An Unlikely Candidate: Reflections on My Run for Congress

By Arthur Lieber

In 2010, Arthur Lieber ran for Congress in Missouri's 2nd Congressional District when no other Democrat would. Operating on a budget considered minuscule by today's standards, and refusing donations, he ran as an unashamed progressive Democrat in a predominantly Republican district. In Unlikely Candidate, Lieber reveals the inside story of his unconventional campaign, shares the lessons he learned about contemporary electoral politics, and suggests ways to fix our broken political system.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456602680

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to my wife, Gloria Bilchik, who encouraged me without pressure to enter this race if no other Democrat did. Gloria was also a terrific coach during the campaign, helping me learn to be more succinct and clear.

Thanks to Gloria’s mother, Mildred Shur, who with words that I will not repeat here gave me the ultimate incentive to run.

Thanks to Madonna Gauding for also encouraging me from the beginning and having a good sixth sense as to when I was really into it and when I was tepid about my involvement. Madonna has been an outstanding editor and advisor on writing a book.

Thanks to Bobbi Clemons who has one of the most remarkably intuitive and analytical brains for making computer hardware and software meet the requirements of the job. She was a jack of all trades, crunching data and canvassing throughout the district.

Thanks to my good friend Andy Rothschild for identifying a number of inconsistencies in grammar as well as spelling and usage mistakes. His corrections are invaluable. Additional thanks to Gloria’s sister, Renee Shur, who had the arduous task of being the final proofreader.

Thanks to Allison Reed for her fine research on the New Deal and Great Society which gave me the factual background to be very comfortable in advocating a progressive agenda.

Thanks to all the fine vendors with whom I worked, particularly Bill, Becky, and Rick at Minuteman Press in St. Charles who not only did outstanding work but who also were more ears on the ground in St. Charles County.

Thanks to the college and high-school students who engaged in the campaign. While I appreciate what they did for the campaign, it is more important to me that it was a learning experience for them as well.

Thanks to Carol Miller Lieber, who partnered with me in starting a new school, who helped me not to become a Limousine Liberal, and who may have taught me the most valuable three words in trying to connect actions with words: practice the process. It’s the best antidote I’ve found to hypocrisy.

Thanks to my brother, Robert Lieber, who taught me the unlikely combination of patience and persistence.

Thanks to my attorney in St. Louis, Arlene Zarembka, who kept me on track throughout the campaign with a variety of compliance issues. Thanks also to my former Crossroads student, Carisa Henze, who offered a host of fine ideas and provided me with legal advice when I met with the FEC in Washington.

Thanks to my long-time friend Rocco Landesman who offered me encouragement throughout the process. His sardonic wit put everything in context. Thanks also to long-time friend Fred Goldberg with whom I had countless conversations about care quotient while in high school.

Thanks to friend Dan Weinberg who challenged many of the assumptions of my campaign and made me give second and third thoughts to elements of my strategy.

Thanks to Stacy Mergenthal, Rachel Burns, Sue Evans, Carole and Paul Bannes, and the whole St. Charles County crew who brought grounded thinking and great humor to the entire process.

Thanks to my late grandmother, Lucille Milner, who published a book in 1954 called The Education of an American Liberal. I hope that I have done honor to her commitment to social justice and economic fairness.

Thanks to Jon Stewart and Michael Moore whose work gave me confidence that there is traction to my ideas.

Thanks to some outstanding therapists in the St. Louis area who helped me through difficult times and gave me the confidence that an introvert could navigate his way through the political process.

Introduction

I Got My Butt Kicked, But . . .

I ran for Congress in 2010; got my butt kicked; but all was not lost. On the surface it was a shellacking. Republican Todd Akin received 68%, I trailed at 29%, and Libertarian Steve Mosbacher garnered the other 3%. As I’ll demonstrate later, while losing by nearly 40 percentage points was humiliating, the results for the other 218 Democrats who lost on November 2 were also quite disappointing. I received 77,000 votes while spending $50,000, or about $0.64 per vote. This was less than 773 of the 841 candidates from the two major parties who ran that day.

I would have preferred an actual victory to go along with a moral one, but I am satisfied in accomplishing the two goals that I established other than gathering more votes than my opponents. First, I kept true to my commitment to neither solicit nor accept contributions; and second, I helped create a dialogue that was issue oriented and void of negative campaigning.

While this book is a personal account of my run for Congress, it is more importantly an assessment of the state of American politics in 2010, using my campaign for relevant reference points. Hopefully, it will provide helpful suggestions for improving our political process.

