A photograph of Lawrence Lessig, from his Presidential campaign’s Facebook page.

In the spring of 2015, before I decided to run for President, two things were clear to me. First, the need to focus America on the failure of its democracy was as urgent as ever. Second, no plausible candidate for President was going to do that.

That need for reform was summarized by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” (2012): “All of the boastful talk of American exceptionalism cannot obscure the growing sense that the country is squandering its economic future and putting itself at risk because of an inability to govern effectively.”

Democracy has never been utopia. But we forget that at important moments in our history, it has worked, and, through it, we could address the nation’s problems again. Today, whether the issue is climate change or tax policy, health-care reform or the debt, Wall Street regulation or crony capitalism, immigration reform or gun control, the reality is the same: our government has lost the capacity to address these issues—either at all, or, certainly, sensibly.

This truth gets obscured by the pathological level of partisanship within our political culture. Neither insider Republicans nor insider Democrats are willing to acknowledge a systemic problem with America’s democracy. For them, the problem is always and only local: the other party. But we’re not going to ban the Republican Party from American politics. Neither will we abolish the Democrats. And neither party is going to achieve long-term dominance of the American political system, at least not anytime soon. So any solution to the ills of American democracy that looks to one party alone is not a solution.

Instead, what our democracy needs is a democracy movement: a bipartisan recognition of how our Republic has failed, and a political movement powerful enough to bring about a remedy. And today, the only possible agent of political reform is the President. Congress isn’t going to fix itself. Neither are the state legislatures likely to rise and exercise their power to reform the Constitution (even though that was clearly the Framers’ plan). The only modern political actor capable of putting comprehensive reform before “the People” is the one political actor actually elected by “the People” (or sort of, at least indirectly, through an Electoral College): the President.

At the beginning of last year, as the election season began, it seemed clear that no candidate for President was going to make such reform central to his or her campaign. None was going to take on Congress, as the most important early supporters of any Presidential campaign are members of Congress.

Neither was any candidate going to make money in politics a primary issue in his or her campaign. That was almost certain on the Republican side. In the spring, no one expected Donald Trump would be a candidate, and certainly no one thought that if he were, he—a billionaire—would make the outsized influence of billionaires a central issue in his campaign. There were other Republicans that one could be more hopeful about: Lindsey Graham had called for an amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision, and others were consistently attacking crony capitalism. Still, before Trump made big money toxic, it seemed unlikely that any Republican would make big money central.

The same was true for the Democrats. Elizabeth Warren could have made the issue central, but by May it was clear that Warren was not a candidate. That left Hillary Clinton as the obvious nominee, as well as her unlikely challenger, or so it seemed in the spring—Bernie Sanders.

I have no doubt that Clinton wants this rigged system reformed. But given the issues raised about the Clinton Foundation, it was obvious that even if this were the most important issue to Clinton, her campaign would never permit her to make it central. Every speech would be an invitation to an attack from the other side.

That left Bernie Sanders.

In early May, I worked with others to advise Sanders about the issue of money in politics. Given his history, it was no surprise that he was receptive to proposals for reform. Sanders had been a vocal critic of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. He had proposed an amendment to the Constitution to reverse its effect, and to empower Congress to protect the integrity of its elections. He’d never been a strong advocate for public funding of elections, which is the only meaningful reform that Congress could enact immediately, though he had supported it and was open to the idea in this campaign. So after a number of calls, I prepared a memo for Sanders, summarizing the issues and making recommendations for him to endorse.

But the critical recommendation that I made in that memo (subsequently leaked to Politico, apparently by someone with the Sanders campaign) had nothing to do with any specific proposals for reform. Instead, it had everything to do with the priority of reform within his campaign.

Of course, America needed to reform the corrupted system for funding campaigns. But America would only ever achieve that reform, I argued, if a Presidential candidate made it central to his or her election. The only way a President could even hope to have a mandate powerful enough to take on the most powerful interests in Washington was if his or her whole election was tied to achieving that reform.

This point is even stronger with a progressive like Sanders. None of the issues that Sanders would otherwise address—from single-payer health care, to “taking on Wall Street”—could be addressed credibly until we first fixed the corrupted system that Congress has become. There is not a hope in the world for single-payer health care, so long as insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies have the power they have within our political system. Likewise with Wall Street: the financial sector is within the largest sector of contributors to congressional campaigns. There is no hope for sensible reform of the financial sector until Congress is independent of Wall Street. The whole believability of Sanders’s campaign, I argued, would turn on him offering a reason why his reforms would be possible. Making fundamental reform primary was just such a reason.

Sanders was receptive to the recommendations about the substantive proposals about which bills to support, and which amendment made sense. He was not receptive to making these proposals central to his campaign. I could never quite tell why. It could well have been a political judgment—a view about what would rally a base, and what would not. Or it could have been a judgment about what was really possible in Washington. Whatever the reason, when Sanders finally came around to announcing that he would be a candidate, it was clear he was not announcing that he would be a reform candidate. No doubt, he tagged the problem of money in politics. No doubt, he made the bashing of billionaires a central part of his message. No doubt, he spoke repeatedly, if vaguely, about “revolution.” But he was not announcing a candidacy that made reforming our corrupted system the first priority of his Administration. It was not the equality of citizens that Sanders was fighting for. It was the equality of wealth.