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PRESENTATION BY
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
SATURDAY, JUNE 25, 2005
This is my return visit. I was here for your 1997 seminar and it’s great to be back. I want to divide what I’m going to say into three parts and in the course of these three points, I will answer some of the points that David [Brooks] and Mo [Fiorina] have made.
First of all, let me just say that, what Dick [Lamm] said, in quoting Toynbee, about the autopsy and how most great nations or empires commit suicide has been very much on my mind because as I look at what’s happening now, I do have a sense of foreboding. I don’t understand, like my compatriot Cassandra. But I’ll give you plenty of evidence as to why that foreboding may be justified.
The first thing I want to talk about is why, even though we have historically been such a unified nation, we are so polarized right now. Then, I want to move on to destroy this left-right-center obsolete way of looking at the world. Then, I want to end by saying, he who controls the language, controls the political debate, and the Democrats are simply not controlling the language right now. They have abandoned that domain, which is one of the reasons why they’re still doing so poorly, despite all that’s happening in Iraq and with the economy.
So, I’ll start with the question of why we are so much less unified than we’ve been at other points in our history. Let me just give you an example from my own experience. When I was a Republican – you know I used to be a Republican, back in the old age when Dick Cheney was a good friend of Sadaam Hussein’s and Michael Jackson was black – I remember when I was a Republican back in 1993, I was giving a speech at a National Review conference and the topic of my speech was “Can Conservatives Have a Social Conscience?” I was preceded by Brent Bozell. There were about 2,000 people in the room. Brent Bozell gave a really hard-hitting, red meat speech and he got a standing ovation. And I was sitting at the podium really feeling kind of nervous and asking myself two questions. One, how can he and I both call ourselves Republicans? And two, where is the nearest exit?
But, I stood up, and I spoke about the Bible and how it talks about how we shall be judged by what we do for the least among us, social responsibility, social conscience, our responsibility to those who have less – you know, all of those messages that could also be called “liberal” messages and I got a standing ovation. It made me realize something very profound, which is that it depends on what part of the public, of the electorate that you appeal to. We are all a mixture of self-interest and altruism. We are not divided into good people and bad people, selfish people and altruistic people. It depends on what part of our brain and our psyche you appeal to. Most of American politics right now has not appealed to what is best in us, to the better angels of our natures. It has appealed to our fears and to the lowest common denominator interests.
That has been one of the problems. The perfect moment for that appeal would have been after 9/11 when we were all ready to be called to something greater . . . when we were all ready to be called to sacrifice and to do something for our country. Instead, the President asked us to go shopping, literally. He said, “Go shopping. Go to the malls. Don’t just give into your fears” But he never called on us to be part of something greater, including energy independence, which could have been part of something greater and concrete, which he’s now, all these years later, trying to return to.
There are two other factors which make it much harder for us to be unified. They are the media and the outward emphasis on polling in how leaders make decisions. Let me start with polling.
I am appalled by the way that most political leaders are so utterly driven by polling. If you look at all the great leaders in history, they’ve recognized that polling is to be used to see how you articulate a message. Not to come up with a message. Again and again, we see now that politicians are so entirely driven by what the polling results are showing. [David Brooks] mentioned Nancy Pelosi as an example of a liberal Democrat. But Nancy Pelosi is an example of a spineless Democrat. She basically has said nothing against the war in Iraq. She did not even vote for the Woolsey Amendment, asking the White House to come up with a possible exit strategy about Iraq. When the poll numbers turned, literally, on the next day, she came out with her own wishy-washy resolution about Iraq, which meant nothing, which did not ask for any policy changes, but was basically a response to the polls. And that’s Nancy Pelosi. She’s no liberal.
You know, we need to really look at these people again. I mean Hillary Clinton is not acting like a liberal. Hillary Clinton is acting like a complete hawk on Iraq. She sounds entirely like George Bush. Go look at a transcript of her interview just a few weeks ago with Judy Woodruff. When Judy Woodruff asked her what our Iraq exit strategy should be, Pelosi replied, “I’m not comfortable with exit strategies.” And, you felt like saying, well, if you are not, Senator, why don’t you step aside and point us to someone who is, because every war needs an exit strategy.
