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>Lessig never wanted to be president; he wanted a podium. But you can't say that. If he indicated he wasn't serious about being president in any way, they never would have let him on stage.

I guess that's the difference between the Democratic party debates and the Republican party debates. I know that sounds like a troll, but it's not. The GOP primary debates had 17 people running, the Democratic primary had 5 (not counting Lessig). No one seriously thinks that Lindsey Graham is going to be the nominee, nor did anyone think that he could be the nominee when he ran. He's a single issue candidate (national security) and his agenda is make sure this issue is discussed during the primaries. The same thing with Santorum and Huckabee ("traditional values"). It's not a new phenomenon. Back in 1988, Pat Robertson ran with a "Christian conservative" agenda, but no one seriously thought that he was going to be president. His role was to highlight the power of the conservative evangelical Christians in the Republican party, thus causing the eventual nominee to (and the party as a whole) to pay attention to their issues. There's nothing with this tactic, and it may even be effective. But it seems like it's more prominent on the national stage in the Republican Party than the Democratic Party.

As much as I hate to defend Lindsey Graham, I honestly think he's running for the VP slot. He would make an appealing VP for the Republican base -- hawkish on defense and a veteran of senate dealmaking.

Not that I think he was looking to get put into a hypothetical future Democratic cabinet, but where could he have ended up at, had he greater visibility? Supreme Court? DoJ?

Lessig running not as a VP, but to get his podium into the next White House seems like a worthwhile shot.

And he also is against free speech, perhaps they should run together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSV6iqxL2s0

That is one of the analyses I've heard. The other is that he's playing a bit of a coach, making the eventual nominee hone his foreign policy prior to the general.

The only reason why I chose Lindsey Graham for my example, was that he's stuck in JV debates, and had I could articulate a reason for his candidacy -- as opposed to Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, or George Pataki. I honestly can't figure out why their staying the race, except for perhaps for personal marketing reasons.

The difference is really the level of popular support. Even Graham and Santorum, who weren't even on the "main stage" of the recent GOP debate, have won U.S. Senate elections and have national name recognition that far outstrips Lessig.

Lessig seems to think that if he eked his way onto the stage of a televised Democratic debate, he'd have a chance of jump-starting a national political campaign on the issue of campaign finance.

But it's actually the reverse: you only get onto a debate stage if you already have a campaign. The polling criteria is not a gotcha. It's just the easiest way to ensure that only people with actual popular traction get stage time. The debate is not intended to be a "big intro" opportunity. There are other events for that, like the convention (Obama), or big events like the Prayer Breakfast (Ben Carson).

In part the difference in the numbers between the parties is simply that there is no clear favorite on the GOP side, while there is an overwhelming favorite on the Dem side. There are a lot of senior Democrats who have chosen to sit this one out rather than challenge Hillary.

Lessig's agenda wasn't to overturn Citizens United, it was public financing of campaigns. Nobody --not Sanders nor Lessig -- is going to push that through Congress any time soon.

Citizens United is probably doomed under Clinton if she's elected, no less than under Sanders. Demographically Kennedy, Scalia, or Thomas is likely to be replaced in the next five years and very likely in the next nine and CU hangs by a single vote on the Supreme Court.

Of course, reversing CU will actually make things worse from Lessig's stated perspective. With less independent money and with outside voices silenced, politicians will either be more entrenched with special interests or forced to spend even more time raising money from business executives. Unless you have a full restructuring of the system with public financing, most any plausible change isn't going to improve things.

Firstly: I'm not in the US, and fairly left leaning even for someone outside the US. That said:

I think that the US progressive establishment's fixation on the Citizen's United case is misguided.

I'm biased towards the idea that speech should be free, and tend to think that this should include spending money on making your view heard.

I think that effort could be better spend on attempting to fix the problem of wrong speech: if people are pushing political agendas using things that are factually incorrect that should be restricted. IANAL, but I think that this is likely to be more legally achievable in the US too: IS libel laws have a model of truth as a defense, and it seems to me this could be a framework for regulating false political speech.

