Eugene McCarthy - Further Activism

Further Activism

He opposed Watergate-era campaign finance laws, becoming a plaintiff in the landmark case of Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that certain provisions of federal campaign finance laws were unconstitutional. McCarthy, along with the New York Civil Liberties Union, philanthropist Stewart Mott, the Conservative Party of New York State, the Mississippi Republican Party, and the Libertarian Party, were the plaintiffs in Buckley, becoming key players in killing campaign spending limits and public financing of political campaigns.

In 1980, dismayed by what he saw as the abject failure of the Jimmy Carter presidency (later he would say, "he was the worst president we ever had" ), he appeared in a campaign ad for Libertarian candidate Ed Clark, and also wrote the introduction to Clark's campaign book. He eventually endorsed Ronald Reagan for the presidency.

In the 1988 election, his name appeared on the ballot as the Presidential candidate of a handful of left-wing state parties, such as the Consumer Party in Pennsylvania and the Minnesota Progressive Party in Minnesota. In his campaign he supported trade protectionism, Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative and the abolition of the two-party system. He received 30,905 votes.

In 1992, returning to the Democratic Party, he entered the New Hampshire primary and campaigned for the Democratic Presidential nomination, but was excluded from the first and therefore most important televised debate by its moderator Tom Brokaw of NBC. McCarthy, along with other candidates who had been excluded from the 1992 Democratic debates (including two-time New Alliance Party Presidential candidate Lenora Fulani, former Irvine, California mayor Larry Agran, "Billy Jack" actor Tom Laughlin, and others) staged protests and unsuccessfully took legal action in an attempt to be included in the debates. Unlike the other excluded candidates mentioned, McCarthy was a longstanding national figure and unlike all those who were in the debates, including Bill Clinton, McCarthy had run for the President in previous elections.