CRACKING
THE CODE
this stuff,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director of the Campaign Legal Center. “There’s always
a tendency within any coalition to
gather around in a circular firing
squad and shoot each other.”
Though they’ve welcomed the
new crop of campaign finance reformers, longtime activists believe
the focus of reformers should be
on building political support for
their ideas in Washington.
“A lot of times it’s the down
and dirty how-do-you-win-this in
politics,” McGehee said.
But those pushing to upend the
way campaigns are financed say
that they need to look beyond the
machinations on Capitol Hill and
embrace a bigger, bolder vision.
“Nearly everyone in the movement and outside of it accepts the
fact that we are going to need to
build a huge grassroots movement
if we have any chance of doing
anything,” said Josh Silver, CEO
of Represent.Us, a new reform
group organizing around its own
bill to empower small donors and
reform lobbying laws.
To do that, Silver said, there
needs to be a significant shift in
how reformers talk about the issue.
“You have to shift to corruption
and away from democracy and
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campaign finance reform and getting money out of politics,” Silver
said, echoing the language Lessig
has used. “The top-line message
has to be corruption. The simple
reason is if you go to a Walmart or
you’re at a campground or you’re
at church and you talk to somebody about campaign finance
reform or even democracy, their
eyes tend to glaze over. If you talk
to them about political corruption, they get fired up and start
talking about how much they
agree with you.”
INSTEAD OF LOOKING to the traditional reform effort’s backers —
typically large foundations like the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which
tend to dole out small amounts of
cash for isolated projects — the
new class of reformers are