign revealed that they raised $17 million.
“Super PACs, Mr. Walker learned, cannot pay rent, phone bills, salaries, airfares or ballot access fees,” The New York Times reported. “They are not entitled to the preferential rates on advertising that federal law grants candidates, forcing them to pay far more money than candidates must 🔜for the same television and radio time.”
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bus꧋h made his appeal to w🐈ell-heeled Republicans central to his candidacy and, by the early summer, donors loyal to his campaign had sunk a staggering $103 million into a pro-Bush super PAC.
Money can’t buy love, nor can it buy good polling. Bush’s fund-raising hauls have slowed dramatically as his standing in primary surveys ജhas diminished, and his campaign is now engaging in theatrical belt-tightening exercises like reducing staff salaries and♒ cutting office furniture.
By contrast, the Republican Party’s frontrunner, a billionaire who regularly touts his ability to self-fund, has spent very little on his campaign. Much of the campaign’s $4.2 million in expenses from July to September came from travel reimbursements and the purchase of paraphernalia like those “Make America Great Again” trucker caps. Trump’s suppor𝕴t in the polls has not been bought but earned in the form of free media exposure.
And what of 2016’s Democrats? Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton lags behind only Bush in terms of campaign dollars raised and, atﷺ over $97 million with $20 million in pro-Clinton super PAC treasuries, she remains the Democrat to beat.
But her chief rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, is at least making it a fund-raising race. From July to September, Sanders and Clinton raised the most of any of the candidate💎s in the 2016 race, including every Republican. Clinton raised $29.9 million, Sanders $26.6 million. Unlike Clinton’s strateg꧅y, which consists of substantial outreach to precisely the kind of high-dollar donors Lessig fears, 88 percent of Sanders’ donations came from contributors who offered less than $200.
The left’s pathological fear of money i🌃n politics is so all-consuming that none of the contrary evidence above will change any minds, least of all Professor Lessig’s. His is an unfalsifiable religious conviction.
The irony is that th🌳ey shouldn’🥀t be in denial. They should be celebrating.
Noah Rothman is assistant online editor at Commentary magazine.