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interview ZEPHYR TEACHOUT In September, Zephyr Teachout challenged incumbent Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Teachout, a Fordham Law School professor, has published a book, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. Grant Reeher (GR): Is there a particular way you’re using the word “corruption” in your book? Zephyr Teachout (ZT): The inspiration for the book came from the way the Supreme Court has been defining corruption. It’s an essential term in recent cases in which the Supreme Court struck down campaign finance laws, because it says that those laws weren’t serving anti-corruption purposes. I was really interested in what corruption has meant in American history in the legal system. My argument is when you go all the way back to the founding (of the nation), you see a pretty consistent understanding of corruption as when public servants — including citizens or people in public roles — use those public roles for selfish or private ends. In Citizens United and this recent case McCutcheon v. FEC, the Supreme Court says corruption only means criminal bribery when there is an explicit exchange. In contemporary American political life, the major threat to democratic self-governance does not come from bags of cash, but from what is perfectly legal: campaign contributions, super-PACs, other … ways in which folks with really enormous amounts of wealth are taking over the political system. This broader definition of corruption that I have, and that I think we really had as law in this country until 1976, encompasses that. (What was) exciting to me as I researched this book — I really focused a lot on the Founding era and the Constitutional Convention — was how much (James) Madison, Benjamin Franklin and all the framers focused on money and politics and corruption. GR: Tell me the story of the snuff box. ZT: Benjamin Franklin was leading a diplomatic tour in France, and the king of France gave him this fancy jeweled box with the portrait of the king on it. People were very concerned that it would corrupt Franklin. They didn’t have any evidence that there was a bribe or there was an explicit deal, but just the fact of accepting a gift of that value. It would make Franklin in the future perhaps pay more attention to French economic interests instead of actually serving the young country. And so we included in the Constitution a provision that forbids taking a gift of any kind whatever from a foreign power if you are an officer of the United States. And listen to the language: “any kind whatever.” Fast forward 230 years, and you see in Citizens United the Supreme Court says these kinds of things are not corrupt, unless there is a deal. It is such a radical shift in the understanding of the threats of gifts. GR: Is your book advancing a prescription for a cure? ZT: I am a big fan of (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), and FDR threatened to pack the (Supreme) Court when the court got so off the rails, and I think we have a court that is off the rails. A court-packing threat might be in order here. But I also think there are things we could do without waiting around for the court. We haven’t really built a system nationally or statewide where anybody could run for office based on their ideas. Our current system of private funding for campaigns is deeply broken. It means that you have to go beg daily at the feet of the wealthiest Americans to get permission to run for office, and so I advocate for a public financing system to replace the private financing system. GR: Maybe you were the one who broke the mold that you just described. You had a pretty good run, and you got 33 percent of the vote. That was a lot more traction than I think anybody would have thought going in. What was your key to break through? ZT: Well, I like to think that if we had public financing of campaigns, I could have won. I am not going to settle for a third of the votes, but I actually was lucky in a 12.03.14 - 12.09.14 | syracusenewtimes.com
lot of ways. One thing is, I have actually worked on campaigns for a long time and that was really important. I accepted my fundraising job as a serious job. It’s really hard. I’m so grateful for everybody who gave me money, but basically for a month of the three and a half months that I ran, I was sitting in a room dialing for dollars. Just think about what that means: 10 minutes a call, you’re supposed to make as many dials an hour as you can. You’re supposed to hit 25 percent. It’s not pleasant. It feels like you are sort of a salesperson, and you very quickly learn what kinds of issues resonate with people who can give $1,000 or $2,000. I would have loved to be in (Gov.) Andrew Cuomo’s shoes where I could raise $60,000 a pop, but I never got one of those donations. We raised about $800,000. If we had a public financing system, that would have been about $4 million. We didn’t do a single TV ad; with a public financing system, I could have done TV. We didn’t do a single mailer; we could have done mailers. And it’s kind of circular, but one of the most important features of fundraising is if you are a successful fundraiser, then the press takes you seriously. My biggest challenge was getting the press to take me seriously in the first two months of running. I got some lucky breaks, the biggest being that Andrew Cuomo made a lot of mistakes. He sued me to try to get me off the ballot, which was a major mistake. I have been involved in politics long enough to actually be shocked. It’s basic politics that if you have an insurgent that nobody knows, you don’t try to popularize their name, and I was really lucky about that. But I don’t think Grant Reeher hosts WRVO Public we broke the mold. It’s still a deeply broken system, and not Media’s program everybody can count on the breaks that I had.
the show
GR: Did you learn anything about corruption through the campaign experience that you hadn’t already learned by researching your book? ZT: Yes. A lot of it was about the call-time, the dialing for dollars. One is that the conversations with people who might give you more than a couple hundred dollars are really pretty explicit about where they agree with you and where they don’t agree with you. I cared deeply about funding public education, and I’m opposed to raising the cap on charter schools. I would hear over and over again in a call, calls with wealthier potential donors, here’s where I disagree with you on charters, I’m pro-charter. You don’t need to be a genius to figure out that this interaction is going to affect how much money they give you. So it just felt so much closer to a quid-pro-quo kind of exchange of campaign support for dollars. We raised money from 9,000 individuals, and the average contribution was $57. Well, for so many who are not raising in those kinds of increments, they are really going to change what they fight for, and that matters. GR: What’s next for you politically? ZT: I would love to run for office again. Having studied corruption so long, I was ready for the hard part. I had no idea how fun the rest of it would be. It’s the dirty secret of politics that it’s actually one of the most extraordinary things you can do. People will talk to you about anything. You can walk into any community. It can be pretty brilliant. They have insights and ideas that are constantly exciting and funny and surprising and, of course, really inspiring. SNT
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Conversations on Twitter @campbellconvos. You can also access earlier interviews by going to tinyurl.com/mplxaex. Reeher is director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute and a professor of political science at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He is the creator and producer of The Campbell Conversations. You can reach him at gdreeher@maxwell. syr.edu.