Our political system is nothing short of a mess. Democracy is compromised by the unseemly use of excessive money which candidates often use to paint distorted views of themselves and their opponents. In many cases, the media sits by and does little, somewhat akin to Nero just watching Rome burn. When the media does cover politics, it bears a certain similarity to how ESPN covers sports in its nightly wrap-ups (SportsCenter). What’s shown each night on SportsCenter? It’s the unusual—the outrageous and spectacular highlights. Mainstream coverage of politics shows the outrageous (loose lips), the car crashes (hypocrisy blatantly uncovered) and superficial highlights (a large rally which is thoroughly unrelated to the content of the candidate’s campaign or the issues that face the nation).

Politics is measured by how candidates do every two years in elections. But the interval between one election and other is far less than two years. Often a candidate wins one election and the next day begins plotting his or her campaign for reelection or to compete for a higher office. The system is geared towards immediate gratification characterized by dollars today, endorsements tomorrow, a constituent pleasing vote the next day, and finally victory in the election. Little time is available for reflection and study. It’s no wonder that our decision-makers live in a bubble, surrounding themselves primarily with people who can be of political or financial benefit to them.

None of our problems lend themselves to quick fixes. An education system that values conformity over creativity will not change in two years. A health-care system that is populated by a whole class of people whose job is to say no (insurance companies) will not become more patient oriented in two years. A foreign policy that is based on the false premise that America has never lost a war will not address reality overnight.

Fixing our political system so that it is capable of providing us with better government requires changes in five essential areas:

• We need candidates for public office who are much more thoughtful and committed to the public good than we currently have.

• We need a media that accurately portrays who our candidates are and gives equal attention to candidates who do not come from dynasties, wealth, or entrenched bases of power.

• We need schools that value the common good; that recognize that our country can be governed much better; that see that their primary role is to help students learn critical thinking skills and apply them for the benefit of society as a whole.

• We need to improve the current body politic. Citizens need to see meaningful reasons to vote. They need to learn how to engage in thoughtful dialogue with politicians, asking pertinent questions and not accepting simple slogans as the basis for policy.

• We need structural change in our government.

I will expand on these topics in depth in Part 2, but first I want to talk about how I came to run for Congress in Missouri’s Second District, and how my experience opened my eyes to what we need to do to fix our political system.

Part 1

An Unlikely Candidate in a Broken System

1. My Decision to Run for Congress

While I majored in political science in college, I did not expect to run for Congress or any other office. Following college I went into teaching, in part because I had many ideas about changing schools. But there was a bigger incentive. The U.S. was at war in Vietnam, and the military draft was in effect. Teaching in an inner-city school district like St. Louis provided a deferment from the army and consequently from going to Vietnam. I still feel somewhat guilty about that, not because I felt that I should go to Vietnam, but because the system clearly favored those who had access to education or money to hire attorneys. If you don’t believe me, ask Dick Cheney. He got five deferments.

Missouri’s Second Congressional District has been gerrymandered, and Republican Todd Akin has won it convincingly in recent years. Most people do not know that over the past forty years, Democrats have represented the district for twenty of them. It’s a suburban district, but one that is becoming home to more and more individuals and families leaving the core city of St. Louis. Most of these people have a history of voting Democratic, and they are providing more of a base for a candidate running against Akin.

Unfortunately, 2010 was not shaping up as a good year for Democrats, and Akin had won the district in 2008 with 62%— that in a year in which Barack Obama was pumping Democratic turnout to the max. The conventional way of challenging an incumbent like Akin is to (a) raise a lot of money—a million dollars or more—and (b) run a negative campaign. I’m sure there were Democrats in the area who were willing to do the second part, but apparently no one thought it was worth his or her while to try to raise a million dollars. Political contributions are like investments, and people want ROI (return on investment). Giving a lot of money to a candidate who loses is a poor investment and the Democratic establishment in Missouri’s Second District knew it.

So, as has been the case through most of the past decade, local Democrats who might have had the best chance of defeating, or at least challenging, Akin punted. Anyone who would raise a million dollars and lose would be indebted to his or her contributors and have nothing to show for it. That’s not a place where many people would want to be.

The U.S. Constitution talks about elections; it mandates them. But there’s nothing in the Constitution that states that elections require money. Elections are the means by which leaders are chosen in a democracy. The key word is choose because there is no choice when there is only one candidate in the race.

For some time I have felt that a Democrat with strong name recognition could compete in the Second District against Akin. I’m not alone in my thinking. Ray Hartmann, editor of St. Louis Magazine, has repeatedly written and spoken about this possibility. But for whatever reason, it hasn’t happened. I made my own efforts to recruit someone else for this race, writing three articles on the Occasional Planet blog.¹ There was some positive feedback but no action.