Your proposal would run smack up against the First Amendment. Both right and left will will reject any sort of speech control out of hand here in the USA.

Maybe.

But if you can explain how overturning Citizen's United wouldn't run into that problem while this idea I'd find that helpful.

OTOH, Libel in the US is already a thing. I'm saying extending those laws to make "the American people" a group that has standing, and falsehoods something that has harm. There is some existing precedent for that under libel.

The problem with CU isn't the 1st Amendment, it's corporate personhood and the press.

It's easy to argue that corporations and unions don't deserve free speech as their directors, employees and members are all entitled to free speech individually.

However the press is different. Nobody, rightly so, wants to limit the press to say and print whatever they like (so long as it's not slander/libel) and today's press is made up of corporations.

How do we keep a free press and silence other corporations?

Oh yeah, the corporate personhood thing. I forgot that.

But I only forgot about it because I simply don't see how that matters in an real way.

Even if corporate personhood went away then (actual, real human) people would be paid to speak for a corporation, and then you hit the the 1st Amendment rights issues again.

>Even if corporate personhood went away then (actual, real human) people would be paid to speak for a corporation

There are proper campaign finance laws which regulate the above. Nothing is currently regulating SuperPACs at the moment, even American divisions of foreign corporations can accept money.

People decry career politicians and wish for an alternative, and when we finally get an outsider like Lessig to run and he's weak and apologetic about what he'd do if he won (pass some reforms, step down). That's such bullshit, he should have run like anyone else and then I would have supported him.

It's his own fault for being weak.

> Whether or not you like Sanders, he is the only viable candidate whose core issue is overturning Citizens United.

Repealing the First Amendment is a tremendously weighty decision, and not one whose prospect should fill anyone with optimism.

Nobody mentioned repealing the First Amendment.

It would be quite easy to overturn Citizens United, a weak 5-4 decision borne of highly-questionable provenance, without touching the First Amendment in any way.

The plaintiffs in Citizens United, lest we forget, wanted to be permitted to release a movie critical of a presidential candidate during an election. If that is made illegal again, that strikes me as being quite definitely against the spirit of the First Amendment.

Lest you forget, the plaintiffs wanted to bash Hillary Clinton around and run infinite quantities of ads with infinite anonymous funding for said ads, too, to support "Hillary: The Movie", which wasn't actually a movie that they wanted to release, btw, it was actually a big long TV ad.

Come on, at least be intellectually honest.

They wanted to shadow-fund a TV ad campaign.

Clever of you to leave those facts out!

"Lest you forget, the plaintiffs wanted to bash Hillary Clinton around"

Wait, why would it be wrong to bash a politician around again?

Once again, you conveniently leave out the key part of the comment in question: the source of the funding.

Citizens United wasn't about speech. It was about unlimited anonymous money flooding our elections.

Nothing is wrong with criticizing a politician. That's obvious. But thanks for the clumsy obfuscation attempt.

I disagree.

Even the ACLU supported the Citizen's United decision. [1]

[1] - https://www.aclu.org/aclu-and-citizens-united

Lessig didn't (just) want to overturn Citizens United, he wanted to make campaigns publicly financed. Meaning: the Government will spend your tax money to buy advertisements for politicians.

I think that's a terrible idea, and as long as Lessig is flogging it, he won't get my support.

We have public election funding in Canada and it has ushered in the end of days. The voteman came for my last neighbour yesterday. I am certain he will come for me soon. I will save the last bullet for myself. Let this be a lesson to all those who are tempted by public election financing.

Yes, please spend my tax money so you can do you job, write laws that serve my interests. Please stop spending most of your time chasing special interests for money, stop writing laws that serve the needs of those special interests over mine.

That is exactly what I want. Why do you think it is a terrible idea? I'd eve hazard a guess that the money we save from reducing tax loop holes, bad contracts, subsidies and other pork could cover much of the cost of the public funding.

He still could. In the AMA he seems to like Sanders a bit, but Lessig advocated a different approach that he "thought" would be more effective. Now that Lessig has realized it didn't work, I wouldn't be surprised by an endorsement.