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Bob Edgar

Bob Edgar is the president and CEO of Common Cause, a pro-reform 501(c)(4) organization. Prior, he was the general secretary of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA and a six-term Democratic U.S. representative from Pennsylvania. Edgar is the author of Middle Church, a book about people of faith and the progressive movement.

Josh Israel and Sarah Laskow interviewed Edgar on April 16, 2008.

You were a “Watergate Baby,” part of the class of reformers elected to Congress in 1974 in the aftermath of Watergate. What do you remember of those times in the early days of trying to change the campaign finance system in light of that scandal?

Well, back in 1974 when I got elected by accident to the United States Congress, I came with a lot of passion for reform. You’ll remember, we unseated three major committee chairs, Wilbur Mills, Eddie Hebert, Wright Patman, who chaired the Ways and Means Committee, the Armed Services Committee, and the Banking Committee. We were known as reformers. We were young. I was 31, having gotten elected one year after looking the word “Democratic” up in the telephone book. The highest office I had held prior to being a congressman was vice-chairman of my son’s parent-teacher organization. So reform and reform issues were in our blood.

Campaign finance reform was not as prominent an issue then. More prominent was to try to get the porkbarreling of water projects and special interest projects out of legislation. Over the years, the issue of money in politics grew. The expensive campaigns grew. One of the things that I discovered pretty quickly was that 90 percent of the House members got reelected over and over again without any problem. I couldn’t understand why they were raising so much money, several hundred thousand dollars for their reelection. Then I discovered they were giving that away to other congressmen for their races or to candidates who they thought might win so that they could move up the leadership ladder. A lot of that money went into trying to buy friends from other congressmen and senators who were getting elected.

Since that time, there has been a new wrinkle that most of the public doesn’t know about. That is, a number of chairmen have to raise money to give to the party. So they are out there raising a half million or a million dollars. They are getting money and they are giving some of it to candidates and a chunk of it to their political parties, both Republican and Democrat. One of my secret missions is to get donors to write notes on their checks saying: “This money goes for your reelection. If you don’t need it, send it back. Please don’t give it to your party. Please don’t use it to pay your dues. Please don’t give it to another candidate. If I want to support your party or the other candidate, then I will make a contribution directly to them.” It would change dramatically how much money is raised in campaigns.

I also think that the expense of television and radio has escalated and the expense of large staffs who know how to use computers has escalated. So the cost of campaigning has increased. Special interest influence has increased because more and more money has piled in. Some of it is used directly and some of it is used for the so-called 527s. We have not been helped by a Supreme Court who has, I think, misunderstood the First Amendment. Money is not speech. Speech is speech. Money can stifle speech. We need to re-educate the public to put pressure on the Supreme Court to recognize that our Founding Fathers and Mothers never intended money to be speech.

What is Common Cause and what role has it played in this process?

Common Cause is an organization formed 38 years ago by a very thoughtful Republican leader by the name of John Gardner. He recognized, in the wake of Watergate and in the wake of Vietnam, that everybody had lobbyists around the country and inside of Washington but average ordinary common people. It was John Gardner’s vision that an organization like Common Cause would be formed, work on election reform, work on media and democracy issues, work on lobbying reform and ethics reform, and to hold public officials accountable so they serve the public interests and not the special interests.

It certainly kept you in business over that time.

I joined Common Cause in September of last year full time and was elected last May, simply because I think the melody that is playing across the country is a melody of reform, of change, of hope and newness. I think all three presidential candidates, Senator [Barack] Obama, Senator [Hillary] Clinton, and Senator [John] McCain have all gotten on that wave; they didn’t create that wave.

I think it’s very similar to the early ‘70s when Watergate and Vietnam created Common Cause. Now we have Iraq and we have all these scandals: [Jack] Abramoff and [Tom] DeLay and a congressman caught with $90,000 of cold, hard cash in his freezer and a Republican congressman who took $4 million from defense contractors. It’s time for Common Cause to recalibrate itself and reassert itself for this time.

