John Lumea

Why It (Still) Matters That Americans Elect Get Serious About Neutrality

In recent days, Lawrence Lessig and I have been
having a public conversation about the neutrality policy at Americans Elect (me on 13 May and — in response
to a personal email from Lessig — 15 May; Lessig on
17 May).

Although I've been a critic of Lessig on this issue,
I hope it's clear that I've initiated this dialogue with
Lessig not to somehow "call him out" or "take him on" but, rather, to promote a deeper understanding of the potential implications of the Americans Elect neutrality policy, by engaging Lessig both as someone who thinks deeply about issues of organizational process, and as someone whose own implementation of the policy can
be seen as an inflection point for the level of non-neutral public advocacy for specific candidates that Americans Elect was prepared to accept from members of its Board of Advisors.

I deeply respect and appreciate Lessig's willingness to reciprocate the engagement in the public space of his own blog.

::   ::   ::

TO RECAP the fine-print origins of this discussion...

According to Section 10.0 of the corporate Rules
of Americans Elect (pdf link — emphasis mine):

Until the Americans Elect ticket has been selected by majority vote of participating Delegates...Americans Elect shall be neutral with respect to all Candidates and shall not endorse, oppose, advance, or advocate any particular Candidate.

But, down at the personal level, only directors and
staff officers of Americans Elect — not members of
the Board of Advisors — are bound by this policy.

Lessig, who is on the advisory board and who was a tireless advocate for the Americans Elect candidacy of Buddy Roemer — even going so far as to appear with Roemer on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" — thinks this exemption is OK. I don't.

Perhaps you think it strange that I am referring to Americans Elect in the present tense — as though anything to do with Americans Elect still was a live
issue. After all, didn't Americans Elect suffer a rather spectacular flame-out last week?

In fact: In the same public statement last Thursday
in which Americans Elect informed that "the primary process for the Americans Elect nomination" — by
which it meant the nomination of a presidential ticket
for 2012 — "has come to an end," the corporation
also vowed:

We are continuing the Americans Elect
mission of creating more choice in our
political system, giving candidates unaffiliated with the nominating process of either major party an authentic way to run for office and giving the American people a greater voice
in our political process.

Indeed, as Richard Winger of Ballot Access News notes:

Even if Americans Elect has no nominees
for any partisan office anywhere in
the United States in 2012, it will still be
a qualified party in 2014 in eleven states
if it takes certain minimal steps to remain organized. Furthermore, if the organization
will run candidates for office other than President in certain other states, it may
remain ballot-qualified in additional states.

So, Americans Elect hasn't just melted away, like
the Wicked Witch of the West doused with a pail of water. It is likely to be with us for at least one more election cycle beyond the current one.

That, together with the fact that some of the analysis
of What Happened already has begun to go sideways,
is why it's vitally important to continue to think through the implications of the corporation's organizational
ethic — including its policies and practices on political neutrality.

::   ::   ::

THERE ARE a number of different ways to
approach this issue. One could ask:

Does the neutrality policy that Americans Elect
has articulated, in its Rules and ByLaws, clearly
and accurately communicate the policy that it
intends to enforce?

or

Is Americans Elect enforcing the neutrality policy
that it has articulated?

or — to frame this question another way...

Are Americans Elect's neutrality policies and
practices aligned?

I've drawn on all of these approaches. But the more powerful question — and my real focus here — is:

Are Americans Elect's neutrality policies and practices
the right ones, given the corporation's stated values
and goals — i.e., opening up the political process; breaking up the two-party duopoly; putting full voting power back in the hands of "the people"?

To put it more pointedly...

Are Americans Elect's carefully attenuated policies
and practices on political neutrality what one should expect from an organization that was serious about implementing the democratic values and goals that Americans Elect claims to be championing?

::   ::   ::

LAST FRIDAY, in the wake of the Americans Elect statement the afternoon before, New York Times columnist David Brooks filmed a PBS NewsHour feature in which he was asked what he thought had happened. Brooks offered some conventional wisdom, which quickly was seconded by Mark Shields (video starting at 2:38 — emphases mine):

I think the lesson here is that, if you're
gonna — there are a lotta people who are disaffected by the two parties — but, if you're gonna offer an alternative, you have to be for something. You just can't be a process. And so, you gotta have a story to tell, have
a bunch of issues, have a constituency. And they were, s[orta] wanted to be neutral. And I think that was sorta the problem.

