A Texas Liberal Talks About the State of Things in America

Molly Ivins talks about the media, journalism and what we can expect in the next four years after the presidential election.

by Dawn Withers

Molly Ivins has been a keen observer of George W. Bush long before his six-year term as Texas governor and before he became president in 2000. She has been writing about politics in Texas and across the nation for almost 30 years. She co-edited The Texas Observer, a progressive newspaper, from 1970-1976. Then she went to work for The New York Times as a national correspondent before returning to Texas in 1982 as a columnist for the Dallas Times-Herald, where she cultivated a reputation for witty and biting commentary on the national political establishment. She is a syndicated columnist whose work appears in more than 100 newspapers across the nation. Her freelance work has appeared in Esquire, The Atlantic, The Nation, Harper's, the Progressive and Mother Jones, among other publications.

She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is the author of several, best-selling books, including "Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush," (2000), and ìBushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's Americaî (2003), which she co-authored with Lou Dubose. Her most recent book, ìWho Let the Dogs In?: Incredible Political Animals I Have Known,î is a collection of her columns over the span of her career.

Ivins sat down with News Watch for an interview on Oct. 7.

It was bad, I actually felt sorry for him. It was just terrible. I donít even think that was questionable. Bush was just awful. Kerry was fine, he was good and Bush was just terrible.

I donít blame people for that. People are so much smarter than they get credit for Politicians and journalists are two groups that have a tendency to think about people as not the people out there but the people down there. Itís a very annoying habit. One could well conclude that watching this guy in the debate that 55 percent of American people are still considering voting for him ñ God, he looked like a moron.

Thatís to me no indication that people are stupid. A lot of them are doing it out of highest motives. They think that you have to rally around the president in a time of war and we have to support him and by god theyíre good citizens and thatís what they are doing. I think relatively few people are supporting the president because itís good for their pocketbooks.

Maybe there is a cynical ownership class, I donít know them. Bush is like people in Texas, my home state. They really think that if youíre not supporting Bush a) youíre unpatriotic and b) you donít believe in God. Thatís a ridiculous premise but they have been skillfully led to those conclusions by some brilliant Republican footwork and by a 30-year long campaign.

Heís really nakedly announced it when you think about it. Heís going to destroy social services, heís going to destroy Social Security, heís going to change healthcare. Heís going to privatize everything and, you know, leave it all to the magic of the market place to do a more efficient job than the government. I think itís been proved time and time again, there some things the capitalist system cannot due. It cannot due healthcare, it cannot due low-income housing.

Sure. I suspect that Kerry, if elected, he will do nothing for four years but damage control and Iím not sure he can control much of the damage thatís been done. Heíll be left with an impossible situation in Iraq and an economic situation, a fiscal situation that is just nightmarish. Probably the only way he can take peopleís attention off it is to start investigations into almost everything the Bush administration has done.

I read about two public policy books a week, five newspapers a day, all the magazines, both left and right, that I can get my hands on, so I have, over the years, become familiar with most of the public debate and Iím not always as knowledgeable as I should be. But what you do as a reporter, reporters being principally people who donít know anything but know how to find out, is that I know who to call to find out.

I think that so much of political reporting now is just inside baseball stuff ñ itís horserace, itís polls, itís whoís the campaign manager, who the adís on. Itís technical stuff about politics. What political reporters are failing to do is say to people, ëLook. Hereís how all this affects you. This is whatís going to happen to you if this guys wins, if that guy wins.í You find people who think the whole thing is disconnected with their lives. The three things that I hear, and this is in a country where all elections are decided by people who donít vote, I hear them say over and over again, ëWell Iím just not interested in politics. Theyíre all crooks and thereís nothing I can do about it.í And I think all three of them are dead wrong.

But it is in large part because of the media in this country that give people that feeling that politics is about those people in Washington, or those people in Sacramento. No, itís not. Itís about us. This is our deal. We own this country. We run this country and we have a responsibility to be involved in it. I donít think politics is something you can separate from life, like a show on television or a painting on the wall that you can look at and say, ìYou know, I just donít care for that.î If youíre alive your interactions with other people should be in some sense political.

Of course, my only contribution to originality in any of this is that Iím a great believer in making it all fun. I think you should have a good time being political in this world and there are a couple of good reasons. As Jimmy Buffet, that great philosopher says, ìIf we could laugh we would all go insane.î If you donít laugh, if you donít have fun, you will get tired, you will get cynical, you will get angry, you will get discouraged and you will burn out and you wonít be any use to yourself and you still wonít be having any fun. Making politics fun is something I preach constantly. The stuff that flies under the radar is the stuff that really does affect peopleís lives. The hope of the book I wrote, ìBushwhacked,î is built on that premise. What we did is go out and find regular, average, ordinary, everyday Americans, all of whom are exceptional, and just showed how government decisions have directly affected their lives. We didnít think that there would be anything as dramatic as people dying because of some obscure bureaucratic decision but there it is.