You’re a 501(c)(4) organization with an affiliated education fund 501(c)(3). Does your organization support candidates in any way who share your mission?

Our organization is not only nonpartisan and bipartisan but I like to use the term “transpartisan.” We try to transcend issues. Former Congressman Jim Leach is the chairman of my board who spent 30 years as a Republican congressman. We’re trying to build a coalition that cuts across party lines and party affiliations and capture all of those people who care about clean government, good government, getting the election process straight.

We have two themes this year. One is, “Let’s Get it Straight in 2008,” meaning the election process, so we don’t have hanging chads and voting machines that can’t be audited and can’t be recounted. “Let’s Have a Fresh Start for Democracy.” Why is it OK for us to have prison camps at Guantanamo, secret detention, torture, preemptive war on the international side and domestically? Why is it OK for us to have a nation that doesn’t care about the 9 million children who have no health care or issues like global warming?

We don’t want to get down in the weeds and write that legislation, but we do think that the nation deserves to have elected officials who think more broadly about the common good and get elected without the strings that are attached to campaign money that currently is attached to all these special interests groups that are fueling and funding campaign after campaign.

Common Cause doesn’t back candidates in any party or any candidates at all?

That’s correct. We’ve taken on all of the current presidential candidates on the issue of presidential campaign finance reform. We try to stay out of any hint of partisanship in our work. We just want to say to Democrats, Republicans, and independents, when you get elected, serve for the common good. While you’re getting yourself elected, use common sense, use ethical staff and ethical practices. Once elected, set up systems like we just achieved on the House side, an independent ethics panel, so it doesn’t get caught up in favoritism or party controlling, who gets investigated and who doesn’t.

In 2002, Common Cause was a key backer of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, known commonly as McCain-Feingold or Shays-Meehan. We’ve seen it now in effect for about six years. How’s it working?

I think the system is not working well; I think it’s broken. I have a lot of respect for what McCain and [Russ] Feingold did and the House members who supported presidential financing, but it needs to be adjusted. It needs to be adjusted for current realities. Back in those days, we didn’t have the understanding that you could raise a million donors online. Even good government candidates now can bypass the current system. I think it still has a lot of flaws, particularly driven by what the Supreme Court has done on saying that money is speech. Money is not speech. Money stifles speech.

I think as soon as this presidential campaign is over, whether the candidates take the system or not take it, we need to get inside the Congress of the United States and help them to see the importance of presidential campaign financing. Fix the things that are broken on the McCain-Feingold legislation, restore it, repair it, rebuild it so that by the 2012 election, all the candidates who run for president use the campaign finance system.

I would also say there are other reforms that need to be made. We ought not to have presidential campaigns that last for three and a half years. I jokingly said the Iowa caucuses will be rescheduled for February 2009 for the 2012 campaign. We’ve got to get back to some rationality in terms of the way in which we schedule primaries, and we need to be effective with that. Maybe we need to rotate it a bit so that one state or several states don’t have all the influence of picking the candidates. Clearly we need a system of public financing so that candidates who are not the best fundraisers or who do not have billions of dollars in their pocket are not the ones that rush to the front of the line simply because they’ve been cleverer in raising the money.

Along the lines you’re talking about, we have a public financing system of sorts for the presidential campaigns that does not exist for congressional races. In the primary, the candidates are eligible to get a matching fund based on how much they raise. In the general, they’re eligible for a straight grant assuming they agree to limit their spending. We’ve seen, in the primary, all of the major candidates, one by one, opt out of the matching opportunity. Now we have both frontrunners saying that they may opt out for the first time for the general as well. Is this system on its death bed, and can it be fixed?

I think it can be fixed. I think it has to be adjusted to the cost of running campaigns today. I think if you go back and look, you’ll discover that the candidates that have already dropped out are candidates who needed a healthy public financing system. The candidates that are still in are the ones that were clever enough and effective enough to raise gobs and gobs of money. I do think that the general public doesn’t realize how much that money influences candidates.