Brooks was half right. To be sure, it is a compelling
set of ideas — and a candidate to deliver those ideas compellingly — that energizes individual voters and galvanizes and mobilizes blocs of those voters.

But it's irresponsible to suggest that Americans Elect "wanted to be neutral" or that it wanted to be "just...a process." That was the spin, of course. But it's not the way it was.

The truth is, one can't fully understand the license that Americans Elect gives its advisors, i.e., the permission it gives them to be non-neutral, without understanding the larger organizational ecosystem of which this license is a part — an ecosystem in which:

1
advisors almost invariably have used their license
to publicly advocate only for candidates that qualify
as "socially moderate and fiscally conservative" representatives of the ideological "center";

an ecosystem in which

2
even Americans Elect directors and staffers, who, according to Bylaws 4.12 and 6.1 (pdf link), do not
have this license, have used it anyway — with impunity and without consequence — to publicly advocate for candidates that answer to this same ideological profile;

an ecosystem in which

3
Americans Elect mandates an ideologically "balanced" "unity" ticket that — for all of the corporation's
rhetoric about the constrained options that the
"broken" two-party system presents to voters and
to citizens — includes a formally stated preference
for an R/D or a D/R ticket, a configuration that, as a practical matter, would average out somewhere between "moderate Republican" and "Blue Dog Democrat."

an ecosystem in which

4
the question of whether any and every proposed
ticket qualifies as ideologically "balanced" is a determination made by the Candidate Certification Committee — a committee of the Board of Americans Elect whose members, according to the Bylaws (5.4.2), are "appointed by [and] serve at the pleasure of the
Board and may be removed without cause."

and an ecosystem in which

5
although, on paper, provision is made in Rule 12.2 for delegates to reverse decisions of the Board, the Board in the past has repressed delegates' ability to use the Rule, in such a way as to make the Rule meaningless.

First of all: "No money goes to supporting any issue
or other political purpose"? Really?!!

What has been at play here is a kind of "centrist" protectionism — sometimes explicit, often implicit, but always intended to rig the game in favor of a highly specific outcome.

So, when Lessig's fellow advisory board member David Walker — who was the subject of a late draft effort — tweeted last Friday that "Americans Elect is about choice and competition," well, perhaps in a limited, abstract sense, an Americans Elect ticket produced within, and by, this ideological ethos would have offered voters one more "choice" and would have provided some "competition" to the tickets produced by the Democratic and Republican parties.

But, internal to the Americans Elect process — down in the Board-controlled habitat of delegates and candidates and "support clicks" that Americans Elect claims as the origin of a new model of democratic self-governance — the Americans Elect ticket always was going to be the Board's choice, not the people's: the product of a paternalistic, anti-competitive and, ultimately, anti-democratic impulse.

::   ::   ::

THIS IS the backdrop against which one must challenge David Brooks's conventional wisdom with more important questions:

• Is there a cause-and-effect link, not between Americans Elect's neutrality surplus and its enthusiasm deficit — but between its neutrality deficit and its enthusiasm deficit?

• What if Americans Elect really had been "just...a process," and if — from the top down and the bottom up — the Americans Elect corporation, its Board, its staff, its advisors, and even its "delegate leaders" and other volunteers had been publicly neutral?

• Could such a truly neutral and altruistic Americans Elect — an Americans Elect whose only interest was (and was seen to be) to offer a ballot line
  and a Web-based nominating platform — have attracted many more delegates and many more credible candidates, of all ideological persuasions?

• Might a politically neutral Americans Elect — rather than the ideologically stacked Americans Elect that we saw — have been more likely to produce an actual ticket, born of the shared sense of potential delegates and potential candidates, alike, that anything was possible?

• Is Americans Elect's absolute organizational neutrality a key to its catalyzing the kind of small-d democratic energy and citizen engagement that
  is necessary, in order to create the participatory and electoral reforms that Americans Elect claims to want?

My contention is: Yes!

Had Americans Elect been truly and fiercely neutral — rather than giving mere lip service to neutrality, while paving the way for a "centrist," fiscally hawkish, Establishment-oriented ticket...

Had Americans Elect simply trusted delegates and candidates, rather than trying to manage them...

It could have created a truly free marketplace of
political ideas that might have been more attractive
to delegates and candidates alike.

