The Scribe

Matt Bai, "Democracy Alliance": How will progressives win?

Excerpts from an interview with Tom Ashbrook at WBUR’s “On Point,” August 21, 2007

(A less detailed, interview with Matt Bai is available here.)

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Tom Ashbrook:  Since early in the 2004 presidential campaign, the Democratic Party has seen a new outbreak of activism from angry bloggers, from fed-up billionaires – new, fired-up players alienated by the Clinton centrism of the 1990’s and infuriated by the Iraq war and President Bush.  Journalist Matt Bai has been watching up close and intimate while these fiery “net roots” and liberal moneymen have become a major force.  They’re changing Democratic Party politics.  But, Matt Bai says, they’re not sure yet now to change the country.  …Joining me today is Matt Bai, writer for the New York Times magazine.  For three years he’s been watching the debate and changing guard inside the Democratic Party – maybe more than three years.  He moderated just this month the Democratic presidential debate at the Yearly Kos bloggers’ convention in Chicago.  His new book is “The Argument:  Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics” and he’s an old friend.  …Matt, it’s been great watching all the action that you’re taking us right into the middle of.  It started for your back in the Howard Dean campaign.  What got you on this trail? 

Matt Bai:  Feels like about a hundred years by now! …It starts for me with the Howard Dean campaign.  Not because of Dean himself.  I went out and campaigned very early on.  It was just me and him and a couple of aides driving around Iowa. Dean was interesting and I got to know him much better as years went on.  But what struck me – what pulled me into this – were the crowds that he was drawing in remote parts of Iowa.  The pent-up emotion of these crowds. There were older crowds, some younger people.  They were most Democrats but some independents, some very liberal and some not.  The aggravation with politics, with the Democratic Party and the direction it had taken in Washington.  Their hunger for something different.  The way Dean would stand up and say, “I’m Howard Dean and I’m hear to represent the democratic wing of the Democratic Party!”  The applause would be deafening and people would be very deeply emotional.

TA:  People wept, you said.

MB:  Some actually wept at Howard Dean rallies and did crazier things like put fangs on and those kinds of things.  …It was this outpouring of pent-up emotion and I came to realize that at that time I felt and still feel that it was a transformational moment.  Something was happening outside in the grassroots of the Democratic party that was more important than what was happening in Washington.  I came to believe that more strongly as the years have passed.

TA:  We’re going to follow you down these new threads of activism.   But in their meeting, you say, what comes out of it is “the argument.”  You mean that in a couple of ways.  Frame up “the argument” for us in its Matt Bai definitions.

MB:  I do mean it in a couple of ways.  The first is the most obvious and literal.  There’s been an argument going on since 2003 when what I consider “the outsiders,” the progressive movement -- and I do think it’s a movement and it has self-identified as progressives, people who have not held power in Democratic politics, ordinary people, citizens, people online, big money donors, people who really want some control over their party.  And then you have the party establishment in Washington which has been really neither center nor left but focused entirely on what they felt they needed to do to win.  They were very much focused on fighting battles, day to day, in the legislative process, on trying to compromise in key areas.  That has been raging and changing and evolving over the last couple of years.  In the larger sense what we’re getting at… is that I think every movement in American politics that’s been successful – certainly over the last hundred years whether we’re talking about progressive of the early 20^th century or the social equality movements of the 1960’s or the conservative movement that was very successful in the 1960’s and ‘70’s and beyond into the ‘80’s – every movement has to have some argument for the future and for what government needs to do to adapt.  Each time presents different challenges, some more instrumental than others.  A successful movement has to say that there’s a way government has to adapt to those challenges, and this is what it is.  Generally that argument is divisive, it doesn’t necessarily unite people, it doesn’t necessarily sound great to a lot of people in the beginning. It’s often very unpopular, but it’s the thing that drives American politics and the long-term success of majorities is generally based around some argument that takes hold and that actually changes the way government operates.  That’s the piece of the puzzle that I think this nascent progressive movement is still very much looking for.

TA:  So within the party there’s an argument about the way ahead, and that argument is about what The Argument will be when presented to the country that people hope will lead the country in a better direction.  Introduce us to the players here, Matt.  We kind of know them but you take us in with a level of detail that for me, at least, is new.  You’ve got your bloggers.  You’ve got billionaires.  And more.  Who do you see as the major players in the argument?

MB:  If we’re looking at the progressive movement, let’s for a moment compare the progressive movement to the conservative movement that people are very familiar with.  The Reagan era conservative movement.  If you have in the Reagan era conservative movement, say, a figure like Reagan, a leader, then a rough analogy in the progressive movement would be Howard Dean who really unleashed this wave of emotion and whose followers really began to take over the party at a certain level.  You have MoveOn.org, which, to me, is something like the National Rifle Association or some membership-based group of the right.  You’d have to look at them as a group that aggregates the power of ordinary foot soldiers around the country and turns them into a very powerful lobbying force.  The donors of the conservative movement who were so successful who were so important to that powerful political force…

TA: … the Coors family and all the rest…

MB:  …Coors, Scaife, Mellon… you could go on.  Those are roughly analogous to the liberal donors I write about, the progressives I write about in the book which are members of something called the Democracy Alliance.  It’s about 100 donors that have poured about $100M in, I’m told, to progressive causes in the last couple of years and it’s growing.  Then if you look at the bloggers  --and some of the bloggers won’t like this – but to me they are roughly analogous to the religious right in the sense that they bypass the traditional media. They speak to a highly motivated, passionate crowd.  They’re obsessive about it.  They’re on 24 hours a day.  There’s really no movement without that online component because it is sort of the most passionate and most obsessive of all of the groups involved.  These are what I look as the rough strains of a progressive movement that has gone largely unrecognized. It is a movement.  You see in the 2008 campaign – the 2008 campaign on the Democratic side is largely about trying to adapt to the reality of this new movement.  In order to understand this campaign, I think you have to understand how the progressive movement has taken hold and what it looks like.

TA:  The bloggers may not like you comparing them to the religious right – or perhaps they do!  The old progressive movement as you describe it is very happy to be seen as analogous to movement conservatives – rightwing movement conservatives – of the Goldwater era.  Why?

MB:  Well, because they were successful!  There’s widespread agreement on this much, and that is that the conservative movement that took hold really after Barry Goldwater in the mid 1960’s and ultimately took over the party in a very practical way after Ronald Reagan’s 1976 campaign, this movement was wildly successful in changing not just the agenda in the country – this is important to understand – not just the governing agenda of the country, not just the electoral math but the debate.  That is, the terms of the debate:  where the center is, where the right is, and where the left is in the debate has shifted perceptively because of the power of that conservative movement.  And so these progressives absolutely emulate that movement.  They want to change the climate and the debate in the country, and they very much want to take power.  In that sense, they very much want to do what the Goldwater-Reagan conservatives did.  Now the difference, I would argue and some would argue that it’s not true – the difference that is sometimes overlooked is that movement began with, really, an argument.  Not with media, not with Rush Limbaugh, not with think tanks that own huge buildings in Washington….

