By Urja Mittal and Sarem Gizaw

Benjamin Jealous is the current President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He is the youngest person to have led the 104-year-old organization. Earlier in his career, Jealous worked as a journalist for a Mississippi newspaper and served extensively in the non-profit sector. As the head of the NAACP, Jealous has led advocacy campaigns on a wide range of issues, ranging from voter mobilization to the death penalty repeal.

What lessons have you learned as the leader of one of the nation’s largest African-American civil rights organization that could be translated into leadership in other arenas, such as politics and business?

What lessons have you learned as the leader of one of the nation’s largest African-American civil rights organization that could be translated into leadership in other arenas, such as politics and business?

BJ: Courage is cheap and yet our most valuable commodity. Courage really just comes down to making a decision that you’re going to do the right thing. It doesn’t cost anything to do that except for what it takes to overcome your own fears.

When I was a young investigative reporter in Mississippi, while on hiatus from college, I was investigating the case of a farmer who was being framed for arson. And there was evidence that the sheriff may have been involved in framing him. The sheriff was not a nice person. There came a moment when the death threats became very specific and very credible—death threats against me for investigating the case—[and] the guy had two hung juries. This was his third trial. All that happened was a tractor’s tire had burned, but because the tire was attached to the tractor and the tractor was worth a lot of money, it was enough for grand arson. So if he was found guilty, he would have gone to prison for 30 years.

I came to my publisher at my newspaper. My newspaper had been firebombed twice in the 10 years I worked there and would be firebombed again about three years after I left. My beat was public corruption, and the last person to have the beat was a woman who was gang raped by [the] police officers she was investigating. In that context, I went to the publisher and said the death threats are getting specific and credible, and I’m not sure I should continue with this investigation. He said to me, “Son, do you feel like you’re doing what God called you to do?” I said, “Sir, respectfully, that’s kind of a deep question for 7 o’clock in the morning.” He asked more plainly, “Do you think you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing right now?” I said, “Yes, sir.” He said, “Well, son, who are you more afraid of — them fools or God?”

That conversation changed my life, because I, in that moment, was forced to really appreciate the decisions that many people had made before me that ultimately I had benefited from. So in my job now, having gone from the mailroom to being CEO of the parent company, I constantly come back to that conversation and whether it’s working with people within the organization to push people to step out affirmatively in support of marriage equality and the LGBT community, whether it’s taking on the Tea Party, whether it’s pushing a politician to stand up and do the right thing on the death penalty. The example of that small-town Southern publisher who, every time his newspaper was burned down, rebuilt it. Every time they threatened him, he kept on going. When I was scared, [he] encouraged me to acknowledge my fear, but to move beyond it. Courage is cheap — it’s free — but it’s priceless.

The repeal of the death penalty just passed in Maryland, which was a big milestone for the NAACP. At the same time, it has only been passed in certain states so far. How do you see the repeal of the death penalty playing out on a national scale? Do you think the repeal will be passed state by state, or do you think the repeal could be passed as a national policy?

BJ: Maryland is the first state south of the Mason-Dixon Line to repeal the death penalty. It’s the sixth state in six years to abolish the death penalty. It’s the eighteenth overall. Seventeen years ago, when I was a young organizer, I went to work for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and our strategy for 20 years was to repeat the victory of 1972, which was to go to the Supreme Court under the Fourteenth Amendment and have it abolished. That strategy, we tried again and again, for 20 years and kept failing, and so at that point, we changed the strategy to seeking to abolish under the Eighth Amendment.

To do that, you have to prove two things. First, it’s cruel. Second, that it’s unusual. The primary litmus test for a punishment being unusual is state law. Once a majority of states have outlawed [it] or made it an illegal punishment, you can make a persuasive argument to the court that says the punishment is not just cruel, it’s unusual and therefore a violation of the Eighth Amendment.

So we now have a ways to go. There are four more states in play this year — Kansas, Colorado, Delaware, New Hampshire —  and while I don’t think we will necessarily win all those battles this year, I’m very optimistic that if we’ve won six battles in the last six years, we can win eight battles in the next eight years. And be in the Supreme Court within two years of that and abolish it within the next decade.

Can you explain why the NAACP opposes the death penalty?

BJ: The NAACP was founded to end lynching. We’ve always seen the death penalty as being a sanitized version of the same thing. It is used exclusively against poor people. It is used disproportionately against people of color, specifically, black people. Nationally, 43 percent of death row is black. In Maryland, it’s 80 percent. The activism from the NAACP is because of all those reasons.

People are also morally opposed [due to] their religion. For instance, [due to] the strong Christian base in the NAACP, many within say, “Look, Jesus told us to leave vengeance unto the Lord.” There are moral objections. There are religious objections. There are secular moral objections. It is racist. It is targeted solely toward poor people.

What gets the majority of people to support the abolition of the death penalty is that at the end of the day, it’s broken for all of those reasons and it’s racially biased, and it is extremely biased against the poor. It also happens to not work. It’s not an effective deterrent. It is very expensive. And it is not always accurate in its application. We have sent a lot of innocent people in this country to death row, and there’s reason to believe that we’ve killed more than a dozen in the last 40 years. When you put that all together — some people say it’s against their faith, some people say its racist and biased against the poor — most people can get to a place where they say, “It just doesn’t work and we’re better than this.”

We’re the only western nation that still practices the death penalty. We’re one of a handful of nations that still practices it. Among those nations are North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China, [and] Somalia — governments we really don’t want to be associated with. We see ourselves as a beacon for human rights, and you simply cannot be a beacon for human rights in the 21st century and practice the death penalty.

With the election and re-election of President Obama, there was lots of dialogue about the nation moving toward a post-racial era. Others thought that this was a rose-tinted view of the world. What are your thoughts on the progress that the nation has made toward racial equality and social justice over the past four years?

BJ: I’ll say this in three parts. The election of President Obama, more specifically the breaking of the color barrier at the White House was a big moment for our country. It signaled that any child could be president. For the first time in our country, any child could be president, because a black man became president in a year when everyone knew that a woman would be president. Hillary Clinton was the assumed victor.

It wasn’t just a black man. It was a black man who was the son of an immigrant from East Africa. The young people being raised at this moment are the children of the first generation of parents who don’t have to second-guess their children on general principle when the child says that they’re going to be president. There may be specific reasons about the child, but [parents] won’t say, “Baby, nobody like you can be president,” and that’s been the source of many ulcers for many parents for many years. [Before as] a child — whether it’s because she’s a girl, or because he’s black, or because the family has only been in this country for one generation — by the time you’re six you know you’re going to president, but by the time you’re 16, you will know otherwise. President Obama’s election changed that for all of us in an instant because of the context in which it happened, because of the totality of who he is.

With that said, the reason that they call the academic discipline of politics “political science” is because as in physics, in politics, whenever there’s an action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. The breaking of the color barrier at the White House was a big action in a country for which historically it has been understood that only white men can be president. So we should not be surprised [with] the rise of Tea Party. You see simultaneously the expansion of militarized white supremacist organizations around the country. The good news in that is that those groups tend to be small and growing smaller, if you look at their base in the country. And they’re acting exactly like a political force [whose] days are numbered by the demographics of the country and by the rise of your generation, which isn’t just the most diverse generation in our history, it’s the least hung up on race and ethnicity. The most likely to be willing to see their fellow American as simply that — their fellow American. For all those reasons, the last four years have ultimately made me feel more optimistic.

This interview contains minor edits for grammar and clarity.

This interview originally appeared in the spring edition of PPR.

Photo credit: Flickr user jdlasica

By Urja Mittal & Anthony Cruz

Joe Trippi is a Democratic campaign consultant who has worked on the presidential campaigns of Edward M. Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt, Howard Dean, and John Edwards. He has also done campaign consulting for state and Congressional campaigns, including for Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, and for politicians in foreign countries, such as for British Prime Minister Tony Blair. As the National Campaign Manager for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, Trippi is known for his pioneering use of the Internet for grassroots organizing and micro-fundraising.

What do you see as the future of campaigns in terms of using the Internet and innovative technology? In 2012, we saw extensive use of digital campaign tools, such as data mining, micro-targeting, and extensive voter databases.

JT: It’s already changed politics how we know it, in terms of being able to connect people to each other. It’s obviously changed the way we communicate and now with big data on top of it. It has gotten to point where the Obama campaign knew that if a woman between the ages of 40 and 49 who liked the “Ocean’s Eleven” Facebook page got a message from George Clooney, she would give more money. You are able to really use data in a way to communicate with people much more directly about something that really matters, even if it is a movie that’s making them connect with you. So you are going to see more of that.

The problem is that you cannot predict what the next big thing is. In 2003, when I was working for the [Howard] Dean campaign, YouTube didn’t exist. Twitter didn’t exist. The iPhone wasn’t released until 2007. Facebook was on its second college campus. Still, we were able to raise more money than anyone in history and do all the things we did on the Internet. But it is hard to predict what the next thing is. It is probably mobile.

I think like the Dean campaign: We raised $59 million in the 2004 campaign and broke Bill Clinton’s record [from] when he was sitting president, and Howard Dean was somebody nobody knew. We broke it because of the Internet. Obama made us look like a joke four years later. We hit $59 million but he raised a half billion. This time he does $790 million online. By 2016, there is going to be a campaign that makes Obama’s look like a joke. Just as Obama’s first campaign made Dean’s look like a joke and then the second Obama campaign made the first one look like one.

The reason is, like [James] Carville used to say, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It’s the network, stupid! And the network is getting bigger each year [and] growing every year; more people are online on the network. And the tools are on the network. Whether it is broadband, video, Twitter, apps, the tools on the network are more powerful than they were the day before. It was not about Obama’s campaign making the Dean campaign look stupid. It’s that that’s how big the network grew and how powerful the tools grew [to be] in four years. The data mining tools were suddenly in place to make the first [Obama campaign] one look like it wasn’t as strong as the second one. Whether it is 2016 or 2020, there is going to be another big move where we all go, “How’d that happen?”