Ironically, this might have been more likely to
produce an actual ticket — a ticket that was more flavorful and nourishing philosophically and that, precisely because it was grassroots-emergent and
not the product of a top-down fix, was more powerful
in political and electoral terms.

The great promise of Americans Elect, yet to be
realized — the only way for Americans Elect to produce authentic, grassroots-emergent candidates — is for it to become a truly free marketplace of political ideas and candidates. And the only way for that to happen is

1
for Americans Elect to jettison its "centrist" agenda, including its "balanced ticket obligation" and other procedural controls designed to help cultivate ideological purity and ensure the nomination only of candidates from the power chambers of the institutional Establishment

and

2
for Americans Elect itself — Official Americans Elect — the Americans Elect of press releases; interviews; op-eds; blogs; Twitter feeds; and television, radio,
video and podcast appearances — the Americans Elect that constitutes itself, via all these media, in the public statements of the Board and its committees, as well as
in the public comments of individual directors, staff, advisors, "delegate leaders," and volunteers...

...for this Americans Elect to be fiercely and doggedly neutral and independent of any political party, ideology, candidate or influence.

::   ::   ::

LESSIG suggests that the critique I am making is a
little utopian.

We’ve got to avoid the Caesar’s-wife syndrome: If a new institution comes along promising a change from a plainly broken existing institution, the test should not be whether it is perfect. The test is whether it
is better than the alternatives — because otherwise, you bias in favor of the (plainly broken) status quo.

Lessig is right, of course, that one doesn't want to make the perfect the enemy of the good. But the surest way to avoid "biasing in favor of the...status quo" is for the "good" on offer to be not just marginally better than what it seeks to reform or replace, but a lot better.

A status-quo-oriented standard of success — just do a little better than the two parties — is not going to be enough to inspire and motivate a critical mass of delegates and candidates to engage in the Americans Elect process. If you are a reform-minded citizen, why bother, if the only payoff is to be marginally better than the system you already know is already broken?

And yet, it is precisely the status quo that Lessig keeps returning to, to defend the non-neutral activities of himself and his fellow Americans Elect advisory board members (emphasis mine):

John criticizes my serving on the advisory board because he believes my advocacy is inconsistent with the principle of “neutrality.” He believes, moreover, that the distinction between an “advisory board” and “board and staff” is “Clintonian” — that the difference is “hair splitting” and not real. But the difference is real and common and completely the same with every other major party.

Lessig continues (emphasis mine):

John...says the standard isn’t the reality
of the difference, but the “public perception.” But here he seems to be making a move / mistake that others are making about AE
as well: Compared to the other political parties, is there any difference here?
The Democrats and the Republicans both,
when there is no presumptive nominee
(i.e., an incumbent), run party primaries. During those primaries, the entity running
the primary is to remain neutral. But that entity has advisory boards. Does anyone
doubt the freedom of members of those
boards to indicate a preference for a
particular candidate, even if the people
running the primaries shouldn’t?

In addition to the fact that an appeal to the behavioral norms of the Democratic and Republican parties isn't especially inspiring...

Lessig's analysis would be more convincing, if
Americans Elect had been honest about its desire to
be an ideologically and procedurally tweaked version of
a traditional political party — i.e., if building a better, "centrist" version of the same mousetrap had been its stated goal.

Of course, some of us were well enough versed in the political code of Unity 08 / Americans Elect, to see that the creation of a "centrist" ballot line was exactly what Americans Elect was about.

But that's not how Americans Elect sold itself to those citizens who came to Americans Elect through the
"front door" of its Web site, its Facebook page, its
Twitter feed, and the round-edged media appearances
of its top executives. Here — and in the most public way possible — Americans Elect claimed to be a revolutionary, system-challenging "movement" to "crash the party" and put power back in the hands of "the people."

So it is, that the real standard of success, for Americans Elect, has to be the seriousness with which it is engaging that task.

::   ::   ::

LESSIG concludes with this riff on part of one of my earlier comments (in quotes):

When the governor of a state endorses a candidate during a primary, John, do you
think that leads voters in the state not to
vote because they “believe that they have
been ‘pre-subjugated’ to the will of insiders with money, power and media access”? And if not, why would you think that with a member of an advisory board, with no access to the mechanics of the voting system, no authority over the organization, and no “media access” worth nails beyond a simple twitter feed?