TA:  …but with ideas…            

MB:  Right!  With ideas and with pouring money into scholarship and arguments and debates.  This is very important, too:  not with unity, not with lockstep unity so they could win elections.  They didn’t think they could win elections.  They didn’t even like the Republican party.  They began fighting with each other.  And out of that emerged an agenda that was very dynamic and very appealing to people.  Now whether or not it should have been appealing to people we can argue forever…

TA:  … Do the new progressives you’re describing here, Matt, have a comparable argument or set of ideas?  Or a corral full of ideas even if they’re not complementary at the moment?

MB:  No.  They don’t.  They don’t and I want to draw a distinction between “ideas” and “the argument.”  Once you start talking about the lack of ideas, people can say rightfully, well, there’s all these healthcare plans and there’s the expansion of this plan and that plan…

TA: …fair enough!…

MB:  I’m not talking about policy ideas because they’re all piled up on the shelves and I could probably find a few within 10 feet of me!  They’re everywhere in Washington.  I’m talking about something a little more fundamental.  What’s your vision of government?  What do we need to change in government?  We face in this country at least two monumental challenges that are entirely new, two of the most intractable policy problems we’ve faced as a country since the Civil War.  One is the onset of global terror; one is the onset of a kind of globalized economy.  It’s obviously changing our dynamic in a kind of post-industrial world where the economy that built the 20^th century is no longer especially relevant.  Facing those obstacles, I think the movement has to ask what has government been doing for 57 years that it needs to do differently now?  We’re in a new reality.  How do we meet the new reality?  There’s very little discussion like that inside the progressive movement.  In fact the discussion is generally how do we get back to what we were doing before.  How do we get these conservative marauders out of the kitchen and figure out how to continue cooking the way we were cooking in the 1960’s and 1950’s.  That, to me, is probably inadequate in order not just to change the country, which is what I’m primarily concerned with, but to build long-term majorities as well. 

TA:   …Matt Bai was out in Chicago earlier this month, moderated the debate among Democratic presidential hopefuls at the Yearly Kos blogger convention.  Hillary Clinton made headlines with her response to one of his questions.  She was booed at one point [for her response to a question about] taking money from lobbyists.   Matt, you describe the bloggers as the progressive left’s answer to the religious right.  In your book, you describe a lot of fury in this quarter.  Does that work?  And what does it contribute to “the argument”?

MB:  Well, it’s certainly worked to revitalize the party at the grassroots.   If you live in Nebraska and you’re a core Democrat, over the last 20-25 years at least, nobody’s come to your state, there’s been no Democratic party.  There’s been no meeting to go to.  You just read the paper and get depressed!  And then suddenly there comes this thing called the internet and here are these things called “blogs” like Daily Kos and MyDD.  You can log on at night when you get home and put your kids to bed and there are people in Seattle, and there are people who feel the same way in Texas, and all of you can begin to have this conversation that was not available before.  There’s been a revolution at the grass roots.  Has the blogosphere been an incubator for a more substantive debate about the future of progressivism?  No.  I would argue not.  I think it’s largely been reactive.  But I would say in defense of the movement that these are very early days.  I’m chronicling very early days.  In fact even now, as we head into the 2008 campaign, you see a rapidly evolving net roots.  Part of that is simple technology.  Four years ago, if we were having this conversation, broadband technology would have permeated so few American households that only very early adapters, people who were very comfortable with technology, would have been online surfing the web.  Now, of course, that’s not true.  A lot of people who used to donate by writing checks will click on a candidate’s website.  A lot of people are discovering some level of blogs.   As the technology goes mainstream, it really is happening.  Also, the culture of the blogs begins to change from an early-adapter most-motivated culture to a culture that encompasses a lot of mainstream Democrats who want to have a much broader conversation.  It begins to diversify in such a way that you’ll still have the blogs as we knew them in 2004, 2003, but you’ll also begin to have different levels and different sensibilities.  Some of those will, hopefully, be quite substantive. 

TA:  …You say it may not be fully evolved, but it’s already pushing, to a remarkable degree the conversation among the candidates who were on that stage with you in Chicago and beyond.  Why?  How?

MB:  It absolutely is.  Chicago was a great example.  That was a really interesting experience for me.  By the way, Tom, if you haven’t… but it’s much harder to moderate one of those things than it looks on TV!

TA:  I hear it!

MB:  You had all but one of the presidential candidates – Joe Biden didn’t come.  But you had all but one sitting on the stage for the second blogger convention, a bunch of people who had no role in politics three or four years ago.  They not only came, but they did their very best to pander! 

TA:  What’s the effect that this group is having on the candidates on the stage?  On their message?  On their view?  On the way they’re framing issues?

MB:  Put it this way.  This is one example and I think it’s a really interesting example.  If you were getting all the presidential candidates on a stage four years ago and asked about a balanced budget amendment, for instance, Howard Dean himself would have stood up and said he was for a balanced budget.  And he was the most “left-leaning” of the candidates.  On that stage the other day, we asked the same question. One of my co-moderators, the blogger Joe McCarter, asked that same question and only Governor Richardson of all of the candidates on the stage was willing to back a balanced budget amendment and he was booed.  The reason for that, largely, is because in the grass roots, in the progressive movement, this notion of balancing budgets, of Rubin-esque economics, of not investing money in social programs even if it means running up some kind of domestic debt has become really taboo.  And now there’s this new force for wanting… not wanting to be so fiscally responsible but actually spend more money on programs and do the things that need to get done. 

TA:  Does that mean a new liberalism or progressivism – I’m not sure what to call it – has already taken hold?  Is it a done deal?  Or is it sitting there in tension with the centrist impulse of the 1990’s in Washington?

MB:  I would say (I’m gonna hedge on this a little) … The answer to your question is yes and no in the sense that, yes, I think that for the progressive movement that argument is over.  Centrism is considered the worst thing you can subscribe to online and in MoveOn and among the new donors.  This triangulation idea – it’s really the backlash that created the whole movement,

TA:  Despite the way Clinton won with that in a way Democrats had not won in decades?

MB:  Yes.  This is a complex question.  Generally they don’t blame the president personally or not in the past as much as they blame the ethos that he stood for at the Democratic Leadership Council and other groups.  But yes, even though he was victorious, the feeling was that the party itself suffered at a much more broad electoral level.  There’s a very strong case to be made for that – that the losses in the 1990’s were really quite profound.  But I wouldn’t call that a “new progressivism” because so far on a policy level, on an idea level, it’s pretty much just the same manifestation of the same politics that most of these folks, who are baby boomer generation, brought to the table going back to the 1970’s and 1960’s.  I wouldn’t want a stereotype of everyone in the blogs as being a 196o’s liberal.  But there’s certainly a strong strain of old-style, industrial-age liberalism.  I think it’s less a matter of conviction than that that’s the only agenda available.  There’s been so little leadership in rethinking government.  I think if you had a lot of ideas and debate about what a new progressive government would look like, you’d get a lot of support in the progressive movement.  But because there isn’t that debate, generally people fall back on the kinds of programs and approaches which really brought them into politics to begin with.  And those tend to be very much industrial era programs.

TA:  Are the net roots folks confident, empty as that may be?  Will the new progressive stance bring the numbers out to the polls?