As elections and campaigns progress over time, the losing party tends to learn from the lessons of their loss. Leading up to the 2012 campaign, everyone was saying Obama had used big data in 2008 and that the Romney campaign would have learnt from that. Nonetheless, the Romney campaign faced problems with ORCA [Republican voter database] and they did not end up using big data effectively. Do you think the GOP will learn to be able to use big data by 2016, or do you think it will become a Democratic tool and that the Republicans will have to use something else to gain an advantage?

JT: The Republicans didn’t have to. In 2004, the president was George Bush. He didn’t need to go raise a lot of money from $5 or $10 people. He was the President of the United States. Every big dollar in the country was covering their bets by giving him all the money. So it was the Democrats who were struggling financially and had to find a different way to do it. How do you get a lot of people to give you $15? That’s what the Dean campaign did. So we all built that network. That network is getting bigger and bigger. But [the Republicans] didn’t need it.

In 2008, [the Republicans] don’t really see all this coming and are still fundraising with their big money people. Even if Obama makes the Internet thing happen, they think, “We can compete with that.” So [the Republicans] wake up the next day and realize its half a billion dollars — we’re dead. So what did they do? They didn’t say let’s go build a grassroots digital army. They said let’s go create super PACs. Let’s just get five billionaires to write big checks to compete with a half a billion dollar campaign. That was their answer. Now they wake up and go, “Wow, we can raise as much as the army but they still have an army on the ground that can get votes out.” They thought they could raise the half the billion dollars from billionaires and then pay people to organize get out the vote.

Do you think Republicans will learn from this election and come back in 2016 by working on digital grassroots?

JT: They’ll work on it. But here’s the problem: If we [Democrats] have 30 million people in our network and you have two million in yours, and tomorrow I say go find one friend, one family member, one co-worker, one neighbor to join us and you send your two million people do the same, you are behind. Thirty million can replicate themselves a lot more than two million can. It’s not about how [the Republicans] can catch up. It’s like the Democrats are Amazon.com and the Republicans are Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com gets hundreds of millions of people to buy books Amazon, and Republicans are Barnes and Noble and haven’t even come out with the NOOK® (Barnes and Noble’s eReader tablet) yet.

What we know about the Internet is that the first mover on anything — for example, eBay on auctions — [succeeds]. That doesn’t mean there are no other people selling books online, but it’s tough to catch up. After eBay started out, has someone taken them out as the better auction place? It usually doesn’t work that way. It is the network effect.  It’s a different medium. If you can come up with enough money, the network is the network. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is look at when [the Republicans] dominated. Why did they dominate? Because they had top-down message discipline. They all knew exactly what to say on television and radio from the top. A message to go out to everybody in the party who speaks on TV: “Today you are saying this…these are the key words.” Like “job creators.” How do you get everybody in the party saying “job creators?” It wasn’t even a term everybody used. It’s not like saying “business owners.” The [Republicans] are really good at that.

The problem of that [strategy] is that on online social media hates being dictated from the top. So what makes [the Republicans] great in the old media makes them horrible at building an online social network. Democrats are totally disorganized. Republicans come into the room and the boss says, “This is what we are saying today.” Us [Democrats], we want to make sure we hear everybody’s voices. We want to have consensus.  We want everybody’s viewpoints, so we are lousy at this top-down thing. We are so used to decentralized, let-it-go messaging, which used to get us killed in television-driven campaigns. Everybody knew what Ronald Reagan’s message was but what were the Democrats trying to say?

What’s happening now is that [the Republicans] are behind on the network and in the way they operate. This happened [after] the Clintons in 1992 and 1996. They know how to re-elect a president. TV was big in the 1990s.  [But the Clintons] were not active in 2004, and in 2008, they run the old campaign. Obama was around in 2004 and runs the new campaign. They wake up and realize this. The Republicans are like this, [too], and are caught off-guard and now really behind. They get religion involved, and I don’t know if they can catch up, because the network effect is different. They are used to the TV thing. You wake up tomorrow and all the tweets are [about] “job creators.” It is inauthentic. It’s a very alien way to do things, and I am not sure if it is going to work.

What Congressional and gubernatorial campaigns are you watching leading up to 2016?

JT: The whole House [of Representatives] is going to be interesting in 2014. Things are changing so rapidly that it is possible that the Democrats might take back the House. Even though that is impossible on paper. No party makes gains in their President’s second term in the midterm elections. I think Reagan picked up two seats, and he is the only president to have done it. And we are talking two, not 35. But I think there is a going to be a real battle for the House, and I think there is a chance the Democrats could shock everybody.

How?

JT: There is a chance that the brand of the GOP is so damaged from 2012. I don’t mean this as a partisan issue. I think there is a chance we are going to break tradition. By all normal historical records and trends, Republicans should gain seats in 2014. [But] I think Republicans will lose seats, and it will be [due to] a “stop the chaos” movement. For years, people liked divided government, because they liked for one party to stop the other from doing anything. This divided government doesn’t work so well. People may say, “stop this chaos,” and throw the Republicans out. It would be a stunner.

I think the Republicans are on their way to becoming like the Whigs. I think the Internet makes it much more likely that you’ll see a third party.

A third party replacing the Republican Party?

JT: There might be three, but the GOP will die if another [party] emerges. I used to think it would be the Democrats. One of these parties is going. I thought it would be us [Democrats] until Obama came along.

The GOP hasn’t won. The only places they can win are where they draw lines. They lost the Senate majority that they should have, because you can’t change the lines of states. [Same with the] presidency — you can’t draw a piece of Canada in to get more of your votes in. The reason they have the House is, because they drew seats to be safe.

Do you think the Democrats can overcome the gerrymandering to win in 2014?

JT: Little known fact: The Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives got several million more votes than the Republicans for the House of Representatives — two to three million more. We [Democrats] won the Senate, the presidency, and more votes in the House. The only thing that protected [Republicans] was the gerrymandering. The question is, are people so sick of what is going on that Democrats will win when they shouldn’t [in 2014]? If they don’t and the lines are too good, in 2020 [the lines] get redrawn again and then [the Republican Party] will die out. If you don’t the change the dynamics of the party and the demographic groups you reach out to — if, for instance, young people were leaving that party — you might as well give them a can of arsenic and say drink this. A lot it’s the intolerance of anti-gay, immigration stuff. Young people can be fiscally conservative and libertarian. One thing they are not is against these social issues. This party, for whatever reason, cannot stop rubbing these issues in your nose.

Along those lines, do you think the Republican Party could do an ideological turnaround on these social issues?

JT: No — that’s why I think they are dead. There are people who are 30 today, and their only intolerance is of people who are intolerant. They are not going to become intolerant as they get older.

This is what’s happening in this party — they are going extinct. You see this already with Rand Paul saying he is for immigration. He is backtracking. Now you [Paul] are competing for a small share of Democrats. But you just lost the whole base of your party who doesn’t believe in this.

This interview contains minor edits for grammar and clarity.

This interview originally appeared in the spring edition of PPR.

Photo credit: Flickr user jdlasica

By: Samuel Ruddy

John Bul Dau is one of the Lost Boys of the Sudan and the founder of non-profit organizations that benefit those who are displaced by the conflict in Sudan. Born into a tribe in the southern region of the war-torn Sudan in 1974, Dau had to flee attacks on his village at the age of 8 and travel on foot for almost three months without his family to reach safety. After four years in an Ethiopian refugee camp, he fled again when war broke out in Ethiopia. As a member of the thousands of “Lost Boys of Sudan,” Dau was forced to trek hundreds of miles, facing starvation and violence until he reached Kenya. It was not until 2001 that Dau was resettled in the U.S. with the help of a church from Syracuse, NY. Afterward, Dau located his mother and sister and brought them to America. He is now pursuing an education at Syracuse University.

Dau is the founder of three successful non-profit organizations that benefit those who are displaced by the Sudanese conflict. Dau’s relocation and his early experiences in the US are the subject of God Grew Tired of Us, a film which won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.

What an amazing story. What would you say was the most difficult thing about your journey to the refugee camps that most Americans don’t really understand or think about?

JBD: Well, there are so many things, including the prospect that you never had someone with you from your family. At that time I didn’t have my mother. Nobody from my family was there, so it was only my neighbor. So that was a very difficult part, to have no family members at that age. At that time, I was 12 years old.

[There were also] other difficulties — where are you going to eat?  I mean, there was no food to eat, so you only lived on wild fruit, like a bird, chewing grass, like a cow, so that you could stay alive. A thing like thirst was also difficult. At that time, I still remember, I could not find water for almost two days, and some of the boys who were with me started to, you know, dropping and didn’t want to go and died there. Others drank human urine or ate mud so [that] they could stay alive. It was a situation that I think I will never forget. So I don’t know if anyone in the United States — well, maybe there are [people] — but it’s not generally known in America that you can drink a thing like that. I mean, human urine [so] that you could stay alive, or eat mud. It was very difficult.

You had a lot of experience in refugee camps and you understand what refugee camps often lack the most needs. Many Americans don’t understand these needs and sometimes donate the wrong things or donate to the wrong charities to support these refugees. What would you recommend that an average American donate if they want to help?

JBD: From my African perspective, when you want to help me, I have no reason to say, “Help me with this.” To choose how you want to help me. When we were in such a desperate situation, we had no choice to say, “Hey, don’t send this food, send this thing to me.” It is up to the individual who is giving. But what I would really add to that is that when I was in refugee camps, there was no food at all. The food was not enough. They gave us a very small, like maybe about five pounds of dry corn for half a month — about 15 days. So that food may not last a complete two weeks. It would just maybe last eight days. So that means you were left with six days with no food at all. So if you want to help, help with food, because it’s a basic thing. It’s something that saves your life.