Let's agree, for starters, that Lessig — a Harvard professor and co-founder of Creative Commons, whose books routinely are reviewed and noted in the New York Times; who made back-to-back in-studio "Morning Joe" appearances on 24 February and 1 March; who, on
25 April and 13 May, had back-to-back pieces on the Web site of The Atlantic magazine; and who once even was played by Christopher Lloyd on an episode of "The West Wing" — is being overly modest in characterizing himself as a guy who has "no 'media access' worth nails beyond a simple twitter feed" (a feed which, by the way, has more than 190,000 followers).

As to Lessig's questions themselves: They are well-
intended, but they strike me in the gut in a similar fashion as do the self-satisfied criticisms of those who say, of self-identified political independents: "A-ha!!!
You so-called 'independents' do vote for Democrats
and Republicans! You're not independents, at all!"

Well, of course political independents vote for Republicans and Democrats. They live in a political system that, by and large, gives them no other
serious choices. But their votes "for" Democrats and Republicans often say little more than that — when
push comes to shove — they place a higher premium on their responsibility to vote than they do their right to a greater variety of candidates from which to choose.

Ultimately, though, Lessig seems to be making an apples-to-oranges comparison. For voters in the
current system, the limited voting choices that the system produces — starting with the systemic flaws
and corruptions that produce those choices (including endorsements by elected officials) — are part of the baseline. In other words: These limitations are the "always already" built-in "discount" to many citizens'
decision to vote regardless.

But I am asking a different question...

If citizens already are in a system that they believe is fixed — a system in which, to borrow my own phrase, they "believe that they have been ‘pre-subjugated’ to the will of insiders with money, power and media access” — why should they engage in a "new" system — a "new" process — that they believe promises only more of
the same?

I don't mean to suggest that a policy of ironclad
and unflappable and inviolable political neutrality is
the only ingredient that was needed, to produce a happier ending for Americans Elect in 2012.

But I do think that Americans Elect's "rage for 'centrism'" explains a world of sins — including the tendency (policy?) of the Board of Americans Elect, contra its
own rhetoric, to repress the will of Americans Elect delegates. This repression is being felt, even now.

If Americans Elect — or any similar effort claiming
to be nothing more and, indeed, nothing less than a delivery system for the Voice of the People — wishes to succeed in the future, it would do well to keep its own organizational-political mouth shut and let the grassroots delegates — the People — speak for themselves.

Otherwise, it should dispense with the pretense of high-minded Neutrality; call itself the party that it is;
and operate on that basis.

Lessig Responds to Open Letter About the Americans Elect Neutrality Policy

"Having No Power, I Have No Duty to
Waive Any Freedom I Might Have"

On Sunday evening, I sent Americans Elect advisory
board member Lawrence Lessig a letter asking him to explain his repeated public advocacy for Americans Elect candidate Buddy Roemer.

I and others have found these activities hard to square with Americans Elect's official policy of neutrality, which is codified in Section 10.0 of the corporation's Rules (pdf link — emphasis mine):

Until the Americans Elect ticket has been selected by majority vote of participating Delegates in the Nominating Round of voting, Americans Elect shall be neutral with respect to all Candidates and shall not endorse, oppose, advance, or advocate any particular Candidate.

I posted my challenge as an open letter, and advised Lessig of the same.

Yesterday, Lessig responded as follows (emphasis mine). Elliot Ackerman, referenced in Lessig's note, is the son of Americans Elect founder and lead investor Peter Ackerman, and also is the COO of Americans Elect.

John,

Thank you for your letter, and especially for
the decency in the manner in which you have framed your criticism.

When I was asked to join the Advisory board,
I explicitly asked about whether that would preclude me from advocating on behalf of anyone, including candidates for an AE position. I was told it did not. That position
was confirmed to me by Elliot Ackerman in
this email:

My understanding of an "Advisory Board" is precisely the same: Members are asked to
give their advice, but not their loyalty. As a Member, I am free to criticize AE if I believe they are behaving badly. As a Board Member,
I would not have that freedom (to the extent it was inconsistent with a duty of loyalty). Giving up that freedom would be fair (again, were I a member of the Board) because Membership
on the board would give me power in the organization. But having no power, I have no duty to waive any freedom I might have.

Let me know if that has clarified things. I don't think this distinction is "Clintonian": By that, you mean that the actions have the same effect. But my actions don't have the same effect. I have no power in AE. I have no rights in AE. I therefore have no duty to waive any liberty I otherwise have as a citizen.