MB:   There is a strong strain of thought online and in the progressive movement – among donors in particular – which says, If you’re true to your principles, that is, if you’re as left as you wanna be, if you’re the Democratic party that brought a lot of these folks into politics in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, then people will respect your convictions and they agree with you on the issues and they’ll vote for you.  And the reason they haven’t voted for you for 20-odd years is because you ameliorated [sic] and you tried to compromise and you tried to run from the things you believe.  You’d have to test that premise.  I think it’s probably a little simplistic:  yes, people respect convictions but they also want to vote for someone whose convictions roughly match theirs.  The ethos behind Clintonism in my view and in many people’s views was not electoral gain, was not entirely about math, it wasn’t simply about changing the electoral map; it was about modernizing the party.  It was about modernizing the country.  It was about looking for different ways to govern.  And that piece of it largely got lost as his presidency became an exercise in fending off conservative majorities and as people in the party took from Clinton the rhetoric but not necessarily the animating governmental ethos behind it.  So I think a lot of the questions Clinton was asking and answering in a very forward-looking way in the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s have bee cast aside, probably not to the benefit of people who want to change the country in a more progressive way. 

[In response to a caller about what “new” progressivism means]

MB:  …What progressivism really started as linguistically is a replacement for liberalism, which had become so tainted in the political marketplace.  There were actually groups that did polling and worked really hard and very consciously to change liberalism to the term “progressivism.”  This is where the movement sort of gets its name.  It also evokes the early 20^th century progressivism, which we all think of – rightfully so – as very forward thinking, very democratic (small “d”) and very much engaged in the future of the country.  But there’s a massive difference between this progressivism and the kind we were talking about, the Robert Lafollette-Teddy Roosevelt version of progressivism, the Woodrow Wilson version of progressivism.  The single largest difference is this:  it’s very hard to define what it actually means! 

[Caller raises issue of “bringing back the concept of ‘public good’”]

MB:  A great journalist here in Washington, Mike Tomasky – in the left, now with the Guardian – started this conversation largely with a piece about the common good which is a phrase that’s been used in liberalism and progressivism for… decades.  And it is the kernel of an interesting argument.  But just the kernel.  The thing… to think about …the notion of the common good is not really owned by one party or one movement.  You can say, “Well, conservatives don’t worry about the common good, they only care about the individual.”  But that’s not really true.  Conservatives certainly do believe that individual rights and liberty are a way of pursuing the common good, that everyone is best served when everyone takes responsibility for their actions and have as much freedom and latitude to pursue their interests and their livelihoods as they can.  So sometimes this question “where do you differ?” or “where does progressivism differ” gets answered in ways where we’re for freedom and happiness and we want everyone to be empowered.   This is not differing.  The difference is in how you get there.  The question is in the fulfillment of the goals.  Everyone wants the same kind of society.  Nobody wants society to feel repressed or to be polarized or to be rich vs. poor.

TA:  Maybe there is an issue of how far forward you pull this issue of the common good.  Does it ride somewhere in the distance behind miles of individual interests, or is it that much more front and center? 

MB:  Yes, there’s a prioritization issue.  I’d agree with that.  Certainly progressives would prioritize their values differently.  But I think there really is a question about what the common good is.  And how, in fact, you best fulfill that notion. Through individual liberties?  …Or by equalizing income?  Or by redistributing?  …But I think the caller is on to something and I think there’s an absence of debate about what he’s talking about.  There’s such an emphasis on tactics, unity and winning.  Sometimes tactics and unity can be very important to a political party that wants to win.  But it comes at an intellectual cost.  Which is that you have to have some dissent and some argument in order to really begin the process, I think, of coalescing around different, newer visions of where government needs to go. 

TA:  And make it fierce to make it strong, you say. … Talk to us about the high-worth individuals who are joining hands, putting a lot of money in, and their particular angle on the battle that’s underway, as you see it.

MB:  Liberals donors who were not necessarily involved in the Clinton years, who rejected the centrist ethos of Clinton, started to band together soon after Howard Dean’s campaign and around the 2004 election.  They did so largely galvanized by a power point presentation a guy named Rob Stein put together about how the conservative movement had funded its way to success, and what needed to happen on the left.  And they formed something that ultimately came to be known as the Democracy Alliance … which includes about 100 very wealthy donors.  They’ve pulled collectively close to $100 million at this point and will soon exceed that.  They are very secretive.  They’ve not identified their membership list publicly.  They do not allow people into their meetings.  They do not do interviews.  They allow no scrutiny.  This, to me, has been a constant source of tension because you can’t fight for a transparent society and then dump $100 million into American politics and not expect to have some level of accountability. 

TA:  But not every meeting has been closed.  I believe you were there in Austin in the spring of last year when this crowd took on Bill Clinton himself.

MB:  I got to some of that meeting.  I actually reconstructed the piece pertaining to President Clinton from probably a dozen interviews with people in the room.  But I did attend part of that conference before I was summarily ejected!

TA:  Really an extraordinary interaction where Bill Clinton, after some sort of canned remarks, came under very tough questioning from one of those in attendance in particular – Guy Saperstein out of California, very high-profile civil rights lawyer who’s become one of these big donors – with a scathing critique of the Clinton years and where things were going.  Bill Clinton turned to him, as you report, and said, “You’re just wrong.  Everything you just said is totally wrong!  Wrong!  Wrong!  Wrong!  Let’s get real here.”  Right on down in a silent ballroom.  Guy Saperstein is with us right now in Truckee, California.  He’s a member of the Democracy Alliance…   What do you want the Democrat party to be doing?

Guy Saperstein:  Hi, Tom.  …I think the question about what the Democratic party should do and what progressives should do is not the same question. I think progressives need to be building infrastructure outside the party.  Among other things generate some leadership that builds ideas that are not part of the existing political orthodoxy within the Beltway.

TA:  What do you mean by “infrastructure,” Guy?  … What does it mean in political terms?

GS:  I mean building ideas, investing in ideas, the way the conservatives did 35 years ago.

TA:  Magazines?  Quarterlies? Think tanks?  That kind of thing? 

GS:  Yes.  And being willing to think outside the box.  Building a media apparatus to communicate the messages.  Investing in leadership, which is something, conservatives have done extremely well.  Conservatives train and invest in about 30,000 young leaders every year and Democrats have been investing in about 1,000.  Over ten years, that becomes a gigantic differential.  If you look at many of these Republican members of Congress, they were invested in 20-30 years ago by Republican leadership groups and supported.  We don’t do that on the progressive side.

TA:  Do you know what the central idea for infrastructure to promote is?  Or is that a work in progress?

GS:  You mean on the progressive side?

TA:  Yes.

GS:  It’s definitely a work in progress.  It’s one of the four pillars of what the Democracy Alliance has tried to do – with some success and some failures.  Leadership is one place where we’re making real progress.  “Ideas” is an area where we’re not investing the way we should be.  Civic engagement – that is, getting people out to vote and engaging more communities – is a place where we’ve invested a lot of money. It’s a very expensive proposition with somewhat limited effectiveness.  The idea of the Democracy Alliance is to build this political infrastructure that exists outside of the actual party. 