[Donate] a thing like clean water. Things like education. If you want to donate something that will last, it’s education. Because that person will be educated and be able to help himself or herself and help other people. Help those who are in refugee camps with education. Try to start little schools, even if it is a school under a tree where you can pay a teacher by notebooks and pencils, I think it’s enough. I think it’s really, really important to give a gift of literacy if someone wants to do something. Give a gift of literacy, but I’m not taking away the fact that you have to also provide food for these people. Without food, you can’t go to the classroom. So these things, such as basic medical services and medicine, help people very much. I think if you are an American who just wants to help, it’s your choice. It comes from your heart, and so I would not say, “Don’t give things like that.” But what I’m saying, because I was a former recipient of those things, [is that] food works very well [and] education works so well, because it will last for that individual’s life.

Having to start your life all over again in America must have been very difficult. What kinds of resources—from the government, from charities—were available to you, and do you think that there were enough?

JBD: The resources available were the Americans. The American people were the resources that I would never really want to take time not to appreciate. Because when we came here, the American people were so good, especially from my church. People were coming to my apartment to help give us orientations on how to turn on or off the lights or how to do the groceries and how to take a bath and how to find a job and getting in to the library and giving your card and how to enroll in school there. Showing us basic needs of life — how to communicate, how to be able to fit in to the community, how to avoid getting in to conflict with the law of the country. It was something that I could never really appreciate enough, because the American people have been helping us so much.

Government? I don’t know. I mean, the government has done something. They agreed that we should be brought to the United States, and so I appreciate the government for helping with such a policy. An immigration policy for bringing us here. So we came to America legally, and that is through the government. But, as you know, governments have so many children, and so paying attention to particular children is not a government tradition. They bring you here and leave you there. If there no choices or American people, I think it would have been very difficult for us because the government brought us and then just said, “Three months, that’s it; you’re done.” Okay, bring someone from South Sudan, from different places, and bring them to the United States and help them for three months, do you think that’s enough? I don’t think that’s enough, because you were brought like you were coming to a different planet. America was like a different planet, because I didn’t know anybody here, almost everything was completely different —  culture, weather, the way they do things. It was unbelievable — completely like I was going to the moon, because I don’t know anybody on the moon. So bring somebody to the moon for three months and leave them there and say, “You are on your own, including [in] finding a job and holding a job.” I think it was just very tough. It was too soon for us to just be living like that, but I think I appreciate that, too, because it helped me to become who I am today. But other South Sudanese Lost Boys did not make it, so it was tough on them. I thought the government could give us at least five to six months, and then we could be able to navigate America.

What was the biggest culture shock you experienced when you arrived here in America?

JBD: There are so many things that were culture shocks for me in America. Obviously, many people would agree with me—the weather. In Syracuse, it’s very cold during the winter time, so I was taken from an extremely hot to an extremely cold place.

The other striking culture shock that I have observed in my 11 years in the United States is that I came to understand that America is a country of obligation. It’s a society that has things that if you don’t do them, you’ve really lost your face. For example, what do people do here come February 14? That is Valentine’s Day, right? If you fail to give a card or flowers or something to your girlfriend, there’s going to be a war. Or if you fail to give it to your boyfriend, that is going to be a tough time. Or maybe between a husband and a wife. So you must do that obligation. And you see Americans running almost to the day of Valentine’s Day and people are like, “Oh, let me go and get a card, otherwise I can’t go home or I’ll get beat up,” or something like that. Not literally beating up people, but you are disappointing them. Anniversaries, the time when a couple gets married. If you happen to not really know, maybe your wife will say, “Honey, what are we going to do now for our anniversary?” And maybe a man will say, “Oh no!” “Did you forget?” “What?” He just forgets like that. Or a husband will say, “You know, honey, why did you just forget that?” This is tied to American culture; it’s this obligation.

During Christmastime, if you go to a typical American home with children, everybody is making a list. Maybe 15 things listed—I need this, I need a watch, I need a computer, I need whatever it is. Later, this list changes hands, and they are hoping that one of the items on this list will be given to them as a gift. Well, it’s no longer a gift if you ask for it. It’s not a gift anymore. A gift in my African — my South Sudanese perspective — is something that you give me, whether that is a pencil, and you think, “This is a gift that I’ll give to John,” and it is just a pencil. I will take it dearly because you placed value in it, love in it. You place that sense of a gift in to it. It’s a simple pencil, as we know it is. But from the person who gives it, it places a value that is so important. And so I will keep it dearly as mine.

At some point in America, they give you a gift followed by a receipt, maybe tearing off the price. But they give you a receipt saying, “If you don’t like it, you can return it.” Why would you return a gift? Gifts cannot be returned. And so, I think it’s a country of obligation. That is what I think is a striking difference from my own culture. What I observed in the United States is a cultural difference that is really remarkably clear. In South Sudan, you really know birthdays, and if you miss birthdays, it’s really not a big problem. Our love is not placed on items. Our love is placed on true heart, and it has to be that. It should not always be told or seen in items. If you transfer your love from your heart to an item, that is a love that is going to disappear at any time.  Because an item is going to disappear or break, right? So that’s how I look at it, and I want to really have Americans look at what they do. It’s not a bad thing, it’s their culture. But transferring, placing a value of love in to an item doesn’t last longer.

Do you think that this is a product of the materialistic culture in America? Where do you think it comes from?

JBD: What I think it comes from is that the American people have unknowingly and unintentionally destroyed their family base. Why am I saying this? It’s that these things come from family — from uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers. When you have your grandmother, grandfather and uncle living so close to you, they imparted this thing in you as a young woman, as a young man. It comes from that. But when you don’t have uncles and grandmothers and grandfathers closer, it becomes a public thing. For example, they are now in America, or in the West, creating books — cookbooks — where someone says, “She or he knows how to cook.” And then they write books, and then give it to this little girl or this young man and say, “Here’s a book, go and learn how to cook.” That’s when they go their way. It has to come from the beginning; it has to come from the family base. You don’t learn, you don’t go to class so that you can become a great cook. It’s that — it comes from the removal of grandmother [or] grandfather or your mother or father.

Family must be based on great uncles, great aunts, grandmother, grandfather, father, mother. In America, they say, “Oh, my mother is there, and she likes to be independent. And she’s 90-something years old.” And she tries really hard to buy food and so on, shop for themselves and so on. But it’s very difficult. What if they fell and broke their hip and so on?” And you said they are independent. Well, it is our turn to help our mothers if they are old, our fathers if they are old, our grandmothers and grandfathers if they are old. We, the new generation, we, the younger generation, are supposed to help them. You know, because that’s our part. That’s my role, as John, it’s my role. My mother, my father, they will not go to a nursing home. They have to be there with me, so they can help my children grow and become good people.

Do you think your sense of family base comes from the tribal culture that you came from, or is it something that you’ve learned throughout your whole life?

JBD: I think it comes from my culture, my tribal base. Even in America they used to have this in the 1930s-40s, but it has eroded with time. Why? Because of civilization and so many things involved in it. A job, or somebody going to California. An uncle will be in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, while the rest are in Florida. It comes from that, but I think you can still do the same thing. My argument here is, yes, you can maintain it even [when you are] in Jackson Hole and someone else is in Vermont. The idea of just letting it go and becoming something else — human beings were not supposed to be like that. We’re supposed to be one, working together. The family base should be our foundation, and then we form a society. But a society with a broken system, when you let go of the thing that builds you, I think that society is doomed to fail.

Do you think you founded your non-profits, your charities, based on this sense of family obligation and your need to do the right thing by these people who are in need?

JBD: Absolutely, and I always tell people, “I survived wars, you know, I survived death and so many things. Why did I survive those? There is a reason, and the reason is to be able to help those who are still alive.” Bringing smiles to their faces by doing this. For example, we have treated over 100,000 people in the last six years. Over 7,000 children vaccinated, more than 3,000 mothers gave birth at the clinic. We’ve been helping people. Over 600 people who were (legally) blind now can see; we restored their eyesight. That is exactly what a human being should do. What I’m saying is, for those who might be reading this, is not that you should do things like what I’ve done and then you become a good human being. Whatever small thing you are doing in your life are very important. In other words, I am asking people to actually find ways to find something to do, something that you would do. It does not necessarily have to be someone who went through something tough and now is able to do something. My culture is a culture of taking care of each other, which is inter-independent. You know, I help you, [and] you’ll be able to help someone else. But leaving someone, saying, “You are on your own there,” that person might not make it. Find a way to help that person and then say, “You are on your own.”

What I’m talking about — the culture connection — what I’m doing with my organization, is my duty. I say that when I am no longer on Earth, what will I say I have done? It has to be also noticed that all of the things that I have been doing, I did not just do by myself. I did it with other people, who helped me so much to be able to do something in that capacity. It was done because of great Americans that have been helping me, giving time, sitting down, writing checks, spreading ideas, and spreading the word.

Turning toward the political situation in the Sudan, do you feel that with the founding of South Sudan as a separate nation, your homeland is now on the right track? What do you think needs to happen next to fix the most pressing issues that are still present?

JBD: First of all, I want to thank God for helping us to become what we are today, and I appreciate those who have been helping us, including the United States, the U.K., Italy, Norway, the countries bordering South Sudan — Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Eritrea — and the United Nations. The list is long. But most of all, I want to thank President George W. Bush, who really helped us so much and is our hero in South Sudan, [along] with Colin Powell and his first administration. They helped us, and God bless their lives. I’m very happy to see that South Sudan is now independent and is good. Now, we [have] turned our back to those bad days that happened, being persecuted and so on, and that’s no longer there. I think we got rid of such mistreatment.

I am also afraid that our new country might be devolving into other problems because of such weak leadership that is not doing what it’s supposed to do. Things like killing other tribe’s tribe members could be avoided. [But] although I voice my pessimism, I’m still hopeful that our country is going to be okay. I am giving them some chance, or some time, to realize where they are leading our country toward right now. I think South Sudan could avoid problems that every country went through, but we need to have good leadership.

What do you think America can do to help achieve this stability in South Sudan?