So we need to basically look at our traditional views of responding to prominent politicians and re-examine them. Incidentally, for those of you who share my disgust at polling, you can join my campaign. Harry Shearer and I have started a crusade called “Partnership for a Poll-Free America.” The way you join it is you go to the huffingtonpost.com and you sign up by promising that, if you’re ever called to answer a polling survey, you’ll hang up on them. The response rate is already down, hovering at about 30-35%. If we can bring it down to single digits, they will no longer be able to maintain that these polling results have any relevance. I actually believe that the people who talk to pollsters are a small, unrepresentative minority of bored and lonely Americans who have nothing better to do at dinner than talk to strangers for no money. Therefore, they don’t represent us and if we stop talking to pollsters – you can talk to them socially; do not shun them if you meet them at a cocktail party. Just don’t talk to them if they call you and interrupt your dinner to ask you questions, including as they used to ask, whenever a politician is sick, they’ll say “Do you think Ronald Reagan should have prostate cancer surgery?” Maybe polls should be moved to the cartoon pages and be there for our entertainment.
On to the media. The media are a very troubling factor in the way we’ve become so polarized and have lost that central unity. The media seem to be suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder. Right now, if you turn on your TV, you would think that the biggest story facing America is the missing girl in Aruba. Just after the Michael Jackson trial and after the endless post-Michael Jackson verdict analysis, when you thought “Oh my God, OK, this is over,” the Aruba girl appeared or rather, went missing. And, you wonder whether there is some kind of way these stories are organized, so they never happen at the same time and there never is any gap without a story like that. We went from Kobe Bryant to Scott Peterson to Michael Jackson to the Aruba girl.
I have a very simple solution. I go cold turkey on these stories. I literally refuse to watch them. If I have to channel surf all the way to the Golf Channel, if that’s the only channel that does not have the Aruba girl story, I’ll watch the Golf Channel and I do not play golf. I feel we need to protest this.
I was talking to somebody high up at CNN the other day who wants to remain nameless, and I asked “Does it actually increase your rating? Why are you doing it?” He said, “I don’t know if it increases our ratings.” They don’t even know if it increases their ratings! It’s not as if they can legitimately say that’s what the people want. CNN gets about a million voters. You can find a segment of about a million voters a year in the nation, interested in all sorts of other things, other than the Aruba girl. So there’s a kind of default position, which is covering those stories relentlessly. And we the public have to do something about it because nobody else will.
And one of the things that’s happening here is the power of what’s going on, on-line. To answer what [Mo Fiorina] said about Joe Trippi and the whole infatuation with on-line and the blogosphere and all that, I think actually there are some very valuable things happening there (and not just because I just entered the medium last month). Two primarily. One, in terms of Joe Trippi, is the fact that now you have millions of people who can contribute to campaigns. The most significant thing that the Howard Dean forces did is to demonstrate that you don’t have to be dependent on Wall Street to run a massively well-funded campaign. That’s incredibly significant. For the creation of a third party, that’s what you’re interested in, or for the shakeup of American politics.
The other thing is that you now have a new court of appeals when it comes to news stories. They used to say that a news story had 24-48 hours before anyone could determine whether it was really going to have legs. Many, many great stories die on the front page, above the fold of the New York Times. How many stories have you seen there that go no nowhere?
But now you have the blogosphere. And if the blogosphere, which is all about passion and intensity and pursuing a story relentlessly, can keep a story going and going and going, and keep developing it, the mainstream media has to jump in again. The Downing Street Memo is a perfect example. The mainstream media decided the Downing Street Memo was not important. It was not new information. The blogosphere decided it was important. That even if the information had been brought up before, the Administration had never admitted it, so it was important. The blogosphere stayed on it and the mainstream media had to enter the fray. These are the countervailing forces to what the media is doing and the polarizing impact that the media have been having.
Now to my second point, which is called the Right/Left way of looking at the world. I really think that it is incredibly, incredibly obsolete. If you look at the most important, interesting issues we’re facing today, most cannot be explained in left-right terms. Let’s take the war in Iraq, which I believe is the single most important issue facing this country right now, bar none. There is absolutely no way to look at that in left-right terms. Who has actually gotten the most ink recently, coming out recently in favor of withdrawing troops from Iraq, but Congressman Walter Jones from North Carolina, a war-mongering Republican. The Congressman who actually called for French fries to be renamed “Freedom Fries.” Do you remember? This is a congressman who now has come out and said basically what John Kerry said during the campaign – wrong war, wrong time, wrong place, we need an exit strategy. You have Senator Chuck Hagel saying we’re losing the war in Iraq and that the White House is disconnected from reality. You don’t have Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi saying that. But it is this incredibly interesting coalition that’s being developed right now, between conservatives who don’t believe in the imperial dreams of this Administration and liberals who recognize that we are spending close to $300 billion in Iraq, losing thousands of lives, spreading anti-Americanism, and there has to be an exit strategy.
