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Comment by millettjon | Hacker News Reader

The point is that they changed the rules out from under him.

It's correct that they changed the rules to exclude him and most people don't like that in principal. But it's also true that he was not a serious candidate because he said he wanted one bill passed and then he'd resign the presidency, and that one bill wouldn't make it through congress anyway.

> that one bill wouldn't make it through congress anyway

To be fair to Lessig, if the single issue "pass this bill" candidate was actually elected President, congress would feel a lot of pressure to comply.

To be fair to accuracy, members of Congress who campaigned against the bill (as any who planned to oppose it would likely to be forced to of a major party nominee had it as their entire platform, since the question would be undodgeable) would face no meaningful pressure to vote for it, as their constituents would have weighed and accepted their opposition.

Yes, anyone who is elected actively campaigning against the bill would presumably not feel any pressure to vote for it.

Why would congress feel pressure just to do what the president wants? Presidents claim all kinds of mandates when they are elected, congress often goes it's own way.

Congress would feel pressured to do what their constituents want. If we imagine Lessig winning, so clearly focused on a single issue, we also must imagine an awful lot of voters clearly willing to vote based on that issue. Desire to claim those votes rather than driving then to their opponents would be the pressure in question. There's still no guarantee, to be sure, but it's clearly more likely post-Lessig-win than on the face of it.

> Congress would feel pressured to do what their constituents want.

Yes, but Presidents aren't elected by majority vote of voters in a majority of Congressional Districts. That's especially true of Democratic candidates, who tend to be hyperconcentrated in urban districts (in part, gerrymandering, but in part that's just the geographic distribution of Democratic support and why even without state-size biases and gerrymandering, Democrats are structurally disadvantaged by single-member, FPTP representation in Congress.)

Certainly, although some of that applies to the presidential election too. To be clear, I didn't mean to imply any kind of sure thing. Just that looking at the likelihood of Congress to pass the bill in the current setting should be expected to underestimate its performance in the wake of the election under discussion.

Most republicans would not feel pressure to support the supposed mandate behind a democratic president. Today, they'd actively go against it in most cases. It goes the other way too. That's why few democrats support the president or republican agendas.

I just don't see it that way at all. Think about Obama's work on national health care. A ton of democrats were worried about supporting it.

Again, there's a difference between a normal candidate claiming a mandate, when in reality many voted for other reasons, and a genuinely single issue candidate like Lessig.

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