JBD: The challenge to America that I have right now is this: Do you give birth to a child and then don’t raise that child? That’s a simple question. Why I am asking that question is that the independence of South Sudan largely came from the United States, from the support we got from the Bush Administration, the support that we got from the Obama Administration. Now, they are not helping South Sudan as much as I wanted. That’s why I pose the question. South Sudan is like it was sent to adoption and adopted by a very bad mother [or] a bad couple. It should be one of the priorities of [the] foreign policy of this Administration. They helped us become independent, but why do you think we will be able to help ourselves when we are still weak, we are still young? We are not yet on our feet, so I’m asking them to come back here. Continue to help us. Get involved in things like tribal fights. I don’t think the government is going to stop it very soon, so I’d like to have the United States come up with good policies that help us — giving us good infrastructure, roads, things where we can up our hand against criminals. If you can’t, we’re making a criminal kingdom — crime is here and there. People go and murder people in that village and take their cows and cattle, goats and so on, and they go on without being punished. America has to help us a lot with bringing culture, bringing schools, bringing security, especially infrastructure and hospitals. And maybe that will bring [crime] down.

What do you think your legacy will be in the history of South Sudan?

JBD: I don’t think I have a legacy, and if I have a legacy, I think it would be a legacy that revolves around people — helping people. If I can, [to] revolutionize the way our people think, change the way they think. The way they think is still on a tribal line, a very rudimentary way of thinking, i.e. “If I have a disagreement with this person, I must destroy that person,” and that would be a solution. No. You may disagree with someone, but the better way is to sit down and negotiate and see each other’s claim, each other’s position, and that will bring people closer. I would like to change that thinking. I would like to bring economic revolution to South Sudan. We have a huge, huge country. It’s like Texas and a half. And how many people? Just eight million people. So huge land, very fertile, and very good. We can really feed Africa. South Sudan will become the food basket of Africa if we can do well, if maintained well. If I can become someone who can do something, bring economic revolution South Sudan, I think it’s good, so those little children [who] are so hungry can have enough food to eat. Those mothers and fathers who sometimes don’t sleep at night, because they don’t know how to feed their families and how to bring food tomorrow. If I can [change the] scenario that they are in, I think I’d like to see myself doing something like that. I just want to be a change that is positive. If I can do it, I think it will be hallelujah.

This interview contains minor edits for grammar and clarity.

This interview originally appeared in the spring edition of PPR.

Photo credit: Flickr user WillistonNorthampton

By: Etan Raskas

Tamera Luzzatto is the managing director of Government Relations at The Pew Charitable Trusts. She ensures that Pew’s wide range of nonpartisan policy work at the state, federal and international levels is effectively and accurately communicated to policy makers.

Ms. Luzzatto previously served as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief of staff in the U.S. Senate from 2001 to 2009. Prior to her service with Senator Clinton, Ms. Luzzatto was on the staff of West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV for nearly 15 years, serving as legislative director and chief of staff.

What inspired you to become involved in politics?

TL: I am one of those people who, since I was a teenager, when the Vietnam War was still occurring, and I was aware of all of the activists who were trying to pass civil rights laws and pursue more equity, more equality for women and people of other races, some match got lit. And ever since then, I feel I became somebody who has looked around to see what, I hope, are wrongs that I want to right and advances that I want to help promote. And that became the creature that I started to want to spend my time [doing].

For lack of a better phrase, I have sometimes said that basically I want to spend my life trying to do good and fight evil. And, of course, in the political world, what one regards as good versus evil varies when it comes to the spectrum of the parties and the ideological spectrum. So, I am aware that what I think of as good policy, someone else might think of as lousy policy. And that just means that you have to, in my case, think about how do you come up with what policy advances or changes or reforms one ascribes to. I feel that I have had the advantage of being very comfortable being a Democrat and an avid Democrat.

You have gone without a resume since 1984. Could you talk a little bit about how you go from having no resume to being the Chief-of-Staff in two very significant Senate offices?

TL: The political and government world and even a good part of the professional world seems to take reputation and word-of-mouth and who you know and what you know about people, certainly on the job site itself. For example, I was promoted twice in my first Senate job for Senator Rockefeller. He promoted me to first be a manager of people who were at my level — what is called a Legislative Director — and then to Chief-of-Staff to basically manage the entire set of his staff, both in his Washington office as well as in his home state offices. And that was around his perception that I could be trusted, that I would pay close attention and create a structure and a staff that were following through on what he wanted to get done.

And so promotions happen that way, period. There are few promotions, unless you are in a global corporation, where you are applying for a promotion. I think probably most promotions come by merit and by just being perceived and observed as deserving of and the right person for that right job.

After that, people evidently just knew enough about me. These days, with modern technology, that may be even more the case. When you think of LinkedIn and how much you end up in print, and the ability to Google somebody. If I really think about it, unless one is looking for very technical skills or very specific job experience, I would imagine there are more and more of us who are getting our jobs because of some other means of learning about that candidate so-to-speak, or that prospect.

And is that what happened when you transitioned to Senator Clinton’s office?

TL: Yes, because someone who was advising her in the White House told her about me. And she heard enough to go for it. And, in fact, what she went for is that she asked me to work for her for three months and be her transition director.

And then by the time I was into those three months — when she was still First Lady — because if you think of it, she was elected the first Tuesday of November, and she was First Lady until January 20, 2001. So, in the course of that period, when I was helping advise her and helping organizing her first Senate office, we clicked and she proceeded to suggest that I don’t have to exit, that I might just hang around. I think we were both guessing that I might stay as her Chief-of-Staff.

I was announced on January 3, 2001, to be exact, because it was her first day as Senator and press releases were put out. I lived in New York, so that was a nice press release — to tell the New York media that somebody from New York was her first Chief-of-Staff. I think that both of us figured that maybe I’d be out of there by the end of 2001 or so. And she never asked me to leave! So I shut her office down in March of 2009.

How challenging did you find that three-month transition period, especially since most people who handle such transitions are working in the opposite direction: from the Senate to the White House. How challenging was it to manage a transition from the White House to the Senate?

TL: I think that was one of the most demanding things I have ever done in my life. Given that I was working for someone I didn’t know. She was the First Lady — she lived and her office was in the White House, and she was to be Senator of a state of 19 million people. New Yorkers are not known for being undemanding and modest in their expectations, and I was getting to know some her brain trust as well. And she had some pretty big brains and brawn that made up her kitchen cabinet, so to speak.

My recollection is that I just worked like a dog. Starting with working to get to know her and what her platform was for becoming a senator, what she wanted to focus on, what she wanted to work on. I had not set up a brand new senator’s office before. There were some mechanical things, infrastructure, and logistical things to learn about what are the hiring policies were, what kind of budget you got — lots of things that I had never done before. That was definitely baptism by many fires.

Was there anything in particular that surprised you about that initial transition or the few months that followed?

TL: I can only remember pleasant surprises. This says something about Hillary Clinton herself. That is, what she became known for and is still mentioned — that she’s a workhorse, not a show horse. What was glue for me to her and therefore was a pleasant surprise, was the degree to which she was a genuine, complete total public servant. That she also wanted to do good and fight evil. And that was the very principle that I was to helping organize an office and hire a staff for. And that could not have been more of a relief, in that there was no diva or a celebrity who became intimidating, or anything else.

You mentioned doing good and fighting evil. What would be some specific instances in which you did that for Senator Clinton?

TL: One story I very much remember is that we were in a rush one day, and because the Secret Service needed to be the ones who got her around, there was always a car to take her to the next place. She and I were going to go to the same press dinner on a particular weeknight. And she had to stop off to do a videotaping for something. We are in the car, and I am waiting for her, so she runs into the building and comes back and then we go to this dinner. And she was, and I know is, super organized, so she definitely kept a pad or some version of a record in her pocketbook or briefcase of things she wanted to be sure to tell other people about, make sure to delegate, make sure to assign.

So I am there in the car, and she suddenly says, “Oh Tamera, make sure to tell so-and-so — and she was referring to somebody on our staff — about the meeting I had.” And the meeting was with some organization of autistic children’s parents who were advocates for funding, policies, or programs help people with autism. And she didn’t want to forget this particular request that they made, and she wanted to make sure that there was some sort of follow-up. And this is at the end of an incredibly busy day, and she is giving a speech that night at a press dinner.

I, of course, like the dutiful staff, write it down. Then she starts telling me a little bit more about it. And then she suddenly grabs my wrist and she says, “I need to stop because I am going to get too emotional.” She was tearing up, because she was recalling what these New York parents had told her about their lives and their needs and what they were asking of her. And I just said to myself — and I bet this was January of 2001 — I said to myself that I am working for someone who really does want to do good.

Many of us went through 9/11 with her, and that was life-defining for all of us. If you really think about September 11, we discovered first thing in the morning that both World Trade Center towers had collapsed and that many thousands of people were killed. There were almost no survivors, so, in that sense, unlike other natural disasters — tornadoes, and floods and tsunamis — which she herself was familiar with, we really were dealing with the results of that many deaths. It’s the wrong analogy, but talk about baptism by fire. It was the crucible of crucibles of experiences.

And that meant that we got very close, because it was so emotional and so intense and so important for us to deliver.

Photo credit: Politico

Michael Castle served as the Governor of Delaware from 1985 to 1992 and the U.S. Representative for Delaware’s at-large Congressional district from 1993 to 2011.

Your campaign website mentions that you have helped make several improvements in education policy including the areas of early childhood education and school food nutrition. Do you plan to continue working towards education reform? If so, in which areas of education policy?

MC: I will continue to try to help education policy in general in this country. I accepted a board position on a university in Delaware, and I think that’s important. But I need to make sure it’s understood that when you leave the political arena, as I have, you lose your influence, in terms of directly getting something done or not done. I’m a little bit limited in terms of what I’m going to be able to do. But I have an abiding interest in education. I read about it constantly, and if asked my opinion, I’m willing to give it, although in some cases nobody wants to listen.

Your campaign website also mentions that you worked on the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Now that it has been ten years since that was passed, how do you feel it has impacted education?