If you’ve raised several hundred million dollars from energy companies or oil, coal, gas, any of the affiliate companies that deal with energy, or you connect that with the auto industry, you are probably going to have a president that continues our current dependence on Middle Eastern oil and Venezuelan oil. When I was in Congress in 1977, President [Jimmy] Carter signed into law the first energy bill which had in it a mandatory fuel efficiency component that historians say was the most important part of that legislation. We lifted from 13 miles a gallon to 27 miles a gallon.

All of the auto industry said within 20 years we’d have automobiles that would give more fuel efficiency. All the energy companies said we would shift to alternative solar and wind power. Here we are almost 30 years later and we don’t have a strong alternative energy component. We’ve got the side effects of global warming. Much of that is the result of the current system, the lack of public financing, and the strong influence of special interest lobbying.

What I want to see is public officials serving the broader public concern, running, getting elected, using a clean public financing system. We have it in Maine; we have it in Connecticut; we have it in Arizona. It’s working. The governor of Arizona got elected by raising 2,000 $5 bills. Once she did that, she was the candidate who accepted public financing. Every time her opponent raised a couple hundred thousand dollars, her amount of public financing went up. Once she was elected, she was no longer tied to the medical industry that was pushing a drug bill. The health legislation passed in Arizona. It was passed and signed free of that special interest tension. Would that happen in every city and every state and every level of elected offices here in the United States, including the president . . .

If you get a couple hundred million dollars from a particular industry, your door is going to be open to them, especially if, as a president, you have to run for reelection, not in four years, but because of the way the system is set up, within two years they’re out running again. They’re going to raise half a billion dollars to a billion dollars for their next reelection. You can’t tell me that that doesn’t influence which bills they sign, which bills they work on, which issues they make as a priority issue.

Yesterday it was in the news, a proposal to temporarily suspend the gas tax, which a number of people suggested would end up transferring those amounts ultimately from the government coffers to oil company coffers. Do you see that as connected to the hundreds of thousands of dollars in oil company contributions?

It’s all connected. For every penny of gas tax that we collect as we pump gas into the automobiles, those moneys go into a highway trust fund. I would prefer they go into a transportation trust fund so you could spend them on public transit as well as highways. You’ve got a crazy situation where people want the best interstate highway system in the free world and the best transportation system but many people don’t want to pay for it. The energy companies have shown the largest profits of any the corporations recently.

You then drill down a little deeper and you will find that they’re some of the largest donors to members of the House and Senate. If you drill down even further, you can actually make a list of those congressmen who depend on either the energy companies or the auto companies shaping their campaign contributions. You can predict how they’re going to vote as legislation comes up.

If we’re going to address global warming, if we’re going to have an alternative energy system that includes things like solar energy and wind power and ocean power, if we’re going to reduce our reluctance on foreign oil from the Middle East or Central and South America, if we’re going to not consume the non-renewable resources that have been created over 5 billion years, and we only started using them 150 years ago and we’re about to run out of some of them that took 5 billions years to create, we’ve got to really shake the system. Get money out of politics. Get it back to where elected officials are really thinking what’s in the public’s interest, not what’s in my interest in keeping this job for the rest of my life.

What’s your take on the Obama campaign’s argument that they’ve created a parallel public financing system when you raise millions of dollars in small increments online? Does that lessen the corrupting influence of money and politics?

I think there is good news and bad news. The good news is it does lessen the impact of any one set of donors. I still believe that it fuels a system that puts too much money into politics. I think as it evolves — and we’ve only seen it in the last couple of elections, that people have used the technology of computers to raise money. I think that corporations and labor unions and other special interests are going to figure that out pretty quickly. I think the organizations, so-called 527s that have unlimited ability to spend money, you don’t think they’re watching that and trying to come up with millions of dollars?

If you’re liberal, you will look at something like MoveOn.org that has 4 million email addresses and they can raise a couple hundred thousand dollars at the push of a button. There are counterparts on the far right as well. It is accurate for Obama to say the more donors, the less influence. I think overall and into the future, you’re going to find people learning how to use that system, hiring every 35-and-under person they can find who understands how to use computers, and we’ll all be inundated with the begging for money.

