Health-Care Head Fake

If President Obama's agenda is going to stand a chance, he needs to hold all of the Democrats in the Senate. The least reliable is Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, a savvy conservative from a deep-red state who will use his leverage for whatever he can get.

Now some progressives think they've figured out a way to use the Web to pressure Nelson, whose big contributions from the health-insurance industry and banks has made him a target. But they still have a long way to go, and Nelson is fighting back against the blogosphere. It's old vs. new—rough-cob politics in the Cornhusker State, or perhaps just in some virtual version of it.

Nelson has a formidable adversary in Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and arguably the nation's best thinker on the legal implications of the Internet. Lessig got tired of just thinking and writing, and after deciding not to run for Congress he decided to try to clean it up from the outside.

His organization, Change-Congress.org, is claiming its first "major victory." In early June, Nelson backed off from his comment that a public option for health insurance was "a deal breaker" and let it be known that he would not join any filibuster against the president's health-care bill.

Lessig says this came after ChangeCongress announced it would spend $10,000 in online ads and send 3,000 direct-mail pieces to Democratic donors in Nebraska pointing out that Nelson received more than $2 million from special interests in health care who oppose the public option.

Rather than attack Nelson as a scoundrel, Lessig calls it his "Good Souls Campaign," which is aimed at "good people trapped in a broken campaign-finance system they refuse to fix." He has launched a "donor strike," asking politically active donors not to contribute to any federal office holder who hasn't endorsed the Durbin-Specter "Fair Elections" bill for public financing of congressional campaigns.

That bill (which doesn't have as many cosponsors as it deserves) is an imaginative and sensible way to advance true campaign-finance reform. Instead of trying to take the money out of politics, it merely takes the big money out of the system. The plan allows qualifying candidates who forego PAC money and raise only small-dollar donations from their constituents (not out-of-state cash) to receive matching public funds and broadcast vouchers.

Nelson is not a supporter of Durbin-Specter, and he doesn't appreciate being depicted as caving to pressure from progressives. His spokesman, Jake Thompson, calls Lessig's efforts "sophomoric" and says that his boss was never against all versions of the public option, only those that, over time, would wreck the private-insurance system.

Thompson says that Nelson's office has heard little, if anything, from Nebraskans who are planning to withhold contributions or otherwise object to Nelson's position. "We didn't get a lot of interest-group commentary related to what they were saying," Thompson says. "Nothing compared to abortion or guns."

The same applies to Nelson's indefensible opposition to Obama's plan to cut out the middlemen and have the government take over the student-loan business. This would save $94 billion, which is real money even in this environment. But Nebraska is home to a big student-lending institution, and the Nebraska private colleges that work hand-in-glove with the lenders are under no pressure from bloggers—or anyone else—to endorse the Obama plan.

So Lawrence Lessig and his supporters have to do a better job of networking with real, live constituents—people who live in Nebraska and will take the time to write personal letters or e-mails to Nelson's office. He has a few new converts but needs at least 5,000 to 10,000 more per congressional district before he can begin to make good on his boast of making a powerful senator quiver and quake.

I wish him luck. The future of not just health care but all political reform—indeed, of all honest politics—depends on Web activists who can crack that code.