MC: I think it’s actually had a more positive influence than some people realize because NCLB has focused the light on education and its deficiencies. Nobody likes that. They complain about it. They complain about the fact that perhaps a school is rated as not achieving where it should or whatever, but the bottom line is that they know they have to go back in and do something about it. So, my sense is that it’s been very positive from that point of view. There are those who would tell you that it may have gone overboard in that area, and that’s more of a negative than not, but I don’t necessarily believe that. The challenge is what some schools need, and I think it’s made some difference in that area. But, as you’ve indicated in your question, it’s been ten years since it passed, and perhaps the time has come to make changes. President Obama has proposed something called Race to the Top, which is really just a reformulation of NCLB, and I think that should be considered by the Congress. It’s like anything else. There are lessons to be learned. It’s like the Affordable Care Act. Whether you’re for it or against, I guarantee you there are probably aspects of it that need to be modified or changed, and I think that’s true of NCLB also. It’s not absolute; it’s just perhaps a step in the right direction.

Having been in politics for so long, do you agree that gridlock and partisanship have recently gotten to an unbearable point, and what do you see in the foreseeable future, in terms of partisanship and gridlock in Congress?

MC: I think it’s worse than it has been anytime in recent years. You always read about the duels they had in times of the Revolution and that kind of thing, but in terms of just the strident goading of each other now, I think it’s the worst it’s been in a long time. I believe that the media has been a bad actor in all of this, and it’s not only the political parties, or their candidates, or their campaigns. But the media has become itself very polarized. You see that cable TV networks tend to be very polarized. A lot of the pundits who write for newspapers are also the same ones who are appearing on some of these very ideologically driven TV shows, and they sort of drive the news. You don’t get as much balance as you did back when you had three major networks and nothing else. You have websites and blogs and individuals who are out there critiquing virtually everything that happens with respect to politics these days. I just think it’s become a much more difficult arena. And my concern is that we’re scaring people off. I look at bright young people here at Fels, and will they be interested enough to run for office, or even be interested enough to go into government, which I actually think is a wonderful opportunity in life? But I worry that people are going to say that, “I just don’t need this aggrevation. I’m not going to do it.” So that concerns me a little bit.

Just out of curiosity, where do you get your news from?

MC: I get my news from mostly newspapers, and I want to read them in hand. I’d rather not read them online. I read our local newspaper. I read the Washington Post when I’m going to Washington, which is a couple days a week. I read the Wall Street Journal on a pretty regular basis, the Sunday New York Times. For sports, I read the Philadelphia Daily News. I read a lot of magazines, a lot of newsmagazines. My wife tells me to get rid of some subscriptions, but I read a lot of that. And then in Washington, there are trade journals. There’s Roll Call and Politico and The Hill, and I read those when I get my hands on them. I don’t subscribe to them on a given day. I read those as well. I don’t get a lot of news from television. I don’t really watch television news. Some from local radio, but that’s just local news. So it’s mostly newspaper-driven.

Being from Delaware, Vice President Biden is a big advocate for Amtrak. Mitt Romney, when he was running for president, said he wanted to privatize Amtrak. What do you think the future federal role of Amtrak will be?

MC: First of all, I think that privatizing Amtrak is an oversimplification. I don’t think there’s any entity out there that would like to take it over on a privatized basis. So I don’t agree with Romney with respect to that. On the other hand, I do think that Amtrak does have some expenditure issues that need to be addressed, and I believe that it needs to be watched carefully with respect to all of that. You may see MAGLEV trains come into being. If they do, they’ll probably start in the Washington-New York corridor, or maybe some portion of that corridor. That could make a difference. Right now, there’s a lot of people who ride the Acela train rather than fly because they feel it’s more comfortable and easier. If you’ve got a MAGLEV train, depending on the cost, it would actually be faster than any other way of getting around, as they have in China and other Asian countries. So those are the things that could happen and would be positive. But these things all cost money, and it’s a question of how are we going to pay for all of that. Amtrak has been unionized almost from the beginning, and that’s not been inexpensive, in terms of what goes on there. Some of their equipment is really old. I was on a train last night that started from Washington one hour late. We got up to north of Baltimore, and a train ahead of us had broken down. We had to go alongside of it and pick all of their customers and put them on our train, so we lost another 45 or 50 minutes. Those are travel hazards that the public isn’t going to put up with on a regular basis. That’s a problem. I just don’t see that privatization—it’s a nice, catchy way of saying “get rid of this problem by doing that,” but I just don’t see it happening.

What advice do you have for those who wish to run for office?

MC: My advice is that you just can’t “run for office.” If one wants to run for office, they ought to get involved in government in some way or another, or at least politics or campaigns in some way or another. The process of getting a nomination means that you have cultivated friendships within a political party that you have chosen, and I don’t think there’s going to be a third party anytime soon. I think it’s going to be Republicans and Democrats, so my view is, get to know the elected officials in a party, get to know the appointed officials in a party. You can become a committeeperson, you can to go work for the government. Every now and then, somebody is a CEO or doing something completely on the outside, and they get embraced by the party and endorsed and elected. But that’s more infrequent than you might think. Getting involved on the inside is very important. I’ve often thought that one of the best jobs a young person can have is to work in an office of an elected member of the House or Senate. I think those are great jobs that would provide the background. A surprising number of members of Congress have worked on the Hill before. It’s a little surprising to me every time I read an article that says “he was a legislative assistant” or something. If there was a clear entry path for going to Congress, I would say trying to work for a member of Congress is the way to go.

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2013 edition of PPR.

Jane Harman is a former Democratic Representative from California. She currently serves as the director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Why did you decided to give up your position in Congress to head the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars?

JH: It was a challenge I could not refuse. I was honored to serve in Congress for 9 terms and took my work extremely seriously. But it’s no secret that in the last few of those terms, Congress became increasingly partisan and unproductive, and when I was asked to be the first woman to head the Wilson Center and to succeed Lee Hamilton, a former member of Congress who very ably headed the Wilson center for 12 years, I couldn’t say no.

As a member of the House, you supported the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program and have gone on record to say that you are undecided on whether law enforcement officials need more powers to conduct wiretaps and other searches without the usual judicial process. Why do you think this is important? And do you think it comports with the Constitution?

JH: I dispute a number of the statements in the question. I never supported warrantless wiretapping, I supported, it’s not literally wiretapping, but I supported the ability to intercept communications consistent with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which requires an individualized warrant if a US person is involved in the communication, and the Bush Administration had a program that for a period operated outside of FISA, and when I learned it was operating outside of FISA, I expressed vocal opposition, and I helped amend FISA so that it would cover the necessary things that we do, and I have always said that what we do with respect with to intercepting communications has to fully comply with our law.

What do you think of the pending cuts to the defense budget? Do you think that the defense budget should be cut at all? And what do you think are the chances that Congress will actually avert the sequester?

JH: Well, Leon Panetta has already cut $500 billion over 10 years from the defense budget, and I support his doing it and the way he did it. He used a scalpel to cut back programs that are not critical for protecting us against current and future threats. I do not believe that the defense budget should be immune from budget cuts. On the other hand, a sequester, the next trillions of dollars of cuts that could happen, would be a catastrophe because they would be across the board, not done with scalpel but done with a sledge hammer, and I hope Congress on a bipartisan basis finds the political will to make the necessary reforms to avoid this fiscal cliff. And if congress does this, then we won’t have the sequester, and we won’t have those cuts

Your “best Republican in the Democratic party” quote is one of your more famous ones. But do you think there is a need for greater ideological diversity in both parties? If so, how can we achieve that? Could you address the aforementioned quote?

JH: First of all, that was something said about me, it wasn’t something I said. It was said by the Republican president of one of the Chambers of Commerce in my district when he introduced me. Somehow, the urban legend is that I said it. But is a fact that my congressional district certainly in my first three terms was a lean Republican seat, and I needed and always sought Republican support. Do I think both parties could become ideologically diverse? I certainly hope so. I think the center is being held hostage in both parties by noisier, better funded, more extreme people, and I was just talking here about what’s called in Egypt the party of the couch, the people who sit on their couches with their clickers and get mad at their television sets.  It’s very important for the party of the couch, which is a wing of both parties, to mobilize, to vote in this election, and to try to make both parties be more diverse and more tolerant and more embracing of problem solving.

Given recent polarization in Congress, do you think that Congress can continue to conduct the nation’s business?

JH: It has to! It’s not optional. It is the place that both makes the laws and funds our government. Congress has no option to go out of business. What’s sad is that President Bush 43 and Obama have tried to do more and more outside of Congress because Congress doesn’t function well. In the case of some of the Bush policies there were reasons why, which I disagreed with, they wanted Congress kept in the dark. But at any rate I think voters, especially couch party voters, have to mobilize and make Congress do its work.

In the wake of the Arab Spring, the U.S. is confronting new security problems and uncertainties. What do you think will be the long-term security implications of the revolutions in the Middle East?

JH: I don’t think we know yet where all this will end. I think it is important for us to stay on the side of reform even tough reform is messy. I personally think that the election in some cases of political Islamists parties could turn out well. I am not scared of it because I think those parties are going to have to deliver for their countries. It will force them to be practical and move to the center because they will have to work with people. I think underlying all of these reforms is the old adage from the Clinton years, the quote, “It’s the economy stupid.” And “It’s the economy stupid” in Egypt for example. Which is why the Muslim brotherhood majority will, in the end, not every time and not every minute, but will in the end have to moderate some of the views of some of the Brotherhood founders.

You were once an advocate of a universal healthcare system. Do you think that the PPACA goes far enough to establish universal coverage, or does it in the right way? Do you think that, as a nation, we need to continue to move toward a universal healthcare system?

JH: I support universal healthcare. I did not and do not support public financing of healthcare. A public healthcare program because I think it’s inefficient. I thought the bill Congress passed, with my vote, was not as good as some proposals that Congress considered, but it was the only bill we could pass at the time. It was an extremely partisan vote, and that vote was unfortunate. What I hope happens now that the Supreme Court has upheld the law, that Congress reforms it in some ways that create more competition and create more access because I do not think that this law, as passed, will provide universal healthcare. I hope that we find a way consistent with bipartisanship and good policy to get to universal healthcare.

