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Larry Lessig Ends Presidential Campaign, Citing Unfair Debate Rules (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Harvard law professor Larry Lessig is ending his run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Lessig blames the demise of his campaign on party rules that have left him "shut out" of the Democratic debates. "The party won't let me be a candidate," Lessig said in his final campaign video. "I can't ask people to support a campaign that I know can't get before the members of the Democratic Party."
... and no one except his Mom and a few slashdot editors knows or cares.
That may change. For me, even just a few years ago, the corrupting influence of money in politics wasn't an issue that I'd ever really thought much about. There was a lot that I was angry about. But it was hard to make sense of it all.
The Iraq war never made any sense. If there was any country that should been held accountable for 9/11, it was Saudi Arabia. But somehow Saudi Arabia was our "friend". And then there was the housing/financial collapse followed by a long recession. Supposedly the Tea Party was all freaked out about the budget deficit but their solution was to advocate cutting taxes on the rich. Huh? If you're really concerned about budget deficits then you raise taxes - particularly on the people who can easily afford to pay more.
In his Gettysburg Address, which he probably wrote while he had smallpox, Abraham Lincoln talks about the USA having been founded to have a government of, by, and for the people. Now, at least until our robotic overlords take power, governments are always comprised of people. But what Abraham Lincoln meant was ordinary people - that the U.S.A was founded to be different than Europe, and most of the rest of the world, that was, at the time, governed by a small, mostly hereditary, ruling class living lives of frivolous luxury by exploiting everyone else. To me, one of the most egregious betrayals of the principles on which the USA was founded occurs at times when the USA is itself controlled by a small mostly hereditary ruling class and when the ruling class uses the US military to support brutal dictatorships in other countries because these dictatorships give money and other personal favors to members of the US ruling class - i.e. the "banana republic".
So why does a candidate like Hillary, who claims to be all about women's rights, have such a cozy relationship with Saudi Arabia? Obviously, follow the money. Like the Bushes, the Clintons have been given millions and millions of dollars by the Saudi ruling family. Do we want yet another president for the USA who deep in the pocket of brutal dictatorships like Suadi Arabia? Well, my personal answer is: Absolutely not!
There was a time when I didn't get it. But now, with Hillary running for president, and likely to receive the democratic nomination. Lessig's message about the corrupting influence of money was exactly what was needed. It's just too bad that the Democratic party chose to shut him down and suppress his message.
This is the Democrat Party we are talking about. The coronation of Hillary for 2016 was decided years ago.
No, his main problem was nobody knew who the fuck he was outside of a few nerds.
This guy was less prepared to run a presidential campaign than that fucking idiot Rick Perry. And that makes him a bigger idiot than Rick Perry--now there's an accomplishment.
It doesn't matter how prepared he is. Because the Clintons have the party establishment tied up, Dems have no viable candidates this year other than her, and she has a lot of legacy antipathy that will make the general election harder for her. Bernie's okay, but I figure he basically was allowed to run because he was too crazy a prospect to be a real threat to the Clinton machine.
Step one: learn your own history. Jefferson forsaw the rise of an American aristocracy and created a perfect tool to prevent and undo it: the estate tax. Since the early 20th century rightwingers have been progressively dismantling that tool and now, surprize surprize, America is ruled by a de facto aristocracy.
Restore the estate tax to 95% and the problem (in all its many forms) is fixed in one generation.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I thought his job was supposed to be convincing voters. Maybe that's just my biased view of living in a country with much less corruption. He did raise more money than several others in the race, including in the democratic debate and was polled at 1% in three separate polls. So he did convince people. He indeed failed to convince corrupt media that they should give up on millions of dollars of easy profit every year.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
He decided to remove the resignation component from his plans weeks ago. He was prepared to go whole hog. The Democratic Party still didn't want him in.
Maybe if he hadn't started off with such a silly plan in the first place, people might have taken him a little more seriously.