TA:  …Clinton turned on you, Guy Saperstein, as quoted by Matt Bai, and said, “This isn’t productive.  You’re asking people to flagellate themselves.  Only in this party do we eat our own!”  Is that the infrastructure is up to?  Is it going to be self-destructive?

GS:  The infrastructure is not necessarily “up to” that, but the infrastructure and people with brains are going to be willing to challenge anyone like Clinton who wants to defend a disastrous war.  In his case he was defending his wife and suggesting that it was just not possible to foresee the problems of invading Iraq.  And I tried to make the point that it was quite foreseeable.  This was actually one of the most predictable fiascos in American history.  There’s a large amount of scholarship about the history of Iraq.  Many, many prominent Republicans, including the first George Bush, had recommended against invasion.  148 Democrats in Congress had voted against the War Resolution.  So for Bill Clinton to come along and say that this was not foreseeable and we’ve just got to give Hillary a pass on it and not test her leadership by the fact that she got this one wrong is simply not credible. 

TA:  Matt Bai, is the Democracy Alliance in your view building the kind of infrastructure that parallels what the Goldwater Republicans so successfully built over many years?  Does it come into play in the ‘o8 election?  Or is this really long-term stuff?

MB:  That last piece is the key question.  Certainly, these donors are filling a vacuum…  I think you have to stop and give credit to people like Guy Saperstein for getting involved in politics and using their personal wealth – for caring about the country and their party.  I would argue, and I think Guy’s comments would essentially back this up – I don’t want to misinterpret him but I think this is essentially what he’s saying as well – that this has been an almost entirely tactical pursuit thus far.  And so in that sense, while it’s supposed to be long term and substantive and there’s supposed to be a lot of talk about ideas, it has in fact become very short term, very electoral – like the conversation on the blogs, like the conversation elsewhere in the party – and has become very much about majorities now winning elections in ’06, winning elections in ’08.  All of which is find and good.  But what are you winning elections for?  What is it exactly you want to do with the country and how exactly, if you look at history, are you intending to build long term, sustainable majorities if you can’t answer that question?  There’s a strong feeling inside the Democracy Alliance and the rest of the progressive movement that you change the country by winning elections.  I submit that the reverse is true.  That you win elections over the long term by changing the country.  That in fact the mere act of electing Democrats does very little good for the country if those Democrats don’t have some idea about how to meet the challenges of the moment.

TA:  Guy Saperstein… Do you think there’s a liberal America or a progressive America awakened?  Republicans have said for years that this is a fundamentally conservative country.  Are you on track to wake up something that’s already there?  Do you have to persuade it? 

GS:  No.  I think we have a long and vibrant progressive tradition in America.  I think it reaches even into Republican ranks.  Certainly the conservation movement – take that as an example.  That was generated in the Republican party.  Teddy Roosevelt was part of our great progressive tradition.  I think if you really look at core American values, they’re progressive values.  They’re not conservative values.  I think we have much to tap into.  But it’s like Matt says:  we have to have the confidence in our values, in our convictions, to make that argument clearly.

TA:  Matt, are we going to see “the argument” emerge fully formed, rounded out, in time for the vote next November?  Or is this a project of decades?

MB:  I think this is a long-term conversation.  Every election hopefully contributes something to it.  Every argument hopefully contributes something to it overall.  But candidates, politicians, and presidents – they don’t create the ethos for a movement, the movement creates them.  Reagan didn’t create the conservative movement, it created him.  Roosevelt didn’t create progressivism, it created him.

Matt Bai, "The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics"

Matt Bai, political reporter and author of a new book, “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics,” spoke with Neal Conan on NPR’s Talk of the Nation.  August 20, 2007.

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Neal Conan:  Over the past several years, the Democratic Party has been transformed by the political equivalent of a shareholders’ revolt.  Activists, angry with the Party’s Washington establishment found new ways to organize, to raise and spend money, to identify and elect candidates outside the party machinery.  The key factors, according to writer Matt Bai, include the passionate partisanship of the political blogs, the connective power of the internet, and the galvanizing issue of the war in Iraq.  In his new book, Matt Bai, a political reporter for the New York Times Magazine, chronicles what he calls “the first political movement of the internet age.”  If the Democratic Party has changed from the industrial to the digital age, it has yet to figure out what it stands for.  The platform of the 2006 elections, for example, was “We’re not them!”  Matt Bai says Democrats need new ideas, a new sense of mission.  They need “an argument.”  …  Is it important for Democrats to develop a shared political philosophy or is it more important to focus on winning the White House and expanding majorities in Congress.  What should the Democratic Party stand for?  …  Matt, in the run-up to the 2004 election, a lot of people were thinking about how to change politics and the political process.  But you say that they weren’t giving an awful lot of thought to policy. 

Matt Bai:  Right.  I think that’s true.  I think that’s been a hallmark of debate and discussion inside what we’d call “progressive circles” in the last several years because this movement I write about is the self-described progressive movement inside the Democratic party.  And inside the Democratic establishment as well in Washington.  I think the common thread in both of those has been an obsession with tactics, with electoral gains, and with winning or losing.  That’s not terribly shocking because we were living in a time of fairly close political competition and every election seems up for grabs and every election seems winnable.  It’s very hard to put short-term electoral considerations into the background.  What I’ve effectively argued here is that, even allowing for the importance of that, it’s really important not just to the party but to the country to have this deeper discussion about what the argument for the future really is.

NPR:  And one of the examples you use is the conservatives who, in the 1970’s took over the Republican party with a clearly identifiable political philosophy that could be boiled down to smaller government, lower taxes, strong defense, family values.

MB:  That’s right.  And that stemmed directly from a period in Republican and conservative history in the mid-1960’s, obviously after Barry Goldwater in 1964, where you really had this decimated landscape for conservatives.  And they had to begin to think about what a movement would stand for.  They did so in an environment that was not at all hostile to risk or to controversy because there was really nothing to lose.  They weren’t going to win any elections any time soon.  The mainstream Republican party was completely alienated from conservative thought and to their mind, so they didn’t have a vehicle really to work through.  So they really began at the bottom, and began with the ideas.  And this is something which is commonly misrepresented, the idea that they began with building the talk radio movement, Rush Limbaugh, or conservatives began by figuring out how to win elections.  But they really began with these ideas, but you can have a very strenuous argument about whether these ideas make sense for the country.  But I do think, if you look at the history of movements like the conservative movement, like the social equality movements of the 1960’s, like the progressive movement of the early 20^th century – if you look at the history of social and political movements that have had very strong impact on American politics, they have, by and large, started with an argument, with an idea that is critical for the future of the country, for government to adapt to changing times, for transformation.  Political success has grown from there.  And the implementation by people taking those ideas and being willing to implement them at the very top levels of politics have grown from there.

NPR:  And those arguments were developed not inside political parties but came from the outside and found their candidates.