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2013 edition of PPR.

Ron Haskins is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he is the Co-Director of the Center on Children and Families, and Budgeting for National Priorities. He was a longtime welfare policy advisor to Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee, and he played a pivotal role in drafting the 1996 Welfare Reform law. After his service in the House, he also served as a senior advisor to President George W. Bush on welfare policy. His areas of expertise include welfare reform, child care, child support, marriage, child protection, and budget and deficit issues. Dr. Haskins has a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and served as a noncommissioned officer in the Marine Corp.

I’m sure you’ve been getting a lot of questions about this lately, but I wanted to start out with what you think about the Obama administration’s recent decision to start soliciting applications for waivers from some of the work provisions of the 1996 Welfare Reform law.

RH: I think the procedure that the administration used was a big mistake. I think they just cannot have thought carefully about the timing of this. To do something that could be interpreted as reducing the work requirement in welfare in the middle of an election is just asking for Republicans to respond strongly and use it to campaign.

As to the appropriateness of the waiver itself, I think that there is room for a waiver like this. It should have been negotiated between Republicans and Democrats, but if it were, it would give the states more flexibility on issues like education and the use of TANF (i.e., welfare) dollars to support subsidized employment, job searches, and several other things that the states have indicated at one time or another that they would like to do.

I haven’t really seen this in the media, but part of the requirement is that states apply individually for a waiver. This is not applied automatically to the whole country; the states have to submit an application for a waiver. Part of the application is that they have to propose an evaluation to show how their proposal will increase exits from welfare. So, if it were implemented the way it’s written, I think Republicans could agree to something along these lines. There is room for common ground here.

To get into some of the minutiae of the plan, the administration decided to set a requirement that a state’s plan propose to move at least 20 percent more individuals off of welfare compared to the state’s prior performance. I’ve seen some accusations that that number was essentially just made up post hoc to deflect some criticism. Do you think the 20 percent number is realistic or at all meaningful?

RH: I think it’s a good idea to have a target in the waiver and that the Secretary of Health and Human Services would give the states an idea of the kinds of impacts that they’re looking for. Exits from the rolls is not a great measure, because people exit the rolls all the time. What you’re really looking for is net reductions in the total caseload, which takes into account both people coming onto the rolls and people leaving the rolls. So, for example, we’re—well, we’re not doing a great job—but we’re supposed to be in a recovery, and it would be natural for people to leave welfare in a recovery as more and more people gain work. People move from welfare to work all the time. That’s been one of the major impacts of the 1996 legislation. You would expect an increase in exits from the welfare rolls as soon as the recovery gets going. So, it’s the net reductions in the caseloads that counts.

You’ve written a lot about the national debt and deficits lately. There are some people who argue that we’ll simply grow our way out of the deficits—

RH: That’s crazy! There is absolutely no way our deficits are going to go away on their own. In the future, the deficits are only growing to skyrocket. Eventually, government spending will consume 80 percent of the American economy—that’s by 2080. So, there’s no question that we’ve got to take action, and the number one target for action is Medicare and Medicaid, because it’s health spending that’s really going to bankrupt the country. Anybody who thinks that this is going to take care of itself, they just don’t know the facts.

The idea that the deficits will just disappear is just loopy. And it’s worse than that. It’s worse than that because what we have to do to rescue ourselves from our deficits and debt is going to inflict pain on the American people. There’s no way to do this without doing things like reducing the generosity of Social Security, without doing something to control healthcare spending. We’re going to have to cut programs for the poor and programs for the middle class, and we’re going to have to increase taxes. So, almost every American is going to be affected by a serious solution to the deficit.

Anybody who tells the people otherwise is not only telling people something that’s false, they’re making them expect that there’s a way to do this without causing pain, and there isn’t.

So, how do we cut our spending on the social safety without truly disastrous results, then?

RH: Well, it doesn’t necessarily produce disastrous results. We have increased spending on the safety net, in constant dollars, virtually every year since 1965.  If we went back to 1970 or 1975 or 1980 levels of social spending, I don’t think that would be a good thing necessarily, but I don’t think it would be a disaster, especially regarding programs like food stamps. We could save a lot of money, because we give a lot of money to non-poor people. It doesn’t make them better-off to take money away, but it’s not going to be a disaster. And the same thing with tax increases. Roughly half of Americans do not pay any income taxes now. Maybe some of them could pay income taxes if we redid the tax code, and the middle class and wealthy people are going to have to pay more in taxes, too. If they’re not huge increases and we reform the tax code at the same time—which virtually every economist thinks would have a positive influence on economic growth—then people would make more money, more would be employed, and you could spread the burden of additional taxes.

You also published some research a little while back that Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney have both cited to argue that through just a few responsible decisions, individuals can improve their economic position. Do you think that we need more policies encouraging that sort of personal responsibility?

RH: Yes, yes, absolutely. That’s one of the main shortcomings of American social policy. The three things that we should promote are more education, more work, and more marriage, especially more marriage before childbearing. As to how to promote marriage, we don’t really know, except that almost everyone believes—and there is some evidence to support this—that if young males, especially young black males, had higher work rates and made more money, then they would be more likely to get married. We have very good evidence on that. We could encourage programs that encourage work. We could also encourage finishing high school and perhaps working in some certificate programs through local community colleges, and the Obama administration is already experimenting exactly along these lines. These sorts of policies would have a much bigger impact on personal responsibility and poverty and on satisfaction than just giving money away. Giving money away is not necessarily a good approach to poverty, and we give about a trillion dollars a year away between the federal government and the states.

Do you think that the Ryan budgets, or parts of the Ryan budgets, have approached deficit and debt reduction in a reasonable way?

RH: I don’t think that even the Ryan budget is necessarily addressed as much to personal responsibility as it should be. That said, his proposal for premium support would increase personal responsibility, not so much in a way that reduces poverty but in a way that encourages people to be more discerning in the use of healthcare. Now, the way things are, neither the doctor nor the patient has any incentive to economize. And doctors, when they’re being paid by Medicare, have every reason to give every additional test or procedure they can, because that’s how they’re paid. So, that’s a fundamental flaw that violates every concept of how a good market should operate. Both the doctor and the patient should feel some financial pressure. The test or procedure shouldn’t just feel like it’s free. That increases personal responsibility, and Ryan does a better job of that, in my view, than the President does. But, as for promoting work and marriage, I’m not sure that the Ryan budget does that enough.

On the debt and deficit, I think the Ryan plan is the best plan in town right now, primarily because it’s the only one that’s been introduced in Congress that would go a long way toward solving the deficit. Now, it has some problems, there are parts of it that are politically unsustainable. In my views, its greatest weakness is that it doesn’t have tax increases. My view is that we’ve got to have a compromise between Republicans and Democrats, and requirement number one is big cuts in spending combined with tax increases. But I think that the rest of it is very provocative and interesting. It gets a major part of the job done, and he’s gotten support for it. Republicans are supporting it, and Romney says he will support something very close to that. So, I think it’s an ongoing possibility that, in the end, we will get something along the lines of the Ryan budget, especially the premium support for Medicare.

A lot of economists are now discussing the negative effect of inequality on growth. Stiglitz is one high-profile name, but there are others. Occupy Wall Street has been talks about this a great deal. Both campaigns talk about resurrecting the middle class, which some say has eroded or has not shared in recent income gains. Do you think that that argument is truly accurate?

RH: The argument that rising inequality affects people’s motivation and economic mobility is not at all clear in the data. I know there’s a lot of ongoing research that could bear on this issue and that could force some people to change their views depending on this new research.

As for the disappearance of the middle class, it just is not true. First of all, the tax code is extremely progressive. So, when you take taxes into account, it brings the wealthy back toward the middle class. Secondly, if you include government benefits—including Social Security, health benefits, and other transfer programs—the middle class has done fairly well. I think there’s a problem with this talk about the middle class, and my conclusion is based on actual data from the Census Bureau based on people’s complete income. The reason that many conclude that the middle class has had trouble is that they don’t include all of their income!

One of the biggest omissions is healthcare. The government spends hundreds of millions of dollars on healthcare, and it’s totally ignored in calculations of poverty. It’s also ignored in many calculations of income, especially ones that are based on taxes. Similarly, government transfers, like food stamps, are often ignored in calculations of income. So, you have to include all of the income, and when you do, the middle class has done fairly well.

But I do think that the data still signal a problem. The government is doing too much to prop up the middle class. I think this is in part because wages have increased a lot at the top but modestly in the middle. In the past, we’ve had much more robust growth in wages in the middle class. I agree that that is a problem, but the problem is greatly exaggerated because the government has stepped in and helped the middle class a lot.

A lot of people—including your colleague at Brookings, Thomas Mann—are arguing that compromise in Congress is dead and that Congress has really deteriorated over the past two decades. As a former insider in the process, what’s your take on how things have changed or worsened since the 90’s?

RH: I don’t agree with those who say that it’s just the fault of the Republicans. Still, I don’t see how anyone could be an observer of Congress and not see that Congress is dysfunctional. The biggest issue—well, actually, there are several of them. But let me just name two. The biggest one by far is the deficit. We are in danger of going bankrupt and having a huge negative impact on the future and on our children and grandchildren. Congress has approached this issue completely irresponsibly. Republicans and Democrats argue with each other about this, but we know what the solution is: you have to increase taxes and cut spending! Yet, the Congress can’t come to terms with that. Democrats refuse to cut entitlements, Republicans refuse to increase taxes, and you’re never going to get a deal. So, Congress has totally failed here. Slavery and segregation were huge failures of past Congresses. And this is right up there as one of the historic failures of the U.S. Congress, endangering the future of the country.

