Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig is running for President on the single issue of adding restrictions to certain electoral speech. In his announcement video, he points to Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 run for the White House. He says in that video:

In 1967 Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy entered the primary here in New Hampshire to challenge his own party’s sitting president because he feared the most important moral issue of the time, the Vietnam War, was going to be invisible in that election. In four months McCarthy went from almost nothing in the polls to almost beating Lyndon Johnson in the primary and the one issue that no one wanted to talk about became the one issue that no one could ignore.

It seems clear that Lessig intends to set up a parallel between Vietnam and America’s insufficiently regimented electoral system. There’s just one problem with pointing to McCarthy in this case: Eugene McCarthy was able to make that historic primary campaign about Vietnam because a few rich anti‐​war guys gave his campaign massive direct contributions, something Lessig strongly opposes.


In today’s Cato Daily Podcast (Subscribe: iTunes/RSS/CatoAudio for iOS), I talk to John Samples about the facts of McCarthy’s candidacy and why Lessig’s example doesn’t hold up. We also discuss Stewart Mott, one of McCarthy’s financial backers, and his appreciation for less‐​than‐​fully‐​fettered political speech.