::   ::   ::

Actually, by "Clintonian," I mean the tendency
to rationalize a given behavior by appealing to a hair-splitting interpretation of the "law" — in this
case, the Americans Elect neutrality policy (which most broadly is embodied in Rule 10, above) — that skews heavily to the letter of the law rather than to its spirit.

Perception is reality. And what has been clear to me, from the beginning, is that the official and actual public neutrality of Americans Elect — including
the public perception that Americans Elect is neutral — is key to the integrity of the whole Americans Elect project. That citizens simply are not going to trust and take seriously an organization that pays lip service to "opening up the political process" and putting full voting power in the hands of the people, and that claims to be interested solely in creating the structural "empty vessels" of an additional 50-state
ballot line and a Web-based nominating platform — but that also seems to be designing these vessels to carry only a certain kind of political cargo.

So the ideological "stacking of the deck" guaranteed by Americans Elect's "unity ticket" mandate — in which the corporation favors a "centrist" Republican-Democrat ticket — always has struck me as wrongheaded. (Lessig
and I agree, on this point.)

But the double standard of applying the neutrality mandate embodied in Rule 10 only to the relative handful of "directors"and "officers" (see Sections 4.12 and 6.1 of the Bylaws; pdf link), but not to the 100-plus members of the Board of Advisors — individuals who frequently have been the public faces of Americans Elect in the media, and whose names and institutional affiliations Americans Elect displays prominently on its Web site, in an effort to enhance its public credibility — this, too, is an impartiality disconnect.

The truth is: Even in the case of Americans Elect's directors and officers, the neutrality policy is only wink-wink (see Christie Whitman). But the idea should be to go "above and beyond," in assuring the public that Americans Elect is neutral and that delegates hold all the power — not to design and implement elaborate layers of political bet hedging such as a "neutrality" policy that, in practice, hasn't been made to apply to anybody on the masthead.

That the COO and son of the founder of Americans
Elect disagrees — "nothing about your membership
as a member of our Advisory Board prohibits you from supporting any candidate you wish" — is telling.

Telling, too, that this "neutrality gap" with respect
to the Board of Advisors is nothing that the "free to criticize Americans Elect" Lessig — or, apparently, any other Americans Elect advisory board member — has deemed "behaving badly," to borrow Lessig's phrase.

Telling that Buddy Roemer, too, thinks that Lessig's non-neutrality is A(E)-OK.

And telling that nowhere in Americans Elect Rules or Bylaws is the behavior of the advisors or the Board of Advisors of Americans Elect constrained in any way.

They aren't even mentioned.

::   ::   ::

A major reason why Americans Elect now has had
to cancel all three of its scheduled primary ballots,
for lack of sufficient public support for any Americans Elect candidate in particular, and for the Americans
Elect process in general, is this: Americans Elect is not seen as a neutral broker. Citizens are not motivated to participate, when they don't believe and have confidence that their voices and their votes have full weight but, rather, believe that they have been "pre-subjugated" to the will of insiders with money, power and media access.

Americans Elect is not immune to this fundamental law
of political psychology.

Had Americans Elect instead created an unambiguous and airtight "public neutrality" plank that applied with equal force to Americans Elect directors, staffers and advisors — and had Americans Elect implemented a zero-tolerance policy on violations of this plank — Americans Elect would not be where it finds itself today. Of this I am sure. Indeed...

If Americans Elect hopes to recover any
possibility of a sustainable future for itself —
or, perhaps, any future at all — it will have to abandon its "centrist" ideological pretensions
and get serious about neutrality, along the lines
I suggest here.

Lessig sees it differently. He says that his "duty"
to Americans Elect — including his duty to abide by Americans Elect's neutrality policy (which he frames as his duty to "waive any liberty I otherwise have as a citizen") — is limited by his "power in the organization."

Lessig has "no power," he says, and "no rights" —
by which he means that, since he's not a member
of the Board of Directors of Americans Elect, he has
no voting rights and power — thus he has "no duty."

It's not quite that simple.

The truth is, Lessig and other members of the Board
of Advisors have considerable soft power.

In pubicly listing Lessig and other advisors, Americans Elect is saying — indeed, promoting — to the general public, to prospective delegates and to the media that these advisors are "on the team" at Americans Elect.

This being the case, it's reasonable to assume that all three audiences — general public, prospective delegates and media — are looking to the statements and actions
of Lessig and other members of the Board of Advisors of Americans Elect, to help them determine:

• Who is Americans Elect?