I would like to see all of the candidates spend more physical time on issues. Let me just go back to my Senate race. I had to raise a very small amount of money, $4 million, not a lot. I can tell you, every second I wasn’t out giving a public speech, I was on the phone begging for money. If you have to raise $25,000 in an evening’s event, it takes a whole bunch of your staff to figure out how to get those people at the event. Now you need $50,000 or $100,000 because it’s 25 years later.

The same kind of staff is invested in figuring out how they can talk people into giving them a contribution. What if that staff were working on issues, shaping those issues, helping the candidate to articulate those issues? What if we also instituted a system where the candidates themselves had to be in their commercials rather than having all of these consultants that they hire shape their commercials?

When I ran for the Senate, the Bob Edgar I saw on television I didn’t like very much. I was so busy being a candidate, I didn’t have time to go back and reshape it. What if I had to be on Face to Face on the camera or in the radio commercial talking about the things I cared about, and my opponent was out there doing the same? Wouldn’t that be a better way for us to understand? One thing we might do is just make those commercials where the candidate has to speak personally and frankly and face-to-face into the camera, make them cheaper than the specialty commercials where people are shaping.

We’ll see in the Pennsylvania primary that’s coming up, both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton will be using commercials made overnight to shape their message. True, false, nobody has time to check those in the last few days before an election. The one that has the cleverest consultant is going to be the one that wins. The one who’s raised the most money will be able to hire the cleverest consultants. We don’t always make that connection either that money not only is not speech, but money does equal having more talented staff, more talented people, and more opportunity to do more things in a campaign.

You’re saying that you didn’t agree with the advertisements or consultants made for your campaign for the Senate?

Well, it’s not that I didn’t agree with them. I would see them after they were made and they were often shaped by my campaign staff. When you run for the House of Representatives, you can retail yourself. When you run statewide in seven media markets, you wholesale yourself. I can win every election where I was retailing myself, where I can talk with a significant portion of the population and they can get a sense or a feel as to who I am as a person. Sometimes you hire consultants who think they know what you’re like as a person. They spend a little time with you. They go around listening to your speech. Sometimes they’re not able to pick up the essence of who you are.

Take Senator Clinton. I think Senator Clinton has been unfairly described in the media. Her consultants, some days, try to make her look softer. Sometimes they try to make her look harder. Sometimes, as they’ve done in the last 48 hours, [they’ve] latched on to one sentence out of a whole speech her opponent made, and she is blasting him. She’s got to be careful. Her consultants have to be careful that she doesn’t go too far and people do backlash to that stuff.

All night long, they’re working on what’s that message. I just think candidates lose elections often because they don’t have the right marriage. I think Senator Obama, at least in the early stages of the campaign, had better staff and better ability to tap into the melodies that were playing out there of hope and change. He does better if he ignores all of the attacks that are made on him and speaks directly to the hunger of people to get it straight, to get it right, to get a fresh start for democracy, have a sense of hope that we can actually fix things that are broken.

I think there’s a lot of — to use one of his terms — bitterness out there. That bitterness is expressed. He may have fumbled in saying it but that bitterness is expressed in saying: “How can we as young people? How can we as people of color? How can we as women? How can we as men who are working? How can we as senior citizens? How can we as teachers? How can we as environmentalists fix those things that are broken in our society? How can we resist those corporate interests or special interests that want to move us back to the old way of thinking or who want to hold onto their particular image so that they can rake in profits on into the future?”

Let’s talk for a minute about 527s and other independent groups. Why do they have so much influence nowadays, and is there a rule for them?

They have so much influence because of television, because of radio, because of sophistication of computers. They have so much influence because elections; our nation is split. I’m going to say something that will sound partisan but it’s a fact. Over the last eight years, at least, with the current administration, they have been dividers, not unifiers. We are divided on the issue of the war. We are divided on the issue on how to respond to the economy. The current administration was the administration who was going to fix the economy, give tax breaks, and everybody was going to be healthy. Well, with the subprime mortgage rate and people are a paycheck away form being poor, 47 million of us without health care, 9 million children without health care, there’s a sense of desperation in our country. They really want the nation to go in the right direction.