There are many labels you could give his plan, but "silly" seems inappropriate, at least if you know any history. The Founding Fathers would probably have strongly approved of such an initiative, since they knew their history too and modeled our country after principles of ancient Greece and Rome.
The ancient Romans had a specific way of dealing with a major crisis -- they'd elect a dictator as an "extraordinary magistrate" whose sole purpose was to deal with the crisis and then resign. The classic example invoked by the Founding Fathers was Cincinnatus who twice was given absolute power by the Romans and then gave it up to return to his farm. For the Romans, there was nothing worse than a politician who sought to keep power for a long time -- a trend that held for centuries until Julius Caesar finally broke that system and turned the Republic into an Empire.
George Washington has been compared to Cincinnatus a number of times, in that Washington could likely have been declared king after the Revolutionary War, but refused -- and then also made the example of resigning from the Presidency after two terms to avoid setting a precedent for a kind of king-like life-long reign.
I agree that Lessig's idea was idealistic and weird from a modern political perspective, but our country was founded on the ideal of a man who would take power to usher in ultimate reform (particularly in a crisis) and then give it up and return to his normal life. The Romans -- and the Founding Fathers -- thought there was no greater patriotic or noble duty than to be able give up great power once you have served your purpose.
The thing that's sad about Lessig's run is not only that he failed to get attention to his actual platform, but also that his revival of this old idea of giving up power failed to galvanize the American people, at a time when our system is moving increasingly toward concentrated power in the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Such a return to the ideals of the Founders may be one of the few things that could prevent an ultimate devolution into a Caesar-like autocratic regime at some point in the future. (And if that sounds overly alarmist, consider that the decline of the Roman Republic happened gradually introduced by reformers who pledged to help "the people" more and more, and with each stage of "populist" reform -- and periodic scare tactics and wars -- the "people" voted to give up more and more rights to their ruler.)
Are you stuck in the Cold War, bro? Whites have completely dominated boxing in the 21st century. Lazy, fat, African-Americans can't even come close to competing on the same level as the disciplined and well trained fighters coming out of Eastern Europe. All those black "stars" in the 70s never had to fight against anyone from the Soviet Bloc. They would barely be top ten if they had to compete against the whole world and not just other untalented African-Americans.
Dems have no viable candidates this year other than her
While Bernie Sanders is an independent, he does caucus with the Democrats. He's also trying to get the nomination of the Democratic party. You haven't explicitly defined 'viable' here, but I believe Bernie Sanders does indeed satisfy the criteria to be elected President.
Bernie's okay, but I figure he basically was allowed to run because he was too crazy a prospect to be a real threat to the Clinton machine.
So you're dismissing his candidacy on emotional grounds? How helpful. If only everyone thought like you -- then maybe, just maybe, we'd have a chance at implementing meaningful change in this country.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Never mind that Sanders has been polling above Clinton at least part of the time, he's not "viable" because "reasons."
Of course, the only reason people believe Sanders is "crazy" is because the media keeps claiming so, but that's a total lie -- in reality, Sanders' positions are completely reasonable and moderate.
He's not viable because the general election is going to be a whole lot worse for him than the primaries, no matter how he's polling generally now. The attack ads almost write themselves. They do for Hillary too because of how much is anti-Clinton on the right, so neither of them are great for a general, but she's already been through all of them and her general numbers now are the result of that, whereas Bernie will see a hit once the general public has seen more attack aimed at him. Things like "socialist" may not matter as much on the left, but that label alone will cost him points on the right. And some of his lines in debate will kill him on the right. In reality he *might* be a better president than HRC, he'd certainly care about Americans more and try to make better policy changes, although HRC might get more done even though being much less trustworthy, just because she's a good politician. Most of Bernie's more leftist ideas would be blocked by Congress, but he'd probably get some good things done. It's really hard to say who would ultimately be better.
But either will be better than the Republicans, because the next president gets to appoint major voices to the Supreme Court for the next several decades.