Ed Clark, RIP
His 1980 presidential campaign put the Libertarian Party on the map in a year rich in libertarian cultural clout.
Ed Clark, the Libertarian Party's (L.P.) 1980 candidate for president, has died at age 95.
Clark, a Harvard Law graduate who for much of his career practiced corporate law for Arco in Los Angeles, brought a calm normalcy to his libertarian messaging in his two prominent runs, famously trying to define this then-clandestine political philosophy as "low-tax liberalism" to explain his combination of fiscal prudence, foreign policy restraint, and mostly letting people make their own personal choices.
His first unprecedented political success for the ideology came with his 1978 run for governor of California. Because of ballot access complications, he was not on the ballot as a labeled Libertarian but ran a Libertarian-branded campaign of libertarian ideas. (Clark had already been the first chair of New York state's Free Libertarian Party in 1972 and state chair of the California L.P.) David Boaz, later executive vice president of the Cato Institute, worked on that campaign, and recalled about it that:
We had enough money for radio ads. They were very policy-oriented, addressing school choice, busing, victimless crimes, the antigay Briggs Initiative, and the tax-cutting Proposition 13, which only Clark of all the gubernatorial candidates had supported enthusiastically before it passed overwhelmingly. We also got enough last-minute money to run some full-page newspaper ads and put together a half-hour interview (with then-Reason columnist Tom Hazlett) that ran in major markets….
He did best [in percentage terms] in rural Nevada County, where there was a strong local organization, and in Kern County, where the Bakersfield Californian endorsed him and then actually ran news stories about him for a week — as newspapers always do for the Republican and Democratic candidates. And even one on-the-trail feature story, which began (if I recall) "He has the charisma of John F. Kennedy and the verbal agility of Bill Buckley."
Clark ended up winning 5.5 percent of the vote for governor (though Democratic incumbent Jerry Brown won handily, with 56 percent). Clark's raw vote total of over 377,000 is still more than any other Libertarian has ever won in a governor's race. It was a year of tax rebellion and California's Proposition 13 limiting property taxes and an era of the post-Vietnam and Watergate devolution of trust in institutions. With his impressive showing in California, the L.P. didn't have a hard time choosing Clark to be its national standard-bearer for 1980 (with billionaire oil industry magnate David Koch as his running mate).
One Clark campaign flyer on his presidential run sold the message tightly and convincingly: "We can slash taxes and spending. We can free our economy from government restrictions and regulations. We can guarantee complete civil liberties to individual Americans. We can reduce the threat of war."
With that message, Clark ended up, as the L.P.'s third presidential candidate, winning over 921,000 votes, 1.1 percent of the total, over five times as many votes as 1976's candidate, Roger MacBride. It was a record the L.P. didn't come near to beating until former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson ran in 2012.
As Boaz summed up the campaign in The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, it "gained respectful, if not plentiful, media attention, inspired some 300 Students for Clark organizations, distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of its campaign book [A New Beginning], and placed no less than 47 five-minute ads on national television." Still, libertarians close to the campaign felt themselves riding a wave of interest in alternatives to the major parties that got diverted by independent John Anderson's surprise April entry in the race—Anderson ended up with 6.6 percent.
As I wrote about the Clark campaign in my 2007 book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement:
Liberal columnist Nicholas Von Hoffman was an enthusiastic fan of Clark; the press clips were piling up triple and more what MacBride's campaign had seen; the distinctive cross left-right policy mix seemed zesty, attractive, worth noting to many columnists; the tactically brilliant move of making an end run around FECA by naming David Koch the vice presidential candidate, allowing him to spend unlimited amounts of his own billions, made it the best financed LP presidential campaign ever, with $3.5 million spent; why, Clark even played in Peoria, with an endorsement from the Peoria Journal Star.
As establishment a paper as The Washington Post wrote admiringly of his isolationist foreign policy: Clark "thought through foreign policy and fitted ends…to means….Not for him the asserting of ambitious purposes that the country cannot in fact uphold, nor the spending of resources for which no reasonable policy goal can be framed. This is a model of discipline that ought to be demanded of all the candidates."
Clark was a major figure in and contributor to what was a magic year for the libertarian movement's cultural influence. Milton and Rose Friedman's Free to Choose was rising high on both the bestseller lists (it spent 47 weeks of that year on the New York Times bestseller list) and PBS in 1980.
Libertarian movement figures such as Doug Casey (an anarcho-capitalist whose book Crisis Investing topped the Times bestseller list for 29 weeks that year) and Robert Ringer (whose Restoring the American Dream was also a Times bestseller multiple weeks that year) were also influencing the culture with ideas about taking personal control of your life, the richness of freer markets at home and abroad, and making end runs around the flaws and weaknesses of government currency.
Ronald Reagan, who beat Clark to the presidency in 1980, remember, often tried to sell himself as a libertarian, having told Reason in a 1975 interview that he believes "the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism." It was an exciting year, especially at the time, for those who had been striving to sell these peculiar ideas in American politics and culture for decades and had been largely ignored, and Clark played a major role in it.
Clark mostly stepped away from libertarian activism after his surprisingly successful runs, but his role in that consequential year set the stage for the continued infiltration of libertarian ideas into politics and culture.
