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Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Is Now Chairing Lessig's Presidential Bid
Funksaw sends a followup to Tuesday's news that Lawrence Lessig is pondering a presidential campaign: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is now chairing the committee for Lessig's campaign. Wales said, "Larry's run for President is different. He's crowdfunding his campaign instead of seeking out rich donors. He's showing people that we can change the rigged political system. ... The Internet community came together to fight back against SOPA and we were successful. Now we’re behind Lessig to fight for citizen equality." Lessig's goal is to raise a million dollars by September 7, and they're already at roughly $300,000. Relatedly, Newsweek had a brief interview with Lessig over his potential campaign, and Eric Posner wrote an insightful piece about it at Slate.
If I'm going to support a candidate for the job of POTUS I expect them to get elected and then do the f***ing job for at least four years.
If he says he will be a one term president up front I then applaud him for that. But getting elected so he can resign makes no sense.
Go back to academia where you can play what if. We need a real POTUS committed to the job of running the country.
... "crowd funding" in politics is ancient. And I'd point out that most crowdfunding systems have no problem with rich donors. Go to kickstarter... scroll down... they've got prizes for people that give 10k. Generally involves people going to some stupid party with the developer or them inserting you into their work or something.
There's nothing new about Larry's campaign. Guy that founded Wikipedia likes him? Okay... that's interesting sort of... but the crowdfunding argument? I'm not such a low information voter that that doesn't pass the smell test.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
If he has only one bill he wants to pass, and then resign, that doesn't seem like much of a vision to me. The country can't be "fixed" by changing one law. I'd rather elect somebody who has a vision with a bit more scope.
In theory I like proportional representation. In practice every European country with PR seems to have at least one ridiculous/evil/nationalist party run by someone suspiciously similar to Donald Trump, which always seem to make the threshold. For awhile the Law of Jante seemed to protect the Scandinavian states and Germans from this, but the last Swedish elections resulted in a minority government that almost fell due to the Moderate's ignoring the Law of Jante and supporting some ridiculous brinksmanship from the Sweden Democrats.
So it's kinda a trade-off. In the first-past-the-post system minor, relatively unpopular movements, all have to co-opt themselves into a larger movement or be irrelevant. The advantage here is that they don't get office unless they have mainstream allies, which means they have to be somewhat reasonable. Unlike Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, or a half-dozen other European movements. The disadvantage is that sometimes the local definition of "reasonable" is wrong and somebody (ie: the US Greens) should have more power then they get.
In the US, of course, we have the added complication of Separation of Powers, whereby the larger movements can really fuck up the system without taking much responsibility; so they tend to court smaller movements by brinksmanship.