Arnold Hiatt is an American businessman notable for having been the president of the Stride Rite footwear company. In addition, he is notable for having been a large contributor to political campaigns[1] for the Democratic Party[2] as well as being a voice calling for money to get out of politics. He has called for serious electoral reform and public financing of elections.[2][3] Hiatt has been consistently praised by Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig for his stance on electoral reform.[4]
According to Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, in 1996 Hiatt advocated to then-president Bill Clinton that the president work hard to try to end "private funding of public elections", but Hiatt was repudiated by Clinton.[
6][7] In 2007, Hiatt wrote:
Clearly, the way we finance elections is undermining our democracy. The current campaign finance system forces good people to spend far too much time talking to narrow slices of our society and at the expense of focusing on the nation's business. Only the wealthiest citizens or special interests can provide the enormous amounts of money required to run for or stay in office. Even the most trusting among us must recognize the potentially corrupting incentives that this creates.
—Arnold Hiatt, writing in the Boston Globe, 2007[3]
Hiatt has urged passage of the Senate Fair Elections Now Act introduced by Senators Dick Durbin and Arlen Specter, which is a bipartisan proposal to raise a "large number of small donations to show their credibility with the public" before qualifying for public funding for their campaigns.[3]
My own special interest is to get special-interest money out of the political process. The influence of that money indirectly costs taxpayers far more than the costs of liberating the electoral process from the special-interest lobbyists.
—Arnold Hiatt, 2007[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Hiatt
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