Another issue is immigration. Our immigration policy is a complete mess. We admit too many people—well, we don’t necessarily admit them, but they get here!—who should not be admitted to the United States because of their lack of education. You can have a certain amount of that. But the fundamental problem of our immigration problem is that we put too much emphasis on family relationships. That sounds nice. But that means that you often get relatives of people who are already here, and if the relatives are poorly educated, they tend to be poorly educated. Many other countries, including Canada, take education and skills into account when they admit immigrants. And I completely disagree with Republicans that we shouldn’t have something like the American DREAM Act. Kids who were brought here at three, four, five, even ten years old—what choice did they have? Not only that, but many of them are skilled, well educated. We should allow them to get jobs, and if they can get a job or a college degree or serve in the military, we ought to make them citizens. But we can’t even move on that!

Photo credit: Flickr user Center for American Progress

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2012 edition of PPR.

By: Alexander Kern and Urja Mittal

Arianna Huffington is president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group. Born in Greece, she left at age 16 to attend Girton College, Cambridge. She rose to fame as a champion of conservative causes during the 90’s but has since become more liberal. She and several co-founders started The Huffington Post in 2005, and the site now has an estimated 54 million unique monthly visitors. The site has thousands of contributors, including well-known academics, politicians, and celebrities, as well as local and international editions.

After this election, there has already been a great deal of talk about how the GOP needs to adapt, and we were curious for your views on the future of the GOP.

AH: Well, I think it is in the interests of the country and having a strong democracy to have a strong, healthy GOP. To have two strong major parties is critical. As Amy Gutmann writes in her book, part of learning to live in a democracy, means learning to compromise—which does not mean abandoning your principles, it just means learning to come together for the sake of the country. That has not been happening in the last two years, and that has been very much to the detriment of the country.

As we saw when Hurricane Sandy struck, if we had done more around our infrastructure, we could have created jobs and maybe also been more prepared for disasters like this. So, I think Sandy, in a way, was a big wake-up call. It does not work to just operate on dogma.

Along those same lines, you’ve talked before about your dislike of the left-right distinction in politics. How do you see the division in politics?

AH: First of all, I think that the use of the left-right division actually becomes an obstacle to reaching solutions. The minute you call something a left-wing position, you marginalize it. So, say you label wanting to leave Afghanistan left-wing: (a) it’s not true, because 70 percent of the country wants to leave Afghanistan—that’s not left-wing, and (b) you immediately marginalize a position which is in the public interest. Let’s say we wanted to spend more on infrastructure or to have a payroll tax holiday or some other measure that would help create jobs. We can’t just see these as left-wing measures; it’s not accurate and it just prolongs the gridlock.

Do you think the media contributes to that?

AH: Yes, the media absolutely contributes, in many ways. One of them is by labeling everything right or left. Another is by focusing so much on minor stories, like gaffes, to the detriment of focusing on evolving stories. Sometimes it’s harder to tell important stories, but that’s what journalism is about—telling those stories in a way that captures the public’s imagination and brings people into the stories.

How can citizens encourage journalists to focus less on the horse race and to focus more on issue coverage?

AH: The great thing now is that citizens don’t have to depend on just traditional journalists. You can write on your own blog, and really anyone with anything interesting to say can say it. And then it’s going to be picked up, it’s going to be shared, and it can really have an impact. So, we don’t just have to be in the role of influencing others, they can express themselves.

Does your site play a big role in that?

AH: Yes, that’s why, I invited students to blog on the Huffington Post and to cross-post things that you write for other sites. I feel that that’s really the way to grow the discussion and bring all people into the conversation.

With new technology, people increasingly have the ability to micromanage the news they receive. So, you ultimately get a phenomenon where people only read news that confirms their own views, and that shapes people’s perceptions of reality. How big of a problem do you think this is in our country? And how do you try to confront it with The Huffington Post?

AH: Well, we welcome multiple views. We welcome news from all sides and all on topics, and I think that’s really crucial to a robust conversation and debate.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2012 edition of PPR.

Christopher Lu is President Obama’s Cabinet Secretary, co-chair of the Executive Office of the President, and co-chair of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. He previously served as executive director of the Obama-Biden Transition Project; a legislative director and chief of staff to then-Senator Obama; and deputy chief counsel to the Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Mr. Lu was a classmate of President Obama’s at Harvard Law School, and also worked as a clerk for the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and a special advisor to the Kerry-Edwards campaign. Mr. Lu would like us to note that he appeared at the event on Thursday night as a private citizen and not in any official capacity.

 You once said of the President, “He’s like a Rorschach test; you see in him what you want.” Why do you think that so many people have come to believe that the President is a “Kenyan anti-colonialist,” “socialist,” or that Reverend Jeremiah Wright is a close advisor to him? Why do you think his opponents seem to see that in him? And, as a close advisor to the President, what is he actually like?

Having known the President for 20 years, I am always amused by the characterizations of the President, whether he is a Kenyan-imperialist, whether he is a socialist, whether he is a radical follower of whatever. If the President were here right now, he would come off to you every bit as kind and as decent and as thoughtful and as intelligent as he appears on TV. He is the most principled guy I have ever met. He has got the highest character of anyone I have ever met. He is a person of great integrity. He is also just an amazingly smart person. Knowing the real Barack Obama, it is a little amusing to read these characterizations of him.

Could you give us a sense of your day-to-day responsibilities, how hard it is to keep all the federal agencies on message, how often disagreements pop-up between the White House and the agencies, and what role you have in resolving these disputes? 

I think I have the best job in the White House because I not only get to work with the President and get to work with the White House staff, I get to work with the Cabinet. And, uniformly, they are some of the most talented public servants I have ever met.

Look, there are disagreements between the White House and the agencies. There are disagreements amongst the agencies.  And you would expect that among people who are bright and have opinions and have different policy experiences and different policy views. But you know I think that at bottom we all understand that we work for the President of the United States. I am pleased by the fact that we have virtually no turnover in the cabinet over the last four years—I mean, a historically low amount of turnover—and that we all get along well, we all understand our mission, and we all understand that the President’s views are the only views that really matter.

Related to that, the President appointed a Republican to head the Department of Transportation.  I am just wondering if you could give us some insight into why he made the choice to appoint a Republican and how that works within the administration.

I am probably a little biased because my wife works for Secretary LaHood. I am always very careful not to say who my favorite cabinet member is because they are all my favorite cabinet members, but I have a special fondness for Secretary LaHood because my wife works for him.  You know Congressman LaHood and [the President] have a very long relationship that goes back to really the first month that then-Senator Obama was in office. When we opened our district office that in Springfield, Illinois, that was actually in Congressman LaHood’s Congressional district and Congressman LaHood came to our office opening. And that was really kind of the beginning of a long relationship that the Senator and Congressman LaHood had.

Ray LaHood really embraces kind of a pragmatism—a moderation that transcends party definitions. As I said in my presentation, the President asked us to have an administration that reflected the diversity of this country and that included Republicans. And that included people like Ray LaHood, that included people like Bob Gates—our Defense Secretary. I am confident that we will have a Republican in our next term as well, and hopefully that will be Secretary LaHood, if he wants to stay.

You were the Executive Director of the Obama-Biden Transition team when President Obama was making some of these tough decisions.  What were some of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of that experience?

The transition is really one of the proudest moments of my career. We essentially had 77 days to put together an entire federal government. And it is really a remarkable testament to the stability of our government that you could turn over an entire federal government and have pretty radical change in terms of personnel and policies, yet also have amazing stability. I think that speaks to the strength of our democracy.

But I will tell you that there were days where it was a pretty terrifying experience, wondering, “Wow, we are going to occupy the White House; we are going to occupy the federal government.” There were personnel decisions you had to make. There were policy decisions you had to make. Obviously, we were benefitted by the fact that we had a lot of people who had worked in the Clinton Administration and knew how to run a government. But there is something significantly different from running a U.S. Senate office of 50, 60 people and representing a state like Illinois—even if it is a big state—and managing an entire Federal government.  So that was challenging, but I am proud of the work we did.

To get back to the election, it looks like the most likely outcome at this point is that we get a Republican House, Democratic majority in the Senate, and Democratic president. If that ends up being the result, can Americans expect anything other than the gridlock they’ve seen for the past two years?

 Well, first of all, I’m not willing to concede that we can’t take back the house. The President is fighting for Democratic candidates in both the Senate and the House, and I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to achieve that. If, however, we have divided government, I do think that Republicans will have to reassess and realize that their strategy of obstruction over that past four years has not worked. Frankly, the problems that we’re facing in our country are too significant to play partisan politics. As we’ve talked about, we’re facing a serious issue involving the fiscal cliff, and we need to address that.

We also need to continue our efforts to grow the economy. Last fall, the President introduced the American JOBS Act, and independent economists said it would have created a million-and-a-half jobs if it had been adopted. But it wasn’t. And what were the radical things that were in the American JOBS Act? Money to hire people to building roads and bridges, money to hire teachers and firefighters and police officers, money to hire veterans, money to make homes and commercial buildings more energy efficient. These aren’t partisan ideas. These are ideas that in any previous time would’ve been supported by people on both sides of the aisle. I’m hopeful, and the President is hopeful, that once we move past election season, there will be a period of time when we can address these serious issues, whether it’s the fiscal cliff or jobs.

What would you say is the President’s strongest leadership quality, and how, if at all, has he changed over the last four years?

I will tell you that I am amazed at how much the President is still the same guy I knew eight years ago when we were working in the Senate. He is, as I said, a remarkably kind, thoughtful, decent person. He obviously has so many things on his plate—more than any of us could ever imagine. Yet, he always keeps a cool head and a wonderful sense of humor.

In terms of the President’s strongest quality: he’s said, “I say what I mean, and I mean what I say.” There’s a consistency of character, there’s a strength in his leadership that is comforting to people. Even if you don’t agree with the President on a day-to-day basis, he’s genuine, he seems like the real deal, and he is the real deal. I think, fundamentally, that’s what people want in a president. They want somebody who’s a straight shooter, they want a person who has strong convictions and character, and that’s who the president is.