MB:  Yes, that’s exactly right.  They came from the outside.  They had leaders, certainly.  They had people challenging them to think about issues differently.  And each of those movements had a milieu, if you will.  They had – in the early part of the 20^th century people had coffee meetings in people’s homes, civic clubs.  And in the 1960’s, marches.  They marched in the streets in the 1960’s.  And now I think you have the internet as the milieu for this particular movement.  But what makes this movement different from those is that there is neither the focus on how substantively government needs to change, on exactly what is that we need to do to adapt for the future.  Nor is there the leadership of that movement saying to people, “We need to think differently about how to govern the country.”  What you say is correct.  There is not a history of presidential candidates saying or doing that for a movement or for the party.  Ronald Reagan was created by the conservative movement; he did not create the conservative movement.  FDR did not create the progressivism that animated the New Deal.  That came 20 or 25 years before him.  It had been brewing going back into the 1800’s.  So there’s no reason to expect the highest level of government to do this for you.  There needs to be debate and discussion going on outside that establishment.

NPR:  One of the things you’ve chronicled in this book is sort of a parallel structure, where Democrats set out to quite consciously figure out what the conservatives did and do the same thing.

MB:  Right.  I talk in the book about this Democracy Alliance which is, up until now at least, an entirely secret venture of millionaires and billionaires – liberal donors.  There are about 100 donors in the group that started in the wake of the 2004 election and I had some level of access to it that others did not.  Democracy Alliance essentially did exactly what you’re describing.  They set out to replicate the conservative movement in the building of think tanks, in the building of media development that would serve their purposes, and in the building of building what they called “civic engagement”  -- essentially get-out-the-vote efforts.  They are at this point approaching $100M in spending on progressive groups that they have funded, expanded, and capitalized.  One of the issues I talk about with respect to Democracy Alliance which goes to the heart of what we’re talking about when we talk about debate and dissent in these issues is that there’s a feeling inside the Alliance – and inside the Democratic establishment too – that unity is what’s most important now.  Because Democrats have been close to winning elections, because they now control Congress and are in fact in very good shape for the presidency in 2008, that the most important thing is to learn from the conservatives, to stay in lock-step, to not fight with each other.

NPR:  Stay on message.

MB:  Right.  Stay on message.  Project a unified message.  There’s a cost for that.  They’re not wrong.  Electorally that can be very beneficial.  But you have to understand the cost that comes from that kind of enforced unity which is that it’s debate and disagreement and argument from which real intellectual advancement comes, and from where you begin to derive and agenda that people can argue about.  It’s forcing people to make choices both internally and with the voters that creates a course of action for the country.  And I think that to the extent that Democrats and progressives place this emphasis on always saying the same thing and not challenging the orthodoxy it becomes incredibly difficult to forge an agenda that might be more suitable to some of the really transformative challenges the country faces now and going forward…

NPR:  And the Democrats, you argue, are locked into defending the gains of the New Deal rather than looking forward to ideas that might transform the country the way those ideas did 60 or 70 years ago.

MB:  I believe that’s true and I’m not the only one.  There are many people in the book who feel that’s true.  It’s not a hard thing to understand.  In other words, I’m not overly critical about this.  Here you have an agenda that was passed and enacted by the Democratic congresses and the Democratic Party throughout the 20th century that was absolutely extraordinary – unrivaled probably in the history of government – and did some tremendous things.  And you have a conservative movement that has tried rolling it back at every step along the way and continues to do so.  Of course that creates a certain bunker mentality.  You want to protect what you have.  But – again – the cost of constantly protecting what you have, in a unified way, is now allowing yourself to adapt to the future.  That’s the greatest ammunition, in a sense, that you can give opponents:  an agenda whose relevance you’re not willing to revisit.

NPR:  …Jeff is calling from Erie, Pennsylvania.

Jeff:  First of all, I appreciate the topic.  I think it’s very timely.  I’m a professor of history, finishing a book on the history of liberals and Democrats during the 1970’s.  It seems that though this is a historic opportunity for liberals, we’ve been here before – in the late 60’s.  What we saw in the late ‘60’s were middle-class professionals taking control of the Democratic Party and essentially displacing what had been working class whites who had been at the heart of the party before.  My fear for Democrats is that the political net roots – this is the same thing.  These are middle class, majority white professionals, who are again going to take over the party and not be able to build a coalition of working class  -- the sort of coalition the Democrats need to win.  I’m wondering what the author’s comments would be on that – the dangers of the net roots having a stranglehold over the party and having that natural class tension between the working class and middle class professionals.

MB:  Jeff, I think that’s an excellent point.  You raise a host of issues.  There was a huge transformation in the late 1960’s and it wasn’t, as you well know, only about professionals and working class, and it wasn’t only about race, it was also about party bosses being displaced by reformers who then held the power for many years and became the new insiders.  That’s a shift I think we’re going to start to see again.  So yes, I think it’s a legitimate concern that the new forces taking power within the Democratic party, this progressive movement, are pretty homogeneous and have their own set of concerns.  I think see that begin to play out in the Democratic primaries.  There’s a tremendous amount of power being exercised by this new progressive movement and on a lot of the issues you begin to see the candidates begin to play to that base.

Jeff:  Not one of the candidates went to the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) meeting.  This could be important to the presidency but they all go to the stupid bloggers!  Maybe I’m a minority… But how these bloggers become more important than the DLC…!

NPR:  You’ll have to read the book to find out about it!  Because one of the things he does is chronicle the rise of the bloggers.

[break]

NPR:  … Democrats hold the majority in Congress and seem well positioned for a run at the White House next year.  But in a lot of ways, they’ve positioned themselves not as bold, new policy makers, but as a party of protests.  Democrats are a party in search of a philosophy.  That’s the focus of Matt Bai’s new book.  … Is it important for Democrats to develop a shared political philosophy, and what should it be?  …Just before the break, Matt, we were talking with the caller, Jeff, who made a reference to none of the Democratic presidential candidates doing to the Democratic Leadership Council’s meetings but all of them, as he described it, going to those “stupid” bloggers!  That was the Daily Kos conference that you were at earlier this year!  In fact, welcome to the brotherhood -- you mediated a presidential debate!  It’s not easy!

MB:  It’s really a lot harder than it looks! 

NPR:  There is a reaction from some in the party:  who are these outrageous people on what they would call the fringes of the party who seem to be taking over?! 

MB:  I hope these folks will read my book and not just because it’s my book but because I really get into this.  I think about who exactly are these people online.  What are we talking about when we talk about online progressives?  How fringe-like are these people?  The reality is, most of the people in MoveOn.org or out in the blogs, two institutions I spend a lot of time with and talking about in the book are baby boomers… This is a movement largely comprising a lot of folks who burned out on politics, who were very engaged in politics at a young age, who felt left behind in a sense by the party, who sat out the ‘90’s and could never really relate to Clintonism and centrism and “triangulation” as they saw it.  And who found a voice and a community on the internet.  So that if you lived in Nebraska or Ohio or wherever, and there wasn’t really a Democratic party left to speak of because of the decisions the party had made in those intervening years, you could go online and you could be part, again, of a political club or movement.  I hate to sound like a clichéd politician, I hate to sound like Hillary Clinton talking about lobbyists, but these are real Americans!  They’re quite ordinary Americans, by and large.  It was fascinating to spend a lot of time.  There are, of course, as Bill O’Reilly consistently points out, hateful elements online, as there are hateful elements in every era of politics.  There are some cultural trends online I talk about that I don’t think are good for American politics.  It’s ahistorical.  It’s uncivil in a lot of ways.  It’s chaotic.  But it is a movement that is permeating mainstream households as broadband becomes more and more of a fixture, as technology changes the way people connect to each other and to politics.  It is not a movement of fringe people or crazy people.  It is very much the mainstream future of Democratic politics.