Moving on to domestic issues, corporate responsibility and demanding responsibility from corporate America is not a right-left issue. Ayn Rand would have been in favor of responsibility in corporate America. In fact, it was John Kerry’s Achilles heel during the campaign, the way, once he won the nomination, he toned down his rhetoric in order, as I was told by somebody high up in his campaign, when I asked “Why has John Kerry stopped using his term ‘the Benedict Arnolds of corporate America’ to refer to corporate titans who shelter their profits in Bermuda and don’t pay their fair share of taxes?” And he said to me, “Oh Arianna! That was really upsetting Wall Street, so we buried it. It was a very unfortunate phrase.” Well, that was really the problem with the Kerry campaign: they buried everything interesting. So increasingly, those of us who voted for him began to feel like Mickey Kaus’ group – you know, he created this group called “Kerry Haters for Kerry.” That was the problem.
So when people are asking “Why are Democrats, why are working class Americans voting against their economic interests?,” they’re not really. Just look at both parties. To the extent that they both kowtow to Wall Street… to the extent that they’ve both made free trade the idol they worship no matter what the consequences, they actually have both betrayed the interests of working class Americans. That’s the point that Andy Stern, the President of the ACLU, is making right now, when he’s taking on the AFL-CIO and its slavish allegiance to the Democratic Party, and the point that he made to me the other day when I was interviewing him for a column was, look at who John Kerry had sitting next to him and his wife at the most important point in his life when he was giving his acceptance speech at the convention – Robert Rubin. Wall Street! He wanted to send the message to Wall Street, “We’re OK. Don’t worry. We’ll be on your side.” He didn’t have the leader of working class Americans, whoever that would have been. That’s a problem too, but that’s part of what needs to change right now. A kind of progressive populism is what should inform a third party, rather than a McCain-Lieberman coalition. More about that later. But I think that McCain’s performance on Meet the Press last Sunday tells it all. The reason people love McCain is his straight talk and there was nothing straight-talkish in his appearance on Sunday when he tried to have it both ways, both opposing the war in Iraq and saying that he agrees “100%” agrees and supports the President. That’s hardly straight talk.
One more thing about fiscal responsibility. Where is the fiscal responsibility of the right? This has been the most fiscally irresponsible Congress and Administration. Even when it comes to the way money is being spent in Iraq, you would have thought that no matter how passionate you are for the war, you would want the equivalent of a Truman-style committee to examine how that money is being spent. But no! Republicans are passionately against it, except for one Republican, Jim Leech, who has introduced a bipartisan bill in the House to establish just such a committee. And, again, it’s a bipartisan coalition that is trying to bring about fiscal responsibility in the way the war is conducted and in the way our domestic priorities are handled.
And the final example of a major so-called right-left coalition on a major issue that’s not getting a lot of play but is a huge issue is the drug war. You know, both parties have grandstanded on the drug war until we now have 500,000 non-violent drug offenders in jail. We are desiccating whole inner-city communities and basically leaving hundreds of thousands of children orphans, when their parents are taken to jail for non-violent drug offenses and given no treatment and are coming out incapable of parenting or having productive lives. And that’s purely because politicians on both sides, both the so-called right and left, want to grandstand about being tough on crime.
The final point I want to make is about language. I’m a passionate believer in the fact that powerful language can really change political realities. And [ex-Colorado Governor] Dick [Lamm] told me last night something which, neither one of us knows who said it, right Dick? – but we’re both going to find out, and this is – some Greek, you know, of course – said that “When most politicians speak, you nod with agreement, but when Demosthenes speaks, you march.” So right now, what we need is a leader who will really deeply inspire us, deeply appeal to the better aspects of our nature and get us to march for a more fair and just America, which is really what the history of this country has been. It has always been a movement toward a more fair and just society. It has not been a linear movement. There have been regressions and plateaus, but there has also been tremendous progress. If you look at the great moments on this journey, whether it is the Emancipation Proclamation, the Voting Rights Act, the Clean Air Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act… Were these liberal? Were these conservative? What were they?
That’s why we need to look again at all these labels. We need to look very clearly at what we mean by “the center,” so that we don’t take the center to be where you are between left and right.
We need to redefine morality. This whole obsession that “moral values” was what carried this election was not only wrong in polling terms, but also wrong because of how it defined “morality.” Why is morality defined in terms of sex only? Why wouldn’t you say that Wal-Mart is being immoral when it refuses to pay overtime to workers who need it? And why don’t Democrats take back morality and define it in terms that have to do with economic issues, that have to do with not cheating your workers, that have to do with those basic issues that actually go back to the Bible? Let them use the Bible because there is nothing in the Bible about gay marriage and there is plenty in the Bible about our responsibilities to the poor.
Thank you.
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