Lessig Asks: Can You Build a Movement from Capitol Hill?

Stanford
professor and free culture guru Larry Lessig has taken the next step his possible
journey to Capitol Hill, with the launch of an exploratory committee with a
home at Lessig08.org. He's seriously considering,
he says, making a run in the California congressional seat vacated with the
death of Tom Lantos. But in his "announcement video," Lessig announces
not just one idea but two, and it's the first that's got more meat on it at
this point -- an expansion of his nascent Change
Congress effort. In fact, Lessig ties his possible run to the question of
whether or not launching a campaign and/or actually serving as the 12th district's
member of Congress is the best way to advance this national "grassroots"
movement. It's a provocative question, and it's exciting to watch Lessig go
through the process of answering it.

As for the movement itself, Lessig details its three main principles: (1) not
taking any money from lobbyists or PACs, (2) voting to ban earmarks, and (3)
supporting public campaign financing. This being Lessig, those ideas are detailed
in a minimalist slide show presentation. Check it out here.

Motivating his possible run, Lessig says, is the support he's already seen
on the Internets. Indeed, the way that the tubes have rallied around a man regarded
as its patron saint is a sight to behold. Says Lessig on
his blog, "I've been spurred to consider it seriously by the enormous
support of many at draftlessig.org and
facebook
(and by the cool swag at zazzle)."
When I first
posted about the nascent Lessig for Congress effort on Friday, that Facebook
group stood at 548 members. It's now at 2,654. The
ActBlue fundraising page Lessig himself set up has collected more than $3,500
from 55 supporters.

If the idea of a Stanford prof and lawyer building a national political movement
from the groundup seems ambitious, then consider that Lessig has done such a
thing before. When his side lost the Eldred v. Ashcroft copyright extension
case in 2003, Lessig, he has said publicly, made the judgment that sensible
policies about creative content control would only have a chance at political
life in Washington DC if there was a cultural shift in the way people
think about copyright, trademark, and the like. So he set to work trying to
set that shift in motion, laying the groundwork for what has become an international
Creative Commons and free culture
movement.

There are echoes in what Lessig is doing in what John Edwards attempted to
do with this One America movement early on in his '08 presidential run. But
it was sometimes difficult to nail down in the early going whether Edwards was
running for President of the United States or movement leader. It's debatable
whether that approach took some steam out of his campaign in those first days.
As for Lessig, he says he'll make his decision on whether or not to run by March
1, which is 10 days from today. Larry Lessig is undoubtedly a super, super smart
guy. As such, it will be fascinating to see what his judgment ends up to be:
can you really run for Congress and serve as the new kid on Capitol Hill while
also building a grassroots movement with ambitions of overhauling politics
as we know it?

(One last note: If he did make a go of it, Lessig would be facing off in the
Democratic primary against a well-regarded longtime California politician named
Jackie Speier. More on her here.)