NPR:   Juan is calling us from Walnut Creek, California.

Juan:  …I agree with your speaker that the question of unity is very important and the Republicans have displayed that over the past 20 or 30 years, but what they have failed to do when the obtained power is to deliver.  The Democratic party right now has a great opportunity to solidify its base by delivering.  What I’m talking about is a balanced budget.  Back in the early 60’s and 70’s, Democrats were against balanced budgets.  Now the question is, that’s where America is at.  They want a balanced budget.  They don’t want to leave their grandchildren with $9 trillion in debt.  So the question is, are they going to deliver?

MB:  Juan, let me address a couple of things you just said because I find your comment really interesting and helpful. Thanks!  The first is that I think you’ve misread where your party’s at.  And you can be very forgiven for that because these things are shifting very quickly and it’s very hard to follow.  But actually, if you follow the presidential primaries, Bill Richardson is pretty much the only candidate who’s actually standing up and saying he’s going to sign a balanced budget.  The orthodoxy now seems to be that some amount of deficit in return for social programming is actually acceptable and desirable.  The reason I raise that is because that right there is the influence of the progressive movement I write about in the book.  It really is a tangible example of how politics within the party has begun to shift to where the online donors and new progressive really are at.  The other thing is you talk in terms of Democrats having the opportunity of solidifying the base.  I’m sure that’s true.  But really the point I try to get at in the book is they have the opportunity to do something else since Democrats now control Congress and might in fact win the presidency.  Which is to change the way the country governs itself, adapting to an age where we face at least two completely unprecedented kinds of challenges:  global terrorism that is rooted in a non-state threat that we have never faced before, and the onset of globalization and economic challenges beyond the industrial era that are something new after a century of unprecedented growth unrivaled growth.  These are huge challenges.  The thing I’m really arguing for in the book, through looking at all these characters, after spending so much time on the road because the book is really narrative in nature – the thing I’m really talking about is to not think so much about the tactical element, about how you win and how you build a base…, as to understanding that politics really is driven in large sweeps and historic sweeps by ideas.  When you have an idea of how you want to adapt government to face new challenges, all of those other things – while important – grow from that. That’s how you build long-term majorities.  That’s how you change the country which is ostensibly the business we’re all actually in.  The hardest thing about the book, and this is what I’m trying hard to get across, is that I didn’t spend any time thinking about how you win.  I talked about a lot of people who spend a lot of time thinking about how you win.  But I’m trying to at least contribute to a conversation about how you effect change in government.

Juan:  And I think of how do you expect changes being able to manage and be in power.  …I think the Republicans have a certain base in terms of being fiscally responsible.  They have demonstrated that they have failed in that respect.  So the Democrats at this point?  They want to do a lot of different things?  One of the things I want to caution is that absolutism – like universal healthcare.  Universal healthcare may be important.  I agree with that.  But I don’t think that’s where America is at…  I think they need to approach it in a unified stance.  We want to talk about basic healthcare and look at it as not universal, but this is a platform from which we’re going to take a step.   And if the Democrats do that, then I think they’re going to be able to manage other things that are more important… of equal importance:  the environment, Pentagon, the war on terrorism.  The war on terrorism is important in relationship to our relations with the world.  We cannot win the war on terrorism unless we win the hearts and minds of the world.  This is where the arrogance of the Bush administration – they just don’t see the forest for the trees. 

NPR:  …Let’s go now to Willow in Kansas City.

Willow:  … When you talk about winning hearts and minds, I’ve had an interesting experience since I became of voting age myself.  I moved to Kansas City, Missouri, just before the last presidential campaign.  Previously I’d lived in New York City and in Salt Lake City – two states, of course, where there’s no surprise, in pretty much how national elections will turn out.  When I came to Kansas City, I was really amazed and actually energized by the progressives, by the grass roots activities that were going on here but [inaudible] there was really nothing – I think we all know that in retrospect – beyond [trouble with phone].  I was just saying that the problem was that beyond the big ideas there wasn’t anybody but Bush type of rhetoric.  So I couldn’t agree more with the points you’re making.  I would actually add that this is another cost of staying on message for the Democrats and actually for both political parties, I would say.  First, voters are cynical.  Most of us take what they’re saying with a grain of salt.  We hear it as rhetoric.  And frankly a lot of people are fatigued by the fact that they’ve started this campaign so far out.  I think it’s reckless and irresponsible for our entire political system, like you said.  Instead of challenging the orthodoxies and how things are, to spend $1 billion in paid media this far ahead when those dollars could be used in a much more efficient and responsible way. 

NPR:  She does raise the point – and it’s certainly mentioned in your book.  There was an interesting poll out by Pew that was just in the papers.  It seems it some ways – you could certainly argue that the Republican party, that the conservative idea galvanizing the party back starting in the ‘60’s and into the ‘70’s to the point where they thought until a few years ago they had a reasonable expectation of a “permanent majority.”  Not a crazy idea just a couple of years ago.  But it now seems that that’s exhausted itself.  And you have both parties, essentially, in search of a new paradigm.

MB:  Absolutely.  I think that’s true.  People have sometimes said to me, “Why pick on Democrats? Look at the situation the Republicans are in!”  My answer is that I can only do one party at a time!  This is hard enough book to write about Democrats.  I’ve spent the past couple of years looking into it. …  I think that’s true.  We have two parties in tremendous confusion and disarray ideologically, looking toward the future, trying to meet challenges that are frankly intractable and very, very difficult to meet.  I’m not sitting here with the answer.  Nobody that I know is.  I think there’s a huge opening for either party and for any party or movement in American politics who can reasonably and convincingly articulate a direction for government to adapt that is as compelling as we have seen the government adapt at critical times in America’s past – if you look at the New Deal and the Great Society. There have been other moments where previous generations have done a really remarkable job, greatly to our benefit, in rethinking what government needed to do in the wake of demographic changes, of international changes, of economic transformation.  I fear that this baby boomer generation, frankly, has failed to do that.  It may actually take generational  -- a generation born into the post-industrial world, into a digital world, a less ideological culturally, and a less divisive world – to actually begin to address issues that are in front of us rather than behind us.

NPR:  Let get Tom on the line, calling from Maplewood, Minnesota.

Tom:  …I read an article by Dan Savage a while ago, after Bush was reelected, that the Democratic party should maybe look to the small islands in urban area that have huge populations and cut loose the…

NPR: … this is the “urban archipelago” theory – I think I heard it described that way. 