No. Iíve been optimistic to the point of idiocy my entire life. I was expecting to become an unnaturally cheerful old fart. But I noticed some definite signs of grumpiness develop. One of them is that now I am old enough to sit around and look at a younger generation of political reporters and think, ëDamn, these people donít drink, they donít smoke, they donít stay up late. What is wrong with them?í If you can imagine old folks sitting around and saying the problem with young people today is that they are too well behaved, thatís the way I feel about it. They are so serious and often pompous. The degree of self-importance is just amazing. I find few very of them with an appreciation for the comedy in the whole thing. Itís good for politicians to be laughed at, itís good for us to laugh at them. One reason I try to make people laugh about politics is because it invites them in. It makes it more approachable. Sometimes I think weíd be better off if we just took all the guys who are now covering sports and put them on politics.

I keep saying I donít have to do anything, itís all in the material. Not a sigh of resignation. I really think that this administration is the creepiest thing Iíve seen since Richard Nixon was president. Thereís an extent to which Iíve always made fun of fearful liberals, God bless their hearts, always sitting around hearing the sound of jackbooted fascism approaching around every damn corner. Fascism isnít a word that Iíve ever used when discussing American politics until very recently. There are some very creepy things happening.

Iím really concerned about the Bill of Rights. What happens over and over again in this country is we get scared ñ communism, crime, growth of illegal aliens, terrorists ñ we think we can make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free as though there were any relationship at all. What happens is when you make yourself less free is that youíre less free, youíre not safer. There has been a really extraordinary erosion of civil liberties in this administration and I donít find any of their attitudes comforting on this. We hear Bush will sign the Patriot Act as is this is just a terribly important thing. There was absolutely nothing in the Constitution or the law that would have prevented responsible authorities from stopping 9/11.

The only real block you can see, and is a real consideration, is that the FBI and CIA donít get along. Had they been sharing information a little bit more we might, might, might have been able to stop that. But that doesnít have anything to do with the Bill of Rights and thatís whatís being divulged; the First Amendment is effectively gone. You can see what happens in terms of freedom of speech and freedom of religion, both of which are a great concern.

Iíve always gotten a lot of hate mail. And Iím really used to it. There are certain subjects that set people off worse than others, death penalty, abortion. You know if you write about certain things itís going to rattle their cages and youíll hear from them. I used to have a system for dealing with it: On even numbered days, I would read the hate mail and never read it if wasnít signed or always beware of the stuff that comes in red crayon on big cheap tablets, which tends not to be from thoughtful citizens. I would read the hate mail trying to figure out how did I piss this person off. Did I take some cheap shot I should have avoided? Is there some piece of information that would have been persuasive to this person on that case? You can learn a lot. And on odd numbered days, I would just throw in wastebasket and say fuck them if they canít take a joke.

I think that a large part of the spirit of liberty is being able to consider the possibility that you may be wrong. I hope Iím still capable of saying that. Whatís interesting to me, Iím at a point where I can look back and say, ëOkay hereís where I think I was right and hereís where I was wrong,í because Iíve been doing this long enough so that things have proved out in certain ways. I think I was right about the big things in most of my career.

I can remember in 1980 when Ronald Regan was running around the country saying, ë$50 billion deficit! Oh! And this terrible fiscal irresponsibility this is the Democrats they do nothing but tax and spend and tax spend they have no sense of responsibility,í and I remember thinking to myself, ëBoy, $50 billion thatís a lot of money maybe if the Republicans take over they will be more fiscally responsible not spend so much money.í Of course, $2 trillion of national debt later, I decided that was a misconception.

There are times when one thinks this so discouraging, weíre having to re-fight the same battles. Weíve already won that once, how come we have to go and re-fight this again? Well, itís true itís very discouraging to have to go back and re-fight the old battles. Maybe itís always the same battle but in different guises. As I say I think an enormous amount of life is political and these are fights worth fighting. You donít always win; being a Texas liberal teaches you that. So thereís no use in putting off the good times until after you win; itís not a shrewd strategy. I feel confident urging young people to get involved with politics and I even urge them to run for public office, which I think in many ways is a perfectly hellacious life.

You think about it, what you get in this country just for being born here. We donít do anything to earn it. We just get it, the most magnificent political legacy people have ever received: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that whenever any government becomes destructive of these laws, itís the right of the people to alter or abolish it. People live and die for a chance like this. They died in South Africa, Tiananmen Square and theyíre dying today in Myanmar. In this country thereís real chance we could lose the whole thing out of boredom or cynicism or indignation, ëWell Iím just not interested in politics.í I donít blame people for that. I blame the media largely and I also think the system. Iím the last person in the world to deny the system has been badly corrupted by money, but I think thatís fixable.

