Phil Noble of PoliticsOnline just handed Joe Trippi $100 cash up on the plenary panel of the IPDI “Politics Online” conference, as instant affirmation of Joe’s longstanding argument that someday soon a candidate for President is going to go on the Internet and issue a call to millions of Americans to run a campaign financed solely by small donations of no more than $100. The gesture got a big laugh from the crowd, and for good reason.
Yesterday, I met with my old boss and friend Ellen Miller, who is now deputy director at the Campaign for America’s Future, but prior to that, before founding Public Campaign (where we worked together) was the founder of the Center for Responsive Politics, the country’s leading tracker of money in politics. Back in 1992, she helped convince Jerry Brown to voluntarily limit his presidential campaign contributions to $100, using the cutting-edge technology of an 800-number as his fundraising vehicle.
People forget how the other campaigns and the bigfoot journalists who manufacture the conventional wisdom sneered at Brown’s 800-number–and even tried to prevent him from mentioning it during televised candidate debates. But by the end of Campaign 1992, every candidate had an 800-number, and Brown raised over $8 million in small donations, enabling him to keep running even after the other Democratic contenders dropped out of the race.
Ellen and I talked about Trippi’s notion of the $100 candidate in 2008, and agreed that his, or her, day is finally upon us. Just think of all the groups with email lists of over 100,000, and imagine a candidate convincing, say, 50,000 people to donate $100 to a campaign that is explicitly free of dependence on wealthy special interest donors. (Call it “people financing” instead of “public financing.”) Listening to the other panelists responding to Trippi’s idea, it’s clear that not everyone yet gets it. Ellen Malcolm, who ran America Coming Together, and is back at EMILY’s List, just said that she thinks Americans may want something other than a candidate who relies on small donations, such as someone who connects with them and who they agree with on issues. And Rick White, now with TechNet, speculated that Trippi’s notion might attract kooks like Lyndon LaRouche.