Tom:  I was wondering what your opinion is on that and if you think that the Democratic party, if it had a more progressive message and grabbed more cities, if they could afford to lose that other base…

NPR:  This goes to the argument that you go into quite a bit – really about the 2006 election – between the chairman of the Democratic party, Howard Dean, with his 50-state strategy to rebuild the Democratic party, and the leaders of the Democratic campaign committees in the House and in the Senate who said, “Look, we’ve got a change to win now, don’t invest in Alaska!  You’re crazy!  We need to invest in winnable races!”

MB:  Right.  I have a whole chapter about this in the book.   It deals with a lot of these issues.  I’m not a political strategist and I think that’s to everyone’s benefit!  So I try not to offer a lot of strategic advice.  It does seem to me, having covered this for a while, particularly in the Democratic world, that the Democratic party has done enough lopping off of constituencies that it didn’t feel were high percentage bets over the years.  So I do sympathize with Governor Dean’s 50-state strategy in the sense that I don’t know how many constituencies you can afford to write off before you’re trying to reach a very limited American audience and put together just the right number of electoral votes every four years.  In that sense, I do sympathize.  The point I make in this chapter of the book is that this is an argument that always boils down to tactics.  This is an argument that boils down to how you use your money.  Should you use your money to have people door-knocking in Kansas when there aren’t a whole lot of Democrats in Kansas and it makes the party less of a progressive juggernaut?  Should you use your money to put up advertising in Ohio, because Ohio matters every four years and you know you can win Ohio, so why aren’t you putting all your money there?  The underlying supposition is that you can use money to build a long-term majority and enact change.  You had a caller who said earlier, I think it was Juan, who said something I hear very often – which is, the way you change the country is to get in power.  And I address this very specifically in the book.  There’s something to that.  But there’s such a faith in the idea that the way you change the country is to elect Democrats that I think a lot of Democrats have forgotten to ask themselves why.  And that you don’t actually just change the country by winning elections, you change it by what you do when you get there.  In fact, I would argue that the reverse is true.   You actually win elections long term – build long-term majorities – by changing the country.  History proves that point more than it does the reverse. 

NPR:  And do you hear any of the presidential candidates who now, because of the accelerated primaries, are in a race in full swing, of course.  But do you hear any of the presidential candidates talk about anything that seems outside of the Democratic orthodoxy?

MB:  Well, you have seen Senator Obama, interestingly, in the last couple of months begin give a series of speeches, some of them quietly, where he has taken on some of the interest group orthodoxies of the party.  He certainly has begun to put some substance behind the generational theme of his campaign in areas like education and somewhat in foreign policy and on poverty, too.  So that’s interesting to me.  But I would say that the short answer is  “no.”  At this point there has not been a terribly compelling argument. The campaign has been largely about trying to compete for the new progressive movement and for the party’s old interest groups.  But also we’re in August.  We’re not even at Labor Day yet.  We have to cut candidates a break because they’ve had to go out and raise money and withstand scrutiny so early and the truth is you don’t really find out what candidates are about until the fall.  I think they’ve got some time to figure that out and to figure out a way to articulate it.  The history of campaigns suggests that we need to wait a little while.

Authenticity and presidential candidates

Excerpts from a discussion of presidential candidates and authenticity on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” 8/19/07

Intro:  New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, recently argued that we shouldn’t care so much about a presidential candidates “authenticity.”  What matters, he said, is where the candidate stands on various policy issues.  Richard Harwood disagrees.  He’s the founder of the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation. 

WPR:  What does it mean, exactly, for a politician to be “authentic”?

Richard Harwood:  Let me talk about what it means to be authentic juxtaposed to practice “politics as usual.”  It’s the juxtaposition that people are so concerned about.  Think about this:  on the one hand the authentic would be to reflect in your words and actions people’s reality.  And now people believe that most politicians active distort reality in order to win votes. People believe that authenticity is your ability to reflect the wholeness of a situation.  That you understand different perspectives – even the ambiguities – of a situation.  Think about what happens in “politics as usual.”  We refuse to acknowledge other points of view in a political debate as if they don’t exist or as if they’re not meaningful or important to people. I think being authentic means that you actually have a sense of affection for public life, for politics, and for people.  Where as in politics as usual, what we often see is a kind of slash-and-burn tactic.

WPR:  This is beginning to sound like a pretty trick quality to evaluate.  And yet I guess I would have said we all kind of have a gut sense – pretty much right away – as to whether a candidate or anybody we meet in authentic or not. It has more to do with how they seem, how they project themselves, how they walk and talk. 

RH:  I think that’s true.  We have an initial take on people.  But I think authenticity can be judged only over time.  When we see an individual engage in debate, when we see an individual pressed by their opponents, we begin to see what they’re made of, how deep their authenticity runs. 

WPR:  When our current president, George Bush, was running for office, he scored very well in terms of authenticity.  People said, famously, “George Bush was the guy you’d want to go have a beer with,” whereas somebody like Al Gore or John Kerry -- they thought those guys were way too smooth, not “authentic.”  However, I’m not sure that over time George Bush’s seeming authenticity has really stood up. 

RH:  It hasn’t.  I think earlier, before he was even the Republican nominee, many people did a double take on him.  First they thought, Well, maybe I don’t want to support him.  Then he started to talk about being a “compassionate conservative.”  He talked about the need for education reform.  His plain-spokenness I think people thought was genuine on his part.  I think here’s a good example of someone who, on first take, may have seemed authentic to many people but over time has lost that sense of authenticity and now, frankly, finds himself in a deep hole.

WPR: And what happened to make him lose it?  Is there a moment that you remember where you looked at him, or where the nation looked at him, where you thought, Whoops!  That’s not authentic!

RH:  I don’t know if there was a single moment.  Obviously, many people talk about or point to the “Mission Accomplished” moment as sort of a crystallizing moment in retrospect. 

WPR:  That’s where Bush appeared in a flak jacket. 

RH:  That’s right.  But I’m not sure there was a single moment for the president.  I think in most recent months it has been his unwillingness to acknowledge the realities on the ground in Iraq.  On the one hand he put together and supported the Iraq Commission and then simply discarded the report overnight.  I think there are any number of things that added up to his losing his authenticity. 

WPR:  Let’s run through, just to flesh out this question of authenticity – let’s run through some of the current candidates for president.  What about Hillary Clinton? How would you rate her in terms of authenticity?

RH:  I think many people have doubts about her authenticity.  I think they wonder if she is mostly out for herself as opposed to for people.  They wonder whether or not she is so calculating.  I think many people are still waiting to judge her, but there are many, I think, who have turned the other way.

WPR:  And yet, I would guess that if you look at how Hillary Clinton has voted and what she has said about some of her key issues over the years – the Iraq war aside, which she has waffled on – but if you look at some other things – healthcare for instance – she’s been pretty consistent all along.  Her values seem to have been pretty straightforward all along.  Which would suggest that she is an authentic person.

RH:  It would suggest that she’s consistent.  But that’s not all that authenticity is about. 

WPR:  What about Barack Obama?  Of all the candidates, he’s the one who’s most consistently talked about and praised for seeming like a real person, a genuine candidate.