On the one side, you’ve got that sense of desperation. On the other side, you’ve got corporate interests and others that would like to accentuate their profits. So you’ve got this tension. I think we’re going through a system of redefining who America is, what it stands for. We are also fine-tuning capitalism. One side is saying, “How come capitalism is based on having a percentage of our people poor and a percentage of the world’s population poor?” Those on the other side are saying, “How can we compete with China and India and stay at the forefront of the superpower?” They have one side who is saying, “Let’s have superpower-ness with humility,” and the other side saying, “We like the arrogance and the preemptive war; we should dominate.”

I think there is a lot of confusion around terrorism that’s dividing the nation. Think about the British. They caught the liquid bombers, not by war effort, but by police effort. We’ve got others who are carrying around in their head a World War II image that if you bomb capitals, you’re somehow getting that terrorist. My own view is that I think terrorists love what we’re doing. We’re putting huge amounts of debt on our children and grandchildren. We’re building big weapon systems that they’re not afraid of because they’re using other tactics. We’re doubling and tripling our defense budget when we should be using some of that to strengthen our security. Our secure system is based on having our public education work, our health care system work, and our quality of life system work. We’re draining that quality of life on our war efforts.

I think America is so split that 527s are coming in and able to say, “I don’t support a particular candidate but I’m going to blast the heck out of a particular candidate.” The swiftboating they did on Senator Kerry is an example of that. If Senator Obama is successful in getting the Democrat nomination, wait until you see what they do to him in the last days before an election, legally. Morally, I think it’s repugnant. It’s not just the money that they can spend. It’s some of the untrue attacks that will be made, again, to divide the nation as opposed to unifying the nation.

You keep talking about computers and technology and how that plays into the political process. I know Common Cause has done some work on electronic voting machines. How does that play in? Are they helping or hurting?

Your question is a good one. I almost wanted to answer by saying, “Hello, this is Bob, your automated computerized congressman brought to you by.” Computers have become a part of our life. Here is a question. How come I can go to an ATM machine, push a few buttons and get a hundred bucks out of my own account? At the end of the month, get a statement that accurately tells me that the hundred dollars has been taken. I can’t trust going to vote and making sure not only that my vote counts, but I can recount that vote if it is a close election.

In Pennsylvania in a week or so, we are going to have an election where over 50 percent of the voting machines can’t be audited, can’t be recounted, are potentially able to be hacked into. Why is it that we can’t get that straight? Here’s an interesting thing that’s happening that you may want to follow up on. The Kennedy Library in Massachusetts gives a Profiles in Courage Award every year. This year they have two honorees. Both are secretaries of state, one from California and one from Ohio, who went in and decertified the machines that are broken. They simply took them out of service and said, “We won’t use them.” We’ve got the governor, Republican, of Florida who got elected as a populist and the first thing he did was say, “We are going to use only machines that have a paper trail so they can be accurately tested.”

So you have Democratic secretaries of state and you’ve got a Republican governor who really are profiles in courage. Why in 2008, the most important presidential campaign in probably 50 years, shouldn’t we have confidence that our voting machines work? There are a lot of issues that need to be dealt with. One of them is the federal government has given back to the states and localities the opportunity to run the machines and to organize elections.

Maybe that’s OK for local elections, but shouldn’t the presidential election be fair, accurate, and clear all over the country? Are we going to get ourselves in the situation that we had back in 2000 where people are sitting around for weeks looking at hanging chads and not being able to recount? Are we going to get ourselves into the system we had in 2004 in Ohio where lots of people were turned away at the polls because there weren’t enough voting machines and there weren’t enough machines that could be trusted? There weren’t enough paper ballots to cast votes.