On the day of the filing deadline, I hadn’t yet decided

The filing deadline was March 30. Going into that day, Missouri had two districts out of nine in which no Democrat had filed. Writers in several local blogs knew that there were Democrats planning to file in each. I was considering a run in the Second District if no other candidate filed, but I had not communicated that to anyone besides my wife, Gloria, and a few friends.

As the filing deadline approached, I cleared my schedule for March 30. I could go to Jefferson City to file if no other Democrat did. I wanted to keep the option open. Gloria and I talked during and after breakfast about whether or not to file. We were never far from a laptop with a browser open to the Missouri Secretary of State’s website on which candidate filings were posted in real time. We were both getting antsy, particularly me. By 10:00 am when no other Democrat had filed, I said, I’m ready to head for Jeff City. It’s a beautiful day and the worst that will happen is we’ll have a nice drive. Gloria wanted to come, which I greatly appreciated because it meant among other things that we could further discuss the decision. So we put on our yuppie hats and chose my blue Prius over Gloria’s red one to travel across Red Missouri to the state capitol. As further evidence of yuppie tendencies, we each had iPhones with Internet access. AT&T was right. They actually had signal strength along I-70 and US-54 for the two-hour drive to the state capitol. We agreed that it would be wise (and legal) for Gloria to be the one checking the web for updates since I was the one driving.

We did stop for me to make a phone call, to the head of Missouri’s Democratic party. (I didn’t know his name before calling, never heard his name mentioned during the campaign, and have since forgotten his name.) I asked him about the rumors. Did he know of anyone else who might be filing in the Second District? He checked with someone else and said that as best he knew, no one else was filing. If he offered me a word of encouragement, it wasn’t memorable. But I’m thankful that he didn’t try to talk me out of it.

We reached Jefferson City. As we pulled into the parking lot of the Secretary of State’s office, Gloria checked the website again. It still said that no Democrat had filed. We considered this information something less than fully authoritative. By this time we were wearing our show me hats and actually had to go into the appropriate office to see if a Democrat had filed.

We entered the building, took the elevator up to the second floor, and entered the filing room. I still had not made up my mind, but my comfort level was rising, in part because the staff in the office was uniformly friendly and courteous. Even though they weren’t supposed to be interested in who, if anyone, was filing for anything, I sensed a little bit of excitement that there might actually be representatives of both major parties in the Second Congressional District. Then we challenged the boundaries of what they were allowed to do by asking if they had heard any rumors of another Democrat filing in the Second. Shedding another layer of bureaucratic behavior, they gave a direct answer and said no.

There were plenty of other candidates entering the building in anticipation of filing for other offices. The staff was busy. They didn’t have time to engage in a series of what-ifs with me as I did my imitation of Mario Cuomo by playing the role of Hamlet on the Missouri. So Gloria and I excused ourselves and said that we’d be back in five minutes. We went into the hallway, and I pretended that there was still doubt about what the decision would be. Gloria sensed this, and while she had tried to stay neutral, she raised the question of how I would feel if no Democrat filed and I had had a chance to do so. If there was any lingering doubt, that sealed the deal; and I said, Let’s do it.

We went back in the room, and the staff gladly gave me the forms. All I needed to do was to answer a few questions, sign my name, and write a $100 check to the Missouri Democratic party. I figured that if I couldn’t do that, I had no business running for office.

We left the office, went down the steps, and headed for the Prius. I know that I had a shit-eating grin on my face, even if I wanted to hide it. However, I wiped that smile off my face once I realized that on the application I had given our home phone number as the main contact number. I had recently purchased another cell phone just in case I needed a separate number for the campaign. Gloria and I agreed that we didn’t need the aggravation of either serious or harassing phone calls at home. We wondered if it was too late to go back to the office and change the phone number on the form. It wasn’t a typical question for the staff, but they looked up what had to be done and ten minutes later we were out of the building for good with everything properly intact.

The suspense was not quite over

The Democratic nominee in 2008 was Bill Haas, a gentleman who gives the word maverick real meaning. We had never met him but knew that he was extremely bright, perhaps eccentric, and certainly unpredictable. About halfway back to St. Louis from Jefferson City, we were listening to the local news on KMOX radio (formerly the news, sports, and information voice and choice of St. Louis; now best known as the local outlet for some guy from Missouri named Rush). A newsreader said words to this effect: This just in, Bill Haas, the 2008 Democratic nominee for the Second Congressional District seat, has just filed to run again. For reasons that I couldn’t and didn’t have time to articulate, this was an Oh, shit moment. Then the newsreader went on to add that Haas had filed . . . as a Republican. This seemed somewhat tantamount to Keith Olbermann saying that he was leaving MSNBC for Fox News. My jaw dropped so far that it almost caused my foot to engage the