Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

As a young man who spends a fair amount of time on the internet and who both uses and produces content, it’s not surprise that I view Lawrence Lessig as a secular saint.  So, I joined the Facebook group, signed up for his email list and will now link to his exploratory committee website.  He would be running in Tom Lantos’ district against state senator Jackie Speier, a lifetime Democratic politician who was represented the San Mateo/San Francisco in the State Assembly and Senate since 1984.  She has racked up both legislative experience and the support of all the local Democratic elites and party bigwigs, including Lantos himself before he died.

Lessig, on the other hand, has no political or governmental experience besides clerking for Antonin Scalia and Richard Posner.   He has been an academic all of his life and, as you all should know, he basically started the free culture movement on his own. He’s spent the last ten or so years lecturing and giving presentations on the corruption and distortions of copyright law and is a folk hero among tech types.  Before this talk of a congressional bid started, Lessig made waves in the blogosphere for supporting Barack Obama and his tech policy.  Obama was even able to get constant-critic Matt Stoller to gush over his views on tech and his support from Lessig.

The connection between Obama and Lessig is hardly accidental.  Lessig is in many ways the ur-Obama.  Obama, as we’ve heard over and over again, draws much of his support from highly educated, young, wealthy voters.  Lessig fans almost consist exclusively of that wine-track core of the Obama coalition.  Franky, the only people who really care about copyright or free culture are the highly educated, young and wealthy.  Obama is often thought of as being too cerebral and inspiring and lacking experience.  While these claims are overblown with Obama, they’re almost too true of Lessig.  Lessig is incredibly cerebral — both him and Obama were law professors — and has built up this huge and devoted fan base by giving speeches and power point presentations about a fairly obscure subject.

Like Obama, Lessig’s candidate would be a female politician who has been working in the trenches of Democratic politics for decades and who many view as deserving of the Congressional spot.  She is the “establishment” candidate, much more than Clinton, and is viewed by some progressives as tainted by her experience and corporate connections.  The complaints that Erica Jong and many feminists make that Obama is a babe-in-the-woods who would never get such a free pass against an equally qualified male candidate will only be amplified for Lessig.  Lessig has no experience, Speier has experience in spades.  And Lessig, much like Obama, will probably be side-stepping these claims of experience by saying that he is part of a movement to establish good government and a change in how citizens participate in government.  He would, of course, be making the claim that his judgment is better than Speier’s.  Unlike Obama, Lessig would get next-to-no support from blacks or really any other traditional Democratic voting block, except wine-track liberals.

Lessig would probably be able to instantly raise a huge amount of money from his fans all over the country – like Obama.  And while he would be able to draw very few traditional Democratic votes from Speier, he could probably get lots young and tech-oriented people who don’t usually vote to support him. And while he probably won’t win, he’d certainly be a sensation that could draw attention to the issues he’s spent years highlighting.

As a wine-track, good government, cerebral, young, Obama supporting, self-identified liberal from a well-offish family and who has aspirations of higher education, of course I’m a Lessig supporter.  So get over to his website and give him some cash.