I think fundamental in our society, fundamental to democracy, is that when we turn 18 and register to vote, that our vote counts and that we are called upon to think that we should vote. We should vote early. We should vote every time we have a right to vote. We should model that around the world. Why is it in America we can’t get democracy straight?

Do campaign contributions or other moneys play into the decisions being made about these processes, the voting machines and giving the power back to the states?

I don’t know exactly how to answer your question. Yesterday in the House of Representatives, I know this is not very good to time and date this, but under suspension of the rules, we lost an effort that Congressman Rush Holt was trying to do. Money has already been authorized to repair some of these machines. It was brought up under suspension of rules, which needs a two-thirds majority to pass. It was not controversial until yesterday morning when the White House weighed in against the bill and a handful of Republicans stood up and opposed giving the states money that has already been allocated to get the voting machines right.

I don’t know what was behind that. I do know that some investigation has to be made as to who owns the voting machine companies and did some of those companies weigh in to cast a few votes one way or the other. Hopefully, the whole bill will come back up under normal circumstances. It passed by a large majority but not a two-thirds majority. Yes, I think that special interests do weigh in. Some corporations who own voting machine companies want their machines to be the ones that stay. It’s hard to tie it down. It’s hard to drill down deep enough to have a one-for-one connection.

Part of the premise of our project The Buying of the President is that presidential election is not an election, it’s an auction that goes to the highest bidder. Do you think that’s the case?

Yes. There’s one other aspect. You’re looking at money. Here is a fear I have. Let’s just suppose that Senator McCain is the Republican candidate. Let’s just suppose that Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee. We have the possibility — and this is a fear that I hope does not come true — that McCain will win the Electoral College vote because there are eight or 10 battleground states that he might do well in. Someone like Obama, or Hillary for that matter, might win the popular vote, not by a slim margin, but by millions and millions of votes.

I think the current system is not working with the Electoral College. What it means is that [there are] eight or 10 states are where the battleground is. Here is an interesting statistic from the 2004 election: There were 66 visits by the presidential candidates, Bush and Kerry, into Ohio. There were zero visits to Illinois. Illinois didn’t count and doesn’t count because it’s not a battleground state. Common Cause is working on something called the National Popular Vote to try to get an interstate compact, get states that have already supported it, like New Jersey, Maryland, and Illinois, that have signed it into law, spread that good virus across the country so that whoever wins the popular vote wins the election.

It will also spread out who’s important. After the primaries are set, only those battleground states will be the place where money is spent. The corporations in those battleground states will have the most influence on shaping the way people think.

We spoke recently with Barry Lynn at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. We were wondering, given your background as a religious leader, do you think that inappropriate political activity by tax-exempt religious groups is a problem? Has it increased since you were involved with that?

I support Barry Lynn and I think there ought to be separation of church and state but not separation of people of faith and institutions of government. I think over the last 40 years, there has been a blind eye toward the radical religious right and its involvement in politics, and an aggressive attitude on the part of a certain conservative political forces only to investigate through the IRS, and through tax exempt those liberal voices.

I think as you set up rules and regulations, particularly at the IRS, they ought to be fair. For example, the United Church of Christ is now under investigation by the IRS and the Justice Department for having Senator Obama keynote their 40th anniversary celebration. I can tell you that people like Jim Dobson of Focus on the Family, Tony Perkins, Pat Robertson, those guys speak all the time and they speak in churches all the time and they tap candidates all the time. There’s less energy on the part of some of our oversight agencies to draw those conservative forces in line. I think there is some partisanship there and there’s some political activity. So let’s get it straight.

I think that we ought to respect people’s faith or non-faith. This is not a Christian nation. Our Founding Fathers and Mothers persecuted, killed each other, over religion, and finally came to the conclusion that this is a pluralistic nation that needs to respect all people’s faith and those with no particular faith tradition. After 9/11 happened, 4,000 religious leaders that I was part of had a statement that said, “Deny them their victory,” and pointed out, after giving respect to the victims, their families, and the heroes that worked on it: “Let’s not label people who look different as somehow to be attacked. Let’s remember that this is a pluralistic nation.” People who were of the Sikh religion started to get attacked because Americans were too uneducated to know that they weren’t Muslim. We need to respect everybody’s faith tradition. Government should not aid or abet any one religious sector.

