Mark McKinnon -- the Republican campaign consultant who helped create George W. Bush, and who for a time ran John McCain's campaign -- and I don't agree about much. We do agree about the need for fundamental reform of the way campaigns are funded. About a year ago, I said to McKinnon that "the only way we win this issue is if a Republican makes it his." "There's only one Republican," he said to me, "who could do that credibly, and he is not running."
On Thursday, Buddy Roemer proved McKinnon wrong. In an event in Baton Rouge, Roemer announced that he was launching an exploratory committee to consider a run for the presidency. He also announced a campaign different from the campaign of every other candidate. A president, Roemer told his audience, "must be free to lead" -- free of commitments to anything save the principles he commits to. So Roemer's campaign will take no PAC money. It will take no more than $100 in contributions from any individual. And everyone who contributes anything regardless of how small will be disclosed. His will be the first true small dollar campaign for the presidency, and the first that is truly transparent. The single message he will preach is that (practically) every single problem that we as Americans face can be tied to the corrupting influence of money in politics. His success will turn on how powerfully he can prove that claim.
This is not the first time Buddy Roemer has run a campaign like this. When he was elected governor in Louisiana in 1987, there were no limits on contributions at all. Corporations as well as individuals could give as much to a campaign as they wanted, and those contributions were not disclosed. Roemer ran a campaign similar to the one he has announced for president -- limiting the size and the source of the contributions he would take, and disclosing the name of every single contributor. He beat an incumbent (and later to be convicted for corruption) governor and changed the character of the governorship in Louisiana ever since.
I have no clue whether Roemer has a shot in what will certainly be an overcrowded Republican field. The odds are certainly against him. But for Republicans and Democrats alike (not to mention the Republic), let's hope he has. For by focusing his campaign so clearly on money, Roemer will give America a chance to act on what three quarters of us already believe -- that money buys results in our government, and that that corruption must be stopped if our government is to be controlled.
Pundits will sneer at this. Americans believe their government is corrupt, they will say, but Americans don't put fixing that corruption anywhere near the top of their political wish lists.
So much is certainly true. But is that because America doesn't care about the corruption that is our government, or because they don't believe that any politician really intends to change it? And if a campaign made this issue -- the one issue we all really agree about -- the issue, and worked for the remaining 20 months of this campaign to show us how every problem that we see -- from jobs to out of control government spending to regulatory policy gone nuts -- is tied to this single issue, no one knows what happens then. Pundits look backwards. Some day they'll explain how it happened. But don't count on them to predict it.
Barack Obama also promised this sort of change. As he said in Philadelphia three years ago, "If we're not willing to take up that fight," -- the fight to "change the way Washington works" -- "then real change, change that will make a lasting difference in the lives of ordinary Americans, will keep getting blocked by the defenders of the status quo." But when he became president, Obama gave up that fight. It was more important to him to play the game to get his policies through than to "change the way Washington works."
That was an important betrayal. And the consequence of that betrayal today is that most Americans see change coming from the Right, not the Left. They see a Tea Party that has forced a Republican leadership, and therefore Congress, to give up earmarks. And they could now see the whole focus of a Republican campaign for the presidency tied to fundamental reform. The Republicans have stolen the ball, after the President fumbled it. Roemer is the clearest, and maybe just first, example of a Republican candidate to pick it up and run.
One hundred years ago, the last great Republican reformer, Teddy Roosevelt, said this:
The Republican Party is now facing a great crisis. It is to decide whether it will be, as in the days of Lincoln, the party of the plain people, the party of progress, the party of social and industrial justice; or whether it will be the party of privilege and of special interests, the heir to those who were Lincoln's most bitter opponents, the party that represents the great interests within and without Wall Street which desire through their control over the servants of the public to be kept immune from punishment when they do wrong and to be given privileges to which they are not entitled.
Roemer's campaign site is free2lead.com. Watch a campaign ad from his 1987 campaign for governor here.
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Being from Louisiana is a mark against Roemer because people of the South are not generally thought of as "educated". (I should know. I live there too.) Our state college is famous only for football and of our two senators, both act Republican even though this poor state should be royal blue democratic.
Our governor, a Rhodes Scholar no less, comes across as a fool concerned only with advancing his own career in politics and unmindful of the impression he makes while pursuing it.
The only point in Louisiana politics is to feather ones own nest it seems and our government is full of crooks.
Now on the positive side, you will not find nicer people, better food or a more fun party anywhere in the country. They have some of the prettiest scenery here and the state is filled with natural beauty and wonders.
Who knows? Huey Long could have been a real contender if his body guards had not shot him.
Regardless of what people think of his eloquence, Roemer may be like other Southern politicians and be a true populist. There is not enough about him to know anything yet.
Now alot of people wish they had learned more about Obama before we elected him president.
We find ourselves now in a desperate search for another Great Man.
And I am NOT a republican. But it is statements like that that ARE the problem.
Duplicity and deceit? Try the first president to REFUSE public financing and receive the largest corporate donations in history. A democrat, Barack Obama.
Lying sleazebags come in all parties.
Until we do reform our election process, debates on issues like climate change, health care, taxation, foreign policy, etc are meaningless. The govt will, in the end, come very close to following what the special interests want even if it goes counter to whats best for the economy, our security, or our health. We all know the pols first priority in office is to get re-elected over and over again, and that they need buckets full of money to buy tevee time to pound their lies into the voters heads over and over again. So when the pols accept cash from BP- don't be surprised when BP gets off the hook all too easily.
Our political debate has little meaning today because the special interests are in charge. We need to change that.
Not familiar with Roemer but I have learned that TR started the Spanish American War based on the sinking of the Maine, which actually resulted from faulty engineering and not an attack by the Cubans. I don't think the American public can afford any more false wars or fights.
You're not specifically referring to the sinking of the Maine, in Havana harbor, that was significantly precipitating to the onset of the Spanish American War, as has been discussed in this thread, are you ?
Would you say that Franklin Delano Roosevelt somehow shamefully "used" the Dec. 1941 tragic attack on Pearl Harbor "to advance a political and economic agenda" ?
I certainly wouldn't [put that in such perjorative terms], though it's hard to argue against the fact that FDR had been "swimming against the current" of much popular U.S. opinion for years, in exhorting his country for preparation for entry into war, at least as an ally of Britain against the Nazis in Europe, in a war FDR long'd felt it was ultimately inevitable the U.S. would at some point have to enter.
And it's also hard to argue, though again I again certainly wouldn't perjoratively hang low and conniving "war mongering" motivations on FDR for this, in retrospect, that the [essentially full employment] vastly stepped up war materials manufacturing activity in the country, following the post Pearl Harbor U.S. Declaration of War for WW2, etc., is generally looked on by economic historians as being the overriding precipitating factor in finally pulling the U.S. economically out from the long painful years of the Great
I don't know if I will vote for Gov. Roemer in a general election - and as a Registered Democrat in my State I don't have the option of voting for him in a Primary.
However - I pledge now to donate to his campaign as he follows through. Some early, some later if he stays in until my State's primary election.
In the meantime I'm going to read up on his stance on issues, and see whether I want to see a *gasp* Republican in the White House again in 2012.
If Roemer does win the Republican nomination, could Obama show his grassroots mentality that he showed in 2008 and emulate him in a "fair" fight ?
That'd be awesome, and give a TON of political capital to the elected President following the election.