Washington Post: Ann McBride Norton, who led Common Cause and championed campaign-finance laws, dies at 75

The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said a daughter, rock singer Mary McBride.

Mrs. Norton, a Democrat who grew up in a politically connected Louisiana Republican family, joined the nonpartisan Common Cause in 1972 as a part-time volunteer. She advanced in the newly founded public-interest group and became chief lobbyist on Capitol Hill, where she was known for her shrewd political instincts.

“A key opponent in one case may become your prime supporter in another,” she told the Town Talk of Alexandria, La., in 1979. “You will find that in the world of lobbying, there are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies.”

Lobbyists, she said, saw people as belonging to one of three groups: saints, sinners and savables.

“Saints are those who agree with your cause and will fight for it until the bitter end,” she observed in her mellifluous Louisiana lilt. “Sinners are those who vehemently oppose your cause and will to the day they die. People in the first two categories will never switch their opinions. It’s the savables, those caught in the middle, we all try to sway because there’s hope for them.”

In the wake of the Watergate scandal and new disclosure requirements aimed at curbing financial abuses in federal campaign financing, Common Cause saw its membership rolls vault into the hundreds of thousands.

The organization backed civil rights bills, efforts to raise ethical standards for public officials and public financing of presidential elections, emerging as one of the most influential lobbying groups in Washington. Journalists frequently cited its studies and quoted its leaders on the need for tighter regulation of campaign money.

Mrs. Norton was their chief congressional emissary. She was also a frequent presence at rallies and conferences across the country and during the 1970s was Common Cause’s coordinator in an unsuccessful bid to win ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Common Cause President Fred Wertheimer stepped down in 1995 after 14 years in the role, and Mrs. Norton was named his successor and the group’s first female chief executive. She pushed her organization’s 250,000 members to build grass-roots support for bipartisan legislation to prohibit unregulated and unlimited “soft money” donations, which wealthy special interests give to political parties and may then be channeled to individual campaigns.

She described massive infusions of cash from tobacco and HMO lobbyists as a corrupting influence “overwhelming elections and poisoning our political system” at the expense of American taxpayers.

Mrs. Norton was a “transitional” figure during her four years at the helm of Common Cause, said Marcie L. Reynolds, author of “Interest Group Design: The Foundation and Evolution of Common Cause” (2019).

There had long been tension between members who favored grass-roots activism and executives who wanted to maintain the organizational culture of a professional lobby supported by membership dues and contributions.

She left Common Cause in early 1999 after her marriage to Edward M. Norton, an environmentalist once nicknamed “a Rottweiler in granny glasses” for his fierce negotiating tactics.

They moved that year to the Himalayan foothills of southwestern China to work on the Yunnan Great Rivers Project — a collaboration between the U.S.-based Nature Conservancy and the Yunnan provincial government.

Mrs. Norton led an effort to provide cameras to villagers — many of whom had never seen or held one — to document the fragile ecosystem of mountains and deep river valleys in one of the last, vast, untouched spaces of China. The goal was to build political momentum for wilderness preserves and national parks across Yunnan amid the country’s modernization drive.

Mrs. Norton created Photovoices International, a nonprofit community-engagement project first in the Yunnan region and later in Lamalera, a whaling village on Indonesia’s Lembata island, and the lake systems of Borneo. Her work, she hoped, would not only document local ways of life — the practice of fishing with leashed cormorants, for example — but also spur environmental protections and generate ecotourism.

Virginia Ann deGravelles was born in Lafayette, La., on June 23, 1944. Her father, who ran an independent oil leasing company, became chairman of the state Republican Party, and he and her mother served on the Republican National Committee.

She attended Louisiana State University but left in 1964 to marry her college sweetheart, Charles W. McBride, who went on to work for two powerful Louisiana Democrats: as press secretary to Sen. Russell Long and chief of staff to Sen. J. Bennett Johnston Jr.

In a family reminiscence, McBride recalled that the 1976 election cycle put him and his wife at professional odds: She was working with Common Cause while he served as executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

“At some point,” McBride said, “we were with Senator Long at a Louisiana event and he just couldn’t get over the fact that Ann was out trying to reform campaign finance laws and her husband was out trying to raise money for all these Senate Democratic candidates across the country. He asked how in the world we reconciled that and how we talked about it at the dinner table. Ann said, ‘That is easy. Charlie shakes them down, and I shake them up.’ ”

They eventually divorced. In addition to her daughter Mary and second husband, survivors include another daughter from her first marriage, Claire McBride, all of Washington; three stepchildren, actor and director Edward Norton of Los Angeles, James Norton of Boise, Idaho, and Molly Norton of Seattle; two brothers; and five grandchildren.

Mrs. Norton completed her undergraduate degree at American University in 1992 and was a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government’s Institute of Politics at Harvard University. During her years in Asia, she was an NPR commentator. She also was involved in humanitarian organizations.

She said her intent, in Washington and Asia, was to empower those ignored or overlooked by entrenched interests in capitalist and authoritarian societies. She recalled a new level of obstacles when she ventured to an isolated Tibetan community and found the concept of Photovoices hard to explain to the 40 villagers who had encircled her.