• How deeply — if at all — should I
  become involved?

So, when Lawrence Lessig or Mark McKinnon, for example — people who, in addition to their status as Americans Elect advisory board members, also are public figures with public reputations and outsized national media access, giving them the potential to have enormous influence and, yes, power in shaping public and delegate and media opinion about the sort of thing that Americans Elect is...

When Americans Elect advisors like Lessig or McKinnon take to MSNBC or to The Atlantic or even to Twitter (Lessig has 190,037 followers) and give the nod to Buddy Roemer — or to David Walker — or to Jon Huntsman — or to any other specific candidate or type of candidate,
it can't help but telegraph and reinforce to delegates
and to potential delegates the suggestion that certain decisions about the nominee pool already have been made.

And, for those delegates and potential delegates who don't happen to share the politics being promoted, the candidate or ideological advocacy being engaged in by these Americans Elect advisors can't help but have a chilling effect on the desire of these citizens to participate in the Americans Elect process. In effect, it robs them of their power.

And that matters. It matters very much.

An Open Letter to Lawrence Lessig About the Americans Elect Neutrality Policy

With Reference to Lessig's Status as a Member of the Board of Advisors of Americans Elect and His Activism on Behalf of the Americans Elect Candidacy of Buddy Roemer

Lawrence,

Over the last few months, I've done a good bit of writing about Americans Elect.

Rick Hasen called my essay "The Shadow Super PAC of 'Centrism'" a "must-read...on the continued internal democracy deficit at Americans Elect, and the serial violation of a neutrality pledge by Americans Elect’s leadership."

I have enormous respect for your body of work — especially for your work on open culture and on the
issue of money in politics.

But I do have to ask you how, as a member of the
Board of Advisors of Americans Elect, you continue to square your activism on behalf of the Americans Elect candidacy of Buddy Roemer — most memorably, in your treatise "One Way Forward"; in your appearances on "Morning Joe" (videos here and here); in your tweets; and in your recent Atlantic pieces (here and, today, here) — with the Americans Elect corporation's explicit policy on neutrality.

According to Section 10.0 of the Rules (pdf link) of Americans Elect (emphasis mine):

Until the Americans Elect ticket has been selected by majority vote of participating Delegates in the Nominating Round of voting, Americans Elect shall be neutral with respect to all Candidates and shall not endorse, oppose, advance, or advocate any particular Candidate.

You've highlighted the fact that your position as a member of the Board of Advisors of Americans Elect is "noncompensated" — but this, it seems to me, misses the point.

Surely, the straightforward, commonsense reading is
that Rule 10 is a broad mandate — that the "Americans
Elect" of the phrase "Americans Elect shall be neutral" includes both

1
the organization as a whole (as reflected in official decisions of the Board of Directors and the Board's committees)

and

2
the statements and actions of individual directors, executive staff and advisors of Americans Elect, i.e., those who — whether paid or unpaid — are officially and publicly signified by Americans Elect as supporters and representatives the organization.

Of course, one could argue that, no, Rule 10 applies only to (1); that directors and officers are bound by Sections 4.12 and 6.1 of the Bylaws (pdf link); and that advisors can say whatever they want.

But this seems more than a little Clintonian, as well as being a clear violation of the spirit, if not necessarily the letter, of Rule 10 — not least, because it implies (and creates) a loophole through which the Americans Elect corporation and its individual directors and officers can, by not expressing themselves directly, abide by the letter of the neutrality policy stated in the corporation's Rules and Bylaws, even as they violate the spirit of the policy by allowing and enabling various Americans Elect advisors to function as surrogates for expressing either the type of candidate or the specific candidate that
they — i.e., the corporation, or specific directors or officers or, for that matter, seed funders — prefer.

To be clear: I have no way of knowing whether you
are speaking for anyone else at Americans Elect, in advocating for Buddy Roemer (and, of late — albeit
more softly — for David Walker).

Absent being shown any evidence to the contrary, I assume that you are speaking only for yourself.

::   ::   ::

The truth is, Americans Elect seems never to have enforced its neutrality policy — and it certainly isn't
going to start enforcing it now, desperate as it is for a candidate.

But that doesn't make your own position as an Americans Elect advisor campaigning for a specific candidate any less ethically compromised.

