In the Steps of Granny D

A quiet country road from Dublin to Hancock, New Hampshire was the site of the New Hampshire Rebellion’s latest “Granny D Walk” to end the influence of money in American politics.

Granny D was the public moniker for Doris Haddock, a long-time Dublin resident who set out from California a few days short of her 89th birthday to walk across the USA and publicize the need for campaign finance reform.  She had just turned 90 when she reached the nation’s capital on February 29, 2000. 

The path of today’s walk was one she used to train for her historic pilgrimage, which ended at the US Capitol on February 29, 2000, a month after she turned 90.

Few people reflect the strength of conviction demonstrated by Granny D, observed Larry Lessig, the writer and Harvard Law School professor who launched the Rebellion last year.  The group conducted a winter march from Dixville Notch to Nashua in

January and another along the New Hampshire seacoast in July. 

Today forty people, aiming to make breaking the money-politics link a central issue of the 2016 presidential nominating contest, continued Granny D’s quest.  Walking through a wooded area with no pedestrians and barely any cars, there weren’t many people to educate and convince.  But perhaps that wasn’t the point. 

There’s a long history of walks, marches, and pilgrimages intended to bolster movements for social change.  Gandhi’s march to the sea, the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, the United Farm Workers Union’s 300-mile march from Delano to Sacramento, and the regular peace walks led by the Nipponzan Myohoji monks come to mind as examples.  Yes, they are expressions of political views, but they also embody spiritual power. 

When we sing “we won’t let nobody turn us around,” we aim to capture that same spirit.  When musicians Leslie Vogel and Fred Simmons treated us to “Just a Walk with Granny D” before the march, I felt the spirit in motion. 

Part of the point was also to get to know new people, Dan Weeks said at the walk’s outset.  Dan, who was recently appointed as Executive Director for the NH Coalition for Open Democracy (NH COD), says his own activist inclinations began when Granny D visited his high school.  At that time the impressionable 15-year old learned from his elderly neighbor that companies which profited from selling tobacco had a heavy hand in writing the nation’s laws through their political involvement.  Children were dying because of the nation’s twisted approach to campaign finance, Granny D explained.  Dan was hooked, not on cigarettes, but on money & politics activism.  “The system excludes so many of our people,” he says. 

To put it another way, if money is speech, then those with the most money get the most speech.  And as the distribution of wealth becomes increasingly skewed, inequality of speech becomes a profound political problem for a country where government of the people, by the people, and for the people is supposed to be imperishable.

From Dan’s perspective, a walk in the steps of Granny D is a statement that we have not given up hope.

Two hours after setting out, clusters of walkers arrived in the center of Hancock, a town with a population of fewer than 2000 people.  There we were greeted by volunteers and treated to ice cream donated by Ben & Jerry’s.  The crowd had grown to about 60 people, now including Jim Rubens, a Republican candidate for the US Senate who has made campaign finance reform a plank in his platform (and who says he’s the only Republican in the race who is speaking out against the third Iraq war).  

When the ice cream had been eaten, Dan Weeks introduced Professor Lessig for a short speech by the gazebo on the Hancock Common.  Lessig apparently didn’t feel a need to educate the assembled dozens about the corruption caused by the billions of dollars in the political system, nor did he choose to restate the strategy of the NH Rebellion.  He chose instead to exhort the small crowd about the importance of action, something he says our country has become unaccustomed to taking. 

“We’ve just gotten through a century of very passive politics, where we were told to shut up and listen to the commercials and just show up to vote,” Lessig said.

“That’s the only thing we were to do. We weren’t to organize or to get people out in

the streets.  We weren’t about ordinary citizens trying to lead.  We weren’t practiced in that kind of politics.”

“But that’s the kind of politics this will take,” he continued.  “Neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party leadership like this issue.  Neither of them are going to make this transition happen on their own.  It will only happen if we force them.”

Plans are already being hatched for another walk next January, timed to coincide not only with Granny D’s birthday but also with the fifth anniversary of the Citizens United court decision. 

 

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American Revolution Version Two

 

Today’s rebellion started slowly in a parking lot off Route 1A on the south side of Portsmouth.  With 3 days of rain finally over and the sky brightening up, the spirits of the few dozen people who met there were pretty good, and a bunch of them were old friends I wasn’t expecting to see.  It was a good start to a day of marching to get big money out of politics.

That’s the purpose of the NH Rebellion, a year-old organization inspired by Doris “Granny D” Haddock, the New Hampshire woman who at age 90 walked across the entire country to call for reform of the nation’s campaign finance laws.  Her relentless pavement pounding helped pave the way for passage of the McCain-Feingold law in 2002.  That law, in turn, opened the doors to new paths for moneyed interests to worm their ways into the political system and then was undermined by the US Supreme Court. 

With money spent on political campaigns deemed a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, and corporations deemed persons with just about all rights – so far – save the right to cast ballots, Granny D’s spirit is more important than ever.   

“96% of Americans think that big money in politics is a problem,” the NH Rebellion says, “but 91% think we can’t do anything about it.  It’s time to prove them wrong.” 

“Systemic corruption blocks progress on ALL issues, regardless of one’s political viewpoint,” insists the Rebellion.  “Our goal is to make money in politics the central issue of the 2016 presidential primaries by asking every candidate to answer one question:  ‘How are you going to end the system of corruption in DC?’”

From now until the NH Primary, the Rebellion aims to mobilize citizens to ask that question.  They are also planning house meetings, circulating petitions, and organizing more marches.

Our busload of rebels emptied out at Hampton Beach and without fanfare hit the sidewalk for several hours of walking north to New Castle, where a mid-afternoon rally was scheduled.  With everyone walking at their own pace we were soon spread out along Route 1-A, a bit hard to distinguish from vacationers who were just as glad the sun was shining.

NH Rebellion volunteers met us now and then with offers of water, leaflets, encouragement to walk faster, and reminders that the bus would come by to sweep up stragglers.  We were among those “swept up” by the bus to leapfrog ahead a few miles and re-join the march for the last few miles through Rye and New Castle.

Only when we reached the New Castle Library could we see that there was a pretty good crowd.  Finally, inside the walls of Fort Constitution we were able to join a crowd several hundred strong.  No surprise: Portsmouth’s Leftist Marching Band was performing.  

Jeff McLean, the Rebellion’s Executive Director, welcomed the marchers with a brief statement noting that Fort Constitution was the site of the first victory of the American Revolution.  “Today we come here as citizens who recognize a fundamental flaw” in the political system.

McLean, who led organizing of turnout and logistics for the march, introduced Professor Lawrence Lessig, founder of the initiative and the event’s only other speaker.  Conventional wisdom in the nation’s capital is that the money system is entrenched and impossible to change, Lessig said.  “But look around.  This looks like the first victory of the American Revolution Version Two.”

Lessig also proudly announced that his May Day Super PAC had raised $5 million to support candidates who want to rid politics of the influence of money.  

By the time of the NH Primary, Lessig said, every candidate will have to answer the Rebellion’s one question about ending the system of corruption.  That remains to be seen. 

One thing was obvious today.  Unlike the Rebellion’s first march last January, this one was peopled mostly by New Hampshire residents.  These are the people who, if they get jazzed up over the next 16 months, can turn money in politics, the unwarranted influence of big business, and the notion that corporations are vested with constitutional rights into key issues in the Primary campaign.   

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