How did the Browne campaign survive these failures? Membership recruitment was said to be a task for the National Party. Failure to recruit members was a failure of the National Party, not the Browne Campaign. To his credit, Browne repeatedly urged Libertarians to support Project Archimedes, so these failings lay not on his shoulders but on the shoulders of his hand-picked National Chair, David Bergland.
The Campaign’s financial failings were more serious, because money management was the Campaign’s responsibility. There was no possibility— at the start of 2000—that the Campaign could scapegoat someone else with the Campaign’s financial failings. No one outside the campaign knew that the campaign did not have the three-quarters of a million dollars it claimed. The Browne Campaign failed to accumulate its planned cash reserves. It was unable to launch the ad campaign it had announced for early 2000.
The financial failure should have been a showstopper. The Browne financial juggernaut, ‘the best-organized campaign in the party’s history’ in the words of several activists, was a Potemkin village. Under the shiny coat of paint, behind the layers of fundraising letters and television production efforts, the money was not there. Fortunately for the Browne campaign, the Libertarian body politic was only to learn about Browne 2000’s total financial failure at the last moment. The Browne campaign’s deception was possible for one reason: Harry Browne hid his finances from the Libertarian public.
Browne finally made his campaign declaration on February 14, 2000. There was absolutely no possible doubt that he was now a candidate. He then refused to file with the Federal Election Commission. We will return later to Browne’s skirmishes with the FEC and his Libertarian opponents.
Chapter Twelve
Browne Affects to Declare
January/February 2000
If politicians were held accountable for campaign promises, by January 2000 the Browne campaign’s staff would have faced interesting times. In the last three years Browne and his Campaign had promised ‘I will write another book soon’, ‘the campaign fund already has $703,000’, ‘we need to have a large pile of money _already_ in the bank’ (by January 2000), ‘We’ll (run) …when we’ve booked and paid for commercials in advance…’, and ‘I might run again, but only if (we have enough members)…the size of the party dwarfs all other considerations’. There was to be a December media tour, to show to the press the TV ads for the January campaign declaration. Beyond the groundwork, Browne’s April, 1997 letter set forth his tasks, including “build my name recognition”, “…appear.. on radio talk shows, in front of large crowds, and on TV”, “shore up relationships with media people”, and “become a household name over the next three years”.
On the above list, give the campaign full credit for: ‘We need to have a large pile of money’. True. On January 1, 2000 they definitely still needed a large pile of money.
The Campaign failed to deliver on its other assertions. In late December 1999, the national media tour was, without fanfare, cancelled. The Campaign announced over the Christmas Holidays that Browne had postponed declaring his candidacy until mid-February. At the start of 2000 there was almost no money in the bank, so only a few ads could be run. The book, to recruit new Libertarians? It was incomplete. Indeed, it was not generally available until June 2000. Browne was not in any sense ‘a household name’ with significant ‘name recognition’. Finally, Project Archimedes had failed: The Party was nowhere near the “200,000 members” that Browne had identified as the most important variable in determining whether he would run.
Confronted with these difficulties, the Browne campaign staff followed a maxim* of Sun Tzu: “In death ground, fight!”. Despite the near-total collapse of its announced campaign plans, the Campaign continued to pursue the Libertarian Presidential nomination. There were a variety of positive factors. The Campaign had significant financial resources, if less than the Campaign had hoped. Many Libertarians were firmly committed to supporting Browne’s campaign. Browne’s campaign was perceived to have enormous momentum, largely because many Libertarians were subject to the misapprehension that the Browne campaign had a large warchest, vast numbers of volunteers, and a deployed campaign plan with usable advertisements ready to go.
Last and most important, at the start of the year Browne was substantially unopposed. ‘You can’t beat someone with no one!’ is a fundamental political axiom, as true for Libertarians as for anyone else. Browne faced David Hollist, a one-issue candidate whose ‘contract insurance’ proposals appeared to many to be remote from Libertarian ideas, California gay activist Larry Hines, Californian Kip Lee, and the non-candidacy of Libertarian SF author L. Neil Smith. Hines capped his appearance at the New Hampshire State Convention by telling activists that he expected them to tell him which issues to run on. To my eyes, his remark was not well-received. Hines left the Party prior to the 2000 convention. Smith had told his supporters that he would run if he received a million-signature petition asking him to run or if the National Convention on its own volition asked him to run. When Smith’s supporters were told by their erstwhile candidate that he would only run if they accomplished obvious impossibilities, the supporters set out to accomplish them, rather than recognizing that Smith had politely told them that he would not run. Browne would eventually face significant opposition from Donald Gorman, Barry Hess, and Bumper Hornberger, but those candidates only announced later.
*There is a translation of this maxim in a Chinese book whose title is approximately ‘The 36 Strategies Applied to Go’. The Chinese author instead translates the maxim to English as “In death ground, avoid battle”.