If you or other Americans Elect advisors — or, for that matter, Americans Elect directors or executive staff members — wish to campaign for specific Americans Elect candidates, in the way that you have for Buddy Roemer (and David Walker), you are more than free to do so.

But if you are going to engage in this activity while the Americans Elect neutrality policy embodied in Rule 10 and in Bylaws 4.12 and 6.1 remains in place, you should step down from Americans Elect.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

The other, and even more honest, option is for Americans Elect simply to go ahead and kill its neutrality policy — which, in any case, has been a farce all along.

::   ::   ::

Although I'd be gratified by a personal response to this query, the most useful place for you to address it would be on your public blog.

You can find a more comprehensive and integrated presentation — a "one-stop shop," if you like — of my own thoughts on this and other issues related to Americans Elect, in "The Super Shadow PAC of 'Centrism,'" the essay I link above.

I look forward to your response.

With respect,

JOHN LUMEA

UPDATE: Lessig's response and my follow-up is here.

About That "Draft Walker Poll" of966 Florida Registered Voters

In its launch press release of 23 April, the Committee
to Get Walker Running — a.k.a. Draft Walker — billed
itself as a

grassroots and youth-driven initiative to get our country’s fiscal house in order by drafting David Walker...as an independent candidate for president through Americans Elect.

A "grassroots and youth-driven initiative."

To be sure, the Committee is managed by Nick Troiano, who just last month stepped down from a 2-year stint as National Campus Director at Americans Elect, and who — at 22 — is himself barely a year out of Georgetown University.

And yet, the Committee — which is registered as a PAC with the FEC (pdf link) — claims to have conducted an April 2012 public opinion survey of 966 Florida registered voters, to gauge support for a David Walker candidacy.

Not generally the sort of activity that one associates with a project that is totally "grassroots" and "youth-driven."

::   ::   ::

LET'S HAVE a closer look, shall we?

The Committee's home page at DraftWalker.com* includes a rotator feature — right side, scroll down — that cites two results from a poll that explicitly is sourced as "Draft Walker poll of 966 Florida voters, +/- 3.15%, April 2012."

The two results are:

1
75% of voters believe an independent candidate
should take part in this fall's Presidential debates.

and

2
39% of voters are open to voting for David Walker
in this year's Presidential election.

A few more details about this poll — including the
specific date — are available from a "Draft David
Walker Overview" document that is part of a list of downloadable "Volunteer Resources" toward the
bottom of the Web site's "Get Involved" page.

This Overview document (pdf link) includes,
in a Frequently Asked Questions section, the
following:

Will the American people support this effort?

We recently conducted a public opinion survey to help answer that question. Results are based on an April 9th poll of 966 registered Florida voters (+/- 3.5%).

• After sharing some information about David Walker, 39% said they would be open to voting for him if his name appeared on the general election ballot.

• We found that his primary appeal to these voters is that his top issue is fiscal responsibility. This is no surprise given that 86% reported to be concerned (69% "very concerned") about our country's fiscal situation.

• Overwhelming support, 75%, was given to idea of an independent candidate being able to debate President Obama and the Republican nominee this fall.

::   ::   ::

CURIOUSLY, these hushed mentions — intermittently flashing at the bottom of the Draft Walker home page and buried in a Draft Walker volunteer document — appear to be the only two references to this large survey, by the Committee or anybody else.

But the scant information that the "grassroots and youth-driven" Committee to Get Walker Running provides about this "Draft Walker poll" still manages to tell us a number of important things:

• The survey included a relatively large sample
  of 966 registered voters in Florida.

• This was a telephone survey with a script of several questions and follow-up questions.

• The survey includes margins of error, and
  is presented as a scientific poll.

All of this suggests a survey that was designed, written and conducted by a professional pollster
or polling firm or PR/branding firm with polling capabilities — not a handful of college students and recent college graduates.

So here are a couple of questions for the Draft Walker committee...

1
Where can one access the full survey and results of
this 9 April 2012 telephone survey of 966 Florida
registered voters?

2
Which pollster or polling firm or PR/branding firm
actually ran this survey?

3
Is this pollster, polling firm or PR/branding firm connected — in any way — (a) to Americans Elect;
(b) to David Walker; or (c) to persons, firms or organizations who are connected to Americans Elect
or to David Walker?

::   ::   ::

THE OTHER QUESTION, of course, is: Who paid for this polling work?

