It is a truth universally acknowledged that no stunt you do to call attention to the need for campaign finance reform will work.
You can write a comic book. You can write op-eds. You can be Stephen Colbert, running for president with a coordinated Super PAC. Nothing moves the needle. As the Tampa Bay Times notes, 96 percent of people think that Something Should Be Done about reducing the influence of money in politics. Only 9 percent think that something can be done. Cynical, but there it is.
But Doug Hughes had a dream to change that. He’s a mailman from Ruskin, Fla. And one day it hit him: The reason we have never done anything about campaign finance reform is that no one has ever flown through the no-fly zone to deliver letters to the Capitol grounds in a gyrocopter. That was it. That was the missing piece. The gyrocopter.
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He announced his intentions to the local paper, wrote an email to info@barackobama.com, talked to the Secret Service to assure them that, although he was going to fly through the no-fly zone illegally, he did not intend for anyone to be hurt and that his intention was simply to protest.
And then he packed up his gyrocopter in a trailer and drove to Virginia to carry the plan out. “I don’t believe,” he told the Tampa Bay Times, “that the authorities are going to shoot down a 61-year-old mailman in a flying bicycle.”
Writing to Congress, like writing to newspapers, can sometimes feel like putting all your thoughts on paper and then dropping them down a deep bottomless well from which no echo will ever emerge. You might as well write your concerns on Post-it notes and feed them to the Sarlacc for the impact your words seem to make. Do they even read them?, you wonder. Do they even notice?
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But Hughes got noticed, all right. Noticed, and arrested, as most people do who take up the mantle of Florida Man in a newspaper headline (Florida Man Claims He’s Thor As He Tries To Stab Cop With His Own Badge; Florida Man Bites Dog). Say what you will about the stunt — “Florida Man strikes again” — it did attract attention.
Just not, maybe, to the issue that Doug Hughes hoped.
When it landed, the Tampa Bay Times reported, in a piece that truly deserves a Pulitzer: “Richard Burns, 27, who said he works for a marijuana lobby group in Washington, stood in wonder and solidarity. ‘I don’t know whatever it was he was doing but I support him.'”
(Here’s his Web site, for more of his thoughts on campaign finance reform.)
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