I certainly think that the myth of the liberal media is not only dubious but at this point faintly comical. When youíve got people like Bill Kristol admit that itís nothing more than useful tool to beat the media about the head, itís ridiculous. What weíre looking at is not a vast right-wing conspiracy but something that is out in the open for everyone to see. Itís been going on for at least 30 years and it started after (the late Arizona Senator) Goldwaterís defeat and the great Lyndon Johnson sweep of 1964. The right-wingers, they got massacred at the polls and they got together and had conferences about where they should go and how they should do it.

In the end of that decade they had it figured out and the money came from all the people who are still involved ñ Richard Mellon Scaife, the Coors family out of Colorado, The Bradley Foundation, The Olin Foundation, and you hear those names over and over again. The first thing they created is The Heritage Foundation, a think tank. They needed ideas, they needed to present their ideas better. They created The Heritage Foundation and look around! There are hundreds of right wing think tanks dedicated to pushing public policy to the right. Itís just multiplied to an extent thatís just incredible. The research they present is badly skewed. They have subsidized journalists they who have published. They then subsidize small media organs that pick it up ñ The Weekly Standard, The National Review, The Washington Times. From there it makes its way into the general establishment media discussion and the effect of this strategy has been to move political discussion in this country dramatically to the right. Thereís an artifical echo chamber around right-wing views. It doesnít reflect their real power in the society but it is terribly effective.

Fox News is so biased. I think youíd have to be a moron to miss it. The sheer irony of the fact that they used the slogan ëFair and Balanced.í Thereís an opportunity for satire. I think the trouble of course with the establishment media is that the goal, the great god of objectivity, has always been a chimera ñ itís a myth, it doesnít exist. And Iíve never been sure if itís a goal in which we should aim. Iím a great believer in accuracy in journalism and fairness and I realize that fairness is very much in the eye of the beholder but I find that objectivity is normally an excuse for laziness on the part of the journalist. You get classic things like thereís fight on the city council. Councilmen Smith wants the new road paved and the contract to go to the Acme Company. Jones thinks it should to go to the Zenith Company. You interview both of them, you spell both their names right, you give them the exact same amount of space in the paper and you have a perfectly adequate job. What you havenít done is get up off your butt and find out that Smith has been taking kickbacks from the Acme Company for 20 years now. That kind of fake balance, the assumption that truth must lie exactly in the middle of any two opposing points of view is one of the great weaknesses of establishment journalism.

Bill OíReilly actually fancies himself a man of the people. And I would say that heís right-wing populist and Iím a left-wing populist. Operating on that cheerful principle, I actually went on his show a month or so back and I found it as disconcerting as everyone had warned me it would be. When they called me for the pre-interview I said, ëWhy donít we see if OíReilly can find something that we agree on. Youíre both populists, we donít like big power people. Letís see what we can agree on.í

I thought thatís what weíre going to do but OíReillyís premise for the show was that thereís a terrible a lack of civility in American politics and people just are not able to discuss politics calmly and this is just really a shame. He said, ëI realize that Republicans should take some of the blame. Many of us where a little over the top the way we went after Bill Clinton, but surely Molly, even you must recognize these Bush-haters have taken this to whole new height.í

My mouth so far opened I could barely bring out the words, ëOh, I donít agree.í He actually brought on Newt Gingrich to backup his point that it was the left that caused civil political debate to fall into great decline. Gingrich is the man who put out the infamous (Republican Action Committee) memo in 1994, urging every Republican candidate for Congress to describe his Democratic opponent as sick, pathetic, bizarre and a traitor. Now that kind of extreme language is no more called for in times of peace and prosperity than Iím the Queen of England. I mean it was just gross. I am sure that there is blame to go around for the crime of civility when discussing politics in this country.

The artificial right wing echo chamber that they have been successfully campaigning on for years now is that government canít do anything right. Government can screw up a two-car funeral. Government is just an oppressive presence in our lives. It messes up everything is touches. Itís inefficient. Weíre much better off with everything private enterprise, the great capitalist system. The great god capitalism can take care of all problems. Itís a silly premise and a silly argument. Reagan used to go around saying government isnít the solution, government is the problem. Thatís real cute but in fact government is the tool; itís just like a hammer. You can use it to build with or you can use it to destroy with. Thereís nothing intrinsically good about the hammer.

Lyndon Johnson used to say, ëAny jackass can kick down a barn. It takes a responsible man to build one.í Whether or not government is good depends on the purposes to which it is put and the skill with which is it used. You find that eventually these people always come back to taxes, how terrible these taxes are we have to get rid of this burdensome tax. They are just simply shifting the taxes from the richest people in this country to the middle class and the poor and thatís exactly what this is about. Itís just class warfare.