Harvard Law Professor Larry Lessig today announced the end of his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
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A better candidate “could have gone further”, Lessig says in an online video released Monday. Inclusion in the debates was his only real chance to compete, he said. He admitted in the video that he “may be known in the tiny corners of the tubes of the Internets, but I am not well-known to the American public generally”. Over the past two months, I’ve seen him show up for brief interviews on a few of the cable networks, but he certainly didn’t get as much attention as candidates who were, well, relevant to the outcome of the race.
In the video, Lessig did not broach the subject at all.
“Until we end the corruption that has crippled Congress none of the other issues can be addressed”, he noted, repeatedly noting that Congress was “crippled and corrupted”. He managed to raise more than $1 million in contributions, attract a few well known Democratic operatives, and even run a TV ad, but was never taken seriously in a field where even the dark horse candidates had served as governor or senator. The race has largely come down to a two-way faceoff between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. He struggled to hit 1 percent in national polls, the necessary marker to qualify for the primary matchups. Whenever Lessig qualified for participation in a televised Democratic debate, Jarding wrote, the DNC re-wrote the debate rules to make sure Lessig was excluded.
When asked about Bernie Sanders’s campaign-finance reform credentials on Reddit in August, Lessig said, “Sanders is great, but he is running a campaign to win, not to govern”.
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In announcing his withdrawal, Lessig paid tribute to Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old Internet activist who killed himself in 2013 after federal authorities charged him with 13 felonies for hacking into a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer network and downloading more than 4m academic articles from the JStor database. Once this bill was passed, Lessig vowed to resign as President, noting that reform could only occur with the act in place.