Draft Walker — the Committee to Get Walker Running — may have paid for the work. Someone else, acting on the Committee's behalf, may have paid an individual pollster or firm directly for the work. Or a pollster or firm may have contributed all, or part, of the work pro bono.

Either way, the answers to all of these questions would put a good bit of meat on the bones of David Walker's confirmation of Neil Cavuto's observation that Draft Walker is "backing it up with money."

Walker went on to tell Cavuto that he himself is "not involved with" the Draft Walker committee, and that
he has "not had communications with them."

But veteran journalist Alexis Simendinger originally reported this week that Walker had "cooperated with" Committee treasurer and manager Nick Troiano.

In an email on Tuesday afternoon, I asked Simendinger about this; and I noticed yesterday evening that the intriguing "cooperated with" had been dialed back to
the somewhat labored "acknowledged the efforts of."

Still. This rather professional-sounding survey of
Florida voters is one of a number of clues that the "youth-driven" Committee to Get Walker Running
may be operating with more than a little bit of adult supervision — and the adult money that goes with it.

The question is: Who are the adults in this room?

* Attempting to visit the home page of DraftWalker.com
frequently generates a splash sign-up feature that obscures
the page. To make this pop-up disappear, simply click to
either side of the pop-up.

Who's Funding Draft Walker? Looks Like David Walker Knows

David Walker has become a ubiquitous presence, of late, on national television news programs.

Last Monday — the same day that the Committee to
Get Walker Running launched its Draft Walker effort with a new Web site, a press release, a Facebook page, and a Twitter feed — Walker was on MSNBC talking with Chuck Todd about the effort to draft him as a candidate on the Americans Elect line (video).

This past Sunday, Walker was on ABC as a panelist on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, who introduced Walker by saying that he was "from what I read online, perhaps an independent for President, this time around" (videos at the bottom of this item).

The fact is, with his media appearances and statements, no one has done more to fuel speculation about a David Walker candidacy than David Walker.

Indeed, although Walker tries to position himself as someone who is watching all of this from a distance — someone who knows only what he reads in the papers — Walker has given a number of cues, this past two weeks, that he knows a lot more about Draft Walker than he's letting on.

Yesterday, Walker was on Fox Business with Neil Cavuto. Apropos the question of the moment — Who's funding Draft Walker? — here's the relevant exchange (video starting at 0:48 — emphasis mine):

CAVUTO: You interested?

WALKER: I'm not a candidate, and I don't expect to be a candidate. I would rather run a issue-oriented campaign rather than a political campaign. But the fact is—

CAVUTO: But they think you could.

WALKER: Well, whether you can and whether you will are two different things. What I would prefer to do—

CAVUTO: They're backing it up with money, Dave.

WALKER: I understand that — well, I don't know that much about it, candidly. It's a truly independent effort. I'm not involved with it. I've not had communications with them.

 

A few observations:

1
When Cavuto says "they," he is referring to the Draft Walker committee and its supporters and volunteers.

2
When a national news anchor — whether on Fox or
any other network — says "They're backing it up with money," the word "money" is code for a significant amount of money. The kind of money that influences — and is intended to influence — decisions.

3
From the tone and the delivery of both Cavuto's comment — "They're backing it up with money, Dave" — and Walker's response — "I understand that" — it seems very clear that both host and guest are trading on the same background information.

Both Walker and Cavuto take two things as givens:
(a) that a pile of money is being made available for a Walker presidential run and (b) where that money is coming from.

4
What also seems clear is that David Walker does not want this information made public.

Note how Walker bows his head and looks away, as he
is saying "I understand that."

Notice, too, how fiercely Walker starts to backpedal — and that he introduces vigorous "denial" body
language — the instant those three words are out of
his mouth. "I don't know that much about it, candidly."
A classic "protest too much"-ish "tell" of someone who knows that he just has revealed a lot more than he intended to reveal.

But the cat already was out of the bag. Rough translation of what David Walker said to Neil Cavuto: "I'm aware that some big checks have been written or pledged to Draft Walker. I even know who the check writers are.
But — candidly — I don't know that much about Draft Walker. I don't talk to them directly."

Candidly. Like "frankly." One of those little words that almost never means what it says.

"I don 't know that much about it, candidly."

But I do know some.

::   ::   ::

So who's funding Draft Walker?

David Walker and Neil Cavuto seem to know.

Perhaps they and the committee would like to share
with the rest of us.