By the way, if you’re going to investigate the United Church of Christ for having Senator Obama, then you better investigate George [W.] Bush for greeting the Pope’s plane at Andrews Air Force Base. There seems to be government money used there that should be investigated. I’m not calling for that to happen. I’m just simply using it as an illustration of how unfair the current process is of oversight.

What sort of changes to the presidential campaign finance system, or on the state level, is Common Cause supporting now? What are your main wishes?

First of all, we need to make sure that the money levels are adequate. Is $85 million adequate for a presidential campaign, particularly if we move to popular vote where they have to campaign in all 50 states? How do you put in law a cost of living increment on that number so it doesn’t stay stagnant over time? Secondly, we really need a Federal Election Commission that works. If you are going to put laws in place, it has got to have a federal commission in place overseeing those elections. Currently, we don’t have a Federal Election Commission that works. Both parties are stymied on the selection of some vacancies. Here, the most important election in our lifetime, and we don’t have anybody to monitor whether candidates are complying or not complying, not just with the presidential finance rules but the ethical issues related to campaigns.

I think we need to strengthen not only the McCain-Feingold concept of presidential financing; we need to encourage people to do the check-off on their income list so that it fuels that public financing system. If we all shared a dollar or two, we would fully fund it. There are 300 million of us, so it wouldn’t take much to cover the costs of the campaign. Finally, we need to make sure that the Federal Election Commission is in place, operative, and has a free hand at making sure all the candidates comply.

It needs to be much more important in people’s minds. Unfortunately, when laws are broken, like the presidential system is broken, not only do agencies not force compliance or encourage compliance or encourage support of it, but sometimes people get the attitude, “If it’s broken, let’s do away with it.” I want to say, “If it’s broken, let’s reform it.”

Let’s also reinstitute a passion for Senate and House races to be under public financing. Across the country, one of the missions of Common Cause is to invent public financing city by city. Interesting illustration, we installed public financing in the little city of Albuquerque, New Mexico. A couple of community activists are now sitting on county council, and they had no resources and now they’re there. I mentioned the governor of Arizona who had to raise 2,000 $5 contributions and suddenly wasn’t controlled by the pharmaceutical or medical companies.

I went up to see the Maine Legislature. The [Majority Leader] of the Maine House of Representatives [Hannah Pingree] is a 31-year-old blond woman. That wouldn’t have happened years ago. Not only was campaign financing responsible for that but also they have term limits. They recycle people periodically. I can tell you that youth and young adults are far better represented because of the campaign finance structure.

Do you have any things you want to add?

Just a couple things that Common Cause is interested in, and Bob Edgar is interested in. One is I think every baby should be registered to vote at birth. We have this big complicated system all across the country in terms of registration invented by white males about 100 years ago who were land owners to keep women and persons of color from voting. We give babies Social Security numbers. Why not have that Social Security number be their ticket to registration?

Secondly, I think we ought to have a ceremony for every 18 year old, similar to the ceremonies that we give to new immigrants, as a right of passage so that from thence on, they are voters, they are citizens and they are persons with power. We ought to figure out a strategy to get 80, 90 percent of our people voting as opposed to 40, 50 percent of our people voting.

I have one unpopular idea. We’re about to give an economic incentive to try to fix the economy. I say let’s give 100 percent of it to everyone who votes and 50 percent of it to everybody who doesn’t vote. It makes people laugh when I say it. Incentivizing it. There are some countries that actually give you a fine if you don’t vote. You get a fine for driving over the speed limit. We get no fine for not showing up to vote. I think we need to encourage people, through the media, through our campaigns, hopefully through both political parties, to recognize if we want to spread democracy, we’ve got to model it here. You don’t spread democracy with a gun. You don’t spread it with the military. You spread it by showing how democracy works. I think that’s where we’ve fallen down over the last few years.