This has probably quieted down a bit lately, but many of the President’s critics on the left would probably say that, especially in the realms of national security and defense, a lot of his positions seem to have changed since his Senate days. Do you agree with that assessment at all? And, if you do, why do you think some of his positions have changed?

You know, I would disagree with that assessment. But I will qualify that by saying that I don’t really deal with national security issues. I will say that if you go back and look at what the President said on the campaign trail about engagement with other countries—he’s followed through with that. What the President has said in terms of the importance of controlling nuclear proliferation—that’s been a consistent theme throughout this administration. And if you look at what the President said during the first campaign, that if there were actionable intelligence on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, he would go after him—he followed through on that. So, I think there’s been a consistency, and the President understands the importance of keeping the country safe. He also understands the importance of privacy and civil liberties, and he hasn’t wavered on that, either. 

Interview by John Cheo and Michael Soyfer 

Brooke Gladstone managing editor and co-host of NPR’s and WNYC’s On the Media, has a long history with public radio. After working in print media, she joined NPR in 1987 as senior editor of Weekend Edition with Scott Simon and became senior editor of All Things Considered in 1989. In 1991, she spent a year at Stanford University as a Knight Fellow and then reported for NPR from Moscow during Boris Yeltsin’s turbulent presidency (1992-95.) After that, Gladstone served for six years as NPR’s first media correspondent and then joined On the Media when it relaunched in January, 2001. Gladstone is the recipient of two Peabody Awards, a National Press Club Award, an Overseas Press Club Award and several others.

She also is the author of The Influencing Machine (W.W. Norton), a media manifesto in graphic form, listed among the year’s top books by The New Yorker and Publisher’s Weekly, and among the “10 Masterpieces of Graphic Nonfiction” by The Atlantic.

Bio Source.

What do you think of the coverage of the Trayvon Martin incident?

What was really interesting about the coverage was how it got into the national headlines. It’s quite a fascinating circuit. It began with Trymaine Lee, who is a reporter for the Huffington Post, who got a tip, who went down there, and was following it not too long after the event happened. There were some wire reporters down there, and the local papers followed it a little. But it didn’t really make a ripple. Then, Ta-Nehisi Coates—who has a great blog on the Atlantic site, he has a huge community—picked it up, and then Charles Blow mentioned it in the New York Times. We’re talking about three black journalists, who made this part of the national conversation. That’s a real argument for diversity in the newsroom. And Ta-Nehisi was particularly interesting on it, because he said that he got so sad and depressed covering these things, that it was his internet community talking about it before he did. And then he commented on it and suddenly realized that he had to talk about it. It got headlines because of that, because of the ability of the internet to coalesce communities and create a strong force. It also has to do with the political community; with Florida’s very peculiar Dirty Harry, stand-your-ground laws. It has a lot to do with race, with Trayvon’s face, and it has a lot to do with the tapes. I think the coverage is developing, the story is changing, the story is broadening. It’s a long time coming that this story gets these types of headlines.

In terms of evaluating the coverage—you know, I haven’t read every word that has been said about it. You have Geraldo Rivera saying that the problem is the hoodie—which even his own son found embarrassing. It seems to be one of those moments of reckoning for America. I’m curious to see how it rolls out. There are so many different kinds of media now, though, that it’s difficult to give any kind of grade to the whole mess o’ coverage.

What do you think of the development of new, amateur media? How does that contrast with the old, professional newsroom?

Trymaine Lee, the Huffington Post reporter who had been a reporter at the Times-Picayune before, said there’s such a thing in newsrooms as a garden-variety murder. At first, the Trayvon Martin story seemed like a garden-variety murder. And however cold and dehumanizing that phrase is, people who cover murders all the time, just like doctors who cover death all the time, develop a thick skin. To penetrate those assumptions is crucial, and that is precisely the ability of these communities coalescing online and these voices who speak in alternative media. I mean, Charles Blow is New York Times, but Trymaine Lee is Huffington Post and Ta-Nehisi is a blogger—so, it just shows you that there is an ecosystem that relies very heavily now on the web and the ordinary people, the non-professional voices that it brings into the conversation.

Do you think there’s a downside to that?

There’s a downside to everything. The price of freedom is having a lot of ugly voices and scurrilous voices and lying voices. There’s no way to cherry-pick freedom. You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater, but there’s not a whole lot more than that, that you restrict in this country. I think, fundamentally, that’s the safest way to go.

Do you think that any government can seek to regulate online media or that it would be a futile effort to try to do that?

Well, there’s all kinds of regulation. I think that regulating speech is a bad idea. I think that the government is a little crazy when it comes to copyright, and it tends to be bullying the whole world about it. I think that that kind of regulation has gone overboard—the intellectual property regulation. There’s a role for it, but I think that intellectual property in every endeavor has gone too far. But, specifically, what kind of regulation do you mean?

I was wondering whether the current American model of unfettered media can apply equally to other societies that may be less stable or have deeper fault lines. One classic case would be the Danish drawing of the Prophet Muhammad. Now that citizen journalism is the new thing, should other governments seek to regulate any kind of expression, or should it be a free-for-all?

I’m biased! I have a very, very, very strong bias in favor of free speech. This is a fundamental value for me. There are other cultures in which it is not. It makes me feel funny to profess a universal principle. But I do believe that people benefit from a free exchange of ideas. I believe that it leads to greater tolerance and a more civil society. Because I believe this so strongly, I don’t know what I would say to other cultures that feel so differently. I reported from Russia for three years, when it was a free-for-all. Then I went back twelve years later, during the Putin period, and things had become very clamped down. I spoke to a very, very Kremlin-oriented newspaper, Izvestia, and the editor told me, “Don’t preach to me about what you think. We here believe that stability comes first, and freedom comes later.”

Even the Chinese say that, too.

Right. Well…I don’t believe that. But I don’t want to be on the record saying, “You must imitate us in every aspect.” Because that doesn’t work out, either. I don’t have the wisdom to answer your question, I think.

Many newspapers have now instituted fact-checkers—the Washington Post has one, and there’s Politifact and Factcheck.org. The Washington Post’s Ombudsman actually criticized the newspaper for simply reporting and not actually checking the facts. So what do you think of fact-checkers? And do you think it is the media’s responsibility to fact-check politicians’ statements?

Do you mean not calling a lie, a lie? I think fact-checking is great. Unfortunately, not that many people go to these sites to checks them, but reporters use them, which is good. We have our own site called “MST” (“Media Scrutiny Theater”), which is a take on Mystery Science Theater 3000. That was a series where this guy and a couple of robots would watch really, really, really bad science fiction movies. And all you’d see were the backs of their heads, and they’d just make snide comments at the screen. Bob, my co-host, and I have this animation, where all you see is the backs of our heads, and we’re basically doing Mystery Science Theater. And you can find it on our website.

I think what the ombudsman said is very true, and it speaks to one of the biases in the media business, which is what I call, “Fairness bias,” in that, sometimes media outlets will pull their punches in order not to appear bias. It’s always been my view that if a politician says something and it’s a lie, you should say it’s a lie right after, not after the jump or in a box marked “analysis.” But it’s the convention of newspapers not to call a lie, a lie. And there are so many lies that people are desperate for clarity right then. I think that the convention is changing, but the newspapers haven’t implemented that change yet. But you see it happening; you see it slowly drifting, because people crave it.

Journalists usually try to make events in a campaign fit into some sort of narrative. But it might be the case that that’s somewhat artificial and that, by doing so, the media is actually influencing how people think. How do you think the media can and should balance their effect on what they’re observing with their role as an observer?

It’s funny you should bring this up, because fairness bias and narrative bias (which is my favorite bias) are baked into the media and baked into us as human beings. But part of the problem with campaigns and the run-up is that they’re over-covered. I really think that that is a problem. And so what happens is that you have these little incremental stories, so you create narrative boxes, you create characters. Hillary is a scheming emasculator; Bush is a dumb frat-boy; John Kerry is an elite francophone; John McCain, not in the last campaign but in 2000, is a maverick; and so on. And as soon as you’ve set them down, then you can start throwing things into it without much thought, it’s easy. When somebody changes the narrative—like John McCain did in his subsequent campaign, where he capitulated and all of his maverick views went away—the press gets upset and angry, and there’s a serious backlash. I think they should cover it less, but people love to read it. The solution is just to be more honest and more rigorous and accept that people are complicated. That’s difficult. The horse-race is a very easy and very straightforward narrative. Talking about the complexities of the President’s healthcare plan is not. As a result, the public really doesn’t understand Obamacare, and that really does not serve the public. It behooves every reporter to be as informative, at least, as they can.

If I were you, I would not use that answer, because it really sucked.

No it didn’t! That was great!

I definitely wanted to get your opinion on Stephen Colbert. As you know, he launched a Super PAC last year…

Brilliant!

…and then he proceeded to run for President of South Carolina and even funded attack ads against some of the other candidates.

And against himself…

So, I wanted to ask—and it seems like you don’t think this—but do you think he crossed a line? Do you think that anyone in the media should actually involve themselves in the political process directly like that?

Well, satirists have run for President and all kinds of offices. Pat Paulsen did in the ’60’s on a program called Laugh-in, which was a big deal back then. Jimmy Breslin ran in New York, and I think that Norman Mailer did, too. This is a form of civil disobedience. He did more to teach the country about the absurdities of Citizens United and Super PACs than any ream of newspaper articles could possibly have done. His prank has had no effect on voting—we saw that when he ran with Herman Cain. So he’s not screwing with the political process. All he’s doing is exposing it in a stunningly creative and effective way. And kudos to Stephen Colbert for coming up with such an inspired bit of lunacy, which has done so much to inform the American people about what is wrong with our political process.

I don’t want to make you late for your talk. So, thank you so much for speaking to us.

 Thank you.

Check out Brooke Gladstone’s book, available for purchase here. And check out her NPR show, “On the Media.”

Image credit: colbertnewshub.com.