Well, that was quick.
Stanford Law professor Laurence Lessig generated quite a buzz online last week by announcing that he might run for Congress, but killed his candidacy on Monday.
Lessig told Legal Pad that he spent all day Sunday cooped up in his dining room with his advisers, calculators and computers, poring over district maps and hammering out his battle plan. In the end, he said, the 30 days until a special election was not enough to build his candidacy. The 46-year-old Internet freedom fighter will not run for a seat for the 12th Congressional District of California, which opened up after Rep. Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo, died of cancer earlier this month.
Lessig said that his message promoting change in Congress — to help rein in the influence of money on Capitol Hill — was too complicated to get out by the April 8 ballot. Lessig said he didn’t want to risk wounding the reform movement with a “dramatic” loss against the popular Jackie Speier.
“It would be so hard in this compressed period to make the campaign sound like it was anything other than an extremely negative campaign against the extremely popular representative [Speier], and that wouldn’t be productive for anybody,” he said.
Instead, Lessig is turning his attention to launching a site in about a week, at which Democrats and Republicans inside and outside the Beltway could share their views about reform.
— Petra Pasternak
Comments