RH:  He’s almost the exact opposite, I suspect, of where Hillary Clinton is.  So Barack Obama, I think, scores very high on an authenticity barometer.  If you listen to the language he uses, if you listen to how he puts together ideas, if you listen to how he actually addresses the concerns that people hold and doesn’t try to dodge them, he’s laying out a narrative for people about how he sees things and where he believes we ought to go – and where we, as individual citizens fit into that.  I think where he has more of a problem is when he tries to translate that narrative to direct policy issues.  And there he has, I think – well, it’s not an authenticity issue that he suffers from; it’s an authority issue.  It’s the extent of his knowledge, his experience, how many times has he been around the block, do we believe that he can respond to crises and tough situations.  So he’s the exact opposite in many respects of where Hillary Clinton finds herself.

WPR:  What about John Edwards?  How’s he doing on the authenticity question?

RH:  I’m not sure.  Many people seem to like what he has to say.  I think they wonder about how his message has evolved over the last four years.  It’s not clear to me that he breaks through the crowd.

WPR:  With John Edward, I guess, people sort of worry that he’s just a slick trial lawyer.  He looks good.  He looks authentic.  But he’d say anything to win the crowd?

RH:  Well, I think your authenticity is rooted over time in a narrative that emerges about you.  John Edwards’ narrative is, in part, one that he’s very ambitious in that he wants to be president.  He was only in the Senate for a short number of years.  Then all of a sudden you have the sense that he was slick.  And then the haircut episode came out, with him spending hundreds of dollars for a haircut.  And then his going back and forth over what really happened there.  All of those things add up for people.  In an era of You Tube, in an era of 24-hour cable TV and radio, once a narrative is set it’s very hard to break away from it – unless you break out in the campaign itself.

WPR:  What about on the Republican side?  John McCain was a guy who had a reputation for being a straight shooter – somebody who’d “tell it like it is.”  He seems to have lost that in the last couple of years. 

RH:  He did.  Remember he had the “straight talk express” which was a marvel of political operations, in a sense.  He was seen as the real deal.  He lost to George Bush in 2000 and then all of a sudden, at some point a number of years ago, he took a turn and decided he would embrace the George Bush political operation, the George Bush political approach of raising lots of money, of bringing in the establishment.  Somewhere along the line he lost his authenticity.  He seemed more an insider that the maverick people had come to know.  I think in doing so he lost his relevance. 

WPR:  What about Rudy Giuliani?  You think if ever anybody was going to be his true self, Giuliani couldn’t be anything else but, having gone through 9/11 with the people of New York.

RH:  Yes, I think Rudy Giuliani is a great example of someone who has been consistently – for him – authentic.  He had that question for a bit about abortion and a number of other issues, but then he came out an reset his positions that were more consistent with his past.  I think the question for Giuliani is not whether or not he’s authentic but whether or not people like what he has to say.  This is a case, for me, less about authenticity and more about likeability, more about whether or not people agree with him. 

WPR:  There’s another potential candidate who’s getting a lot of buzz and that’s the actor and ex-senator, Fred Thompson.  What’s your take on him?

RH:  When I think of Fred Thompson, I think of something that Barack Obama said early on in his candidacy, which was, “People like me so much not because of what I say but because they want to project onto me.”  I think Fred Thompson at the moment is the Republicans’ authenticity hope.  He embodies, in a sense, or personifies, their desire for some candidate of stature to step forward and be the new Ronald Reagan, to have an aura about him, to be believable, to be able to spin out this narrative about where we are and where we’re going.  I think for Fred Thompson the dilemma is that that’s a very tall order to fill! 

WPR:  It makes you wonder whether politics is simply becoming another form of reality TV where what we’re being shown is what looks like it’s real but it’s all highly manufactured.

RH:  I think it is becoming like reality TV but I’m actually optimistic.  I believe that in the coming years we’ll find such disgust with this reality TV version of politics and it will seem so vacuous and so empty and so devoid of any kind of meaning that we will decided enough is enough and we’ll look for candidates who better reflect what our real aspirations are.  I say this in part because I just finished going on a 30-city book tour and in that book tour I found new elected officials who actually are doing this.  Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York; Cory Booker who’s had his ups and downs in Newark but who I think is one of these officials; Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington; a young guy in Youngstown, the mayor, the first African-American ever elected, J. Williams.  I believe that these candidates are starting to bubble up from the local level.  And it’s only a matter of time until we see them nationally. 

Surveillance, new executive powers, and how the Democrats got blindsided

"To the Point" - August 7, 2007 - "President Bush, the Democrats, and the Fear of Terror"

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Host:   Warren Olney

Guests:  Charlie Savage, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Boston Globe;  Jack Balkin, professor of constitutional law at Yale Law School, and editor of the legal blog, “Balkinization”;  Robert Turner, associate director of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia and former member of the Reagan administration; Mark Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC);  and Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly’s “Political Animal” blog.

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Warren Olney:  President Bush may be a struggling lame duck, but Democrats can still be outmaneuvered if they think they’ll be called “soft on terrorism.”  As Congress was leaving town, both houses gave Mr. Bush the wiretapping authority he wanted, despite opposition from the Democratic leadership.  The White House denies it’s a broad expansion of the president’s powers. House Speaker Pelosi calls it “unacceptable.”  Other Democrats and some libertarians say the new majority buckled under intimidation and pressure.  We’ll look at the new law and the politics that led to its passage. … “Everybody was afraid they might be branded as ‘soft on terrorism.’”  That’s how Senator Barack Obama explained that both Houses of Congress approved electronic surveillance legislation demanded by President Bush, even though it was opposed by the leaders of the new Democratic majority.  Senator Obama was among those who voted against it.  Some Democrats say they were outmaneuvered; others accuse the White House of bad faith.  Charlie Savage has been following the story.   Charlie, we’re talking about the “Protect America Act of 2007” which passed just before the Congress adjourned for August.  Tell us about the circumstances under which the legislation was introduced, voted on, and then signed by President Bush.

Charlie Savage:  Those of us who were following Congress were vaguely aware that the administration, back in the spring, had proposed a bill that would “update” FISA, but no one was really talking about it – FISA being the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 which requires the government to have warrants when spying on Americans for the purpose of national security.  No one was really talking about this legislation until last week when suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, it became an enormous crisis and this bill had to be passed before Congress left for its annual August recess this past weekend.  It swallowed up the main attention from what Congress was trying to do at the end of the week and we observers of this system weren’t even able to see much of the legislation.  The bills were not being introduced.  There was one Republican bill out there.  The Democrats bill wasn’t even ready to be read.  It was all being negotiated behind closed doors.  And then suddenly on a Friday night the Senate approved a largely White House-written version and just before midnight on Saturday the House did the same.  Suddenly we had a major new surveillance law.

WO:  Who said it was a crisis that had to be dealt with before the Congress recessed?

CS:  This was a White House driven legislative strategy.  In that sense it echoes some other post-9/11 politics that we’ve seen.  We saw in 2002 the Iraq War authorization, but no one was talking about the need to authorize a war until September of 2002, just before Congress was going to go home again and suddenly they had to do it then – there was no time to wait.  We saw it again in the fall of 2006 with the Military Commissions Act which, of course, does much more than just set up military commissions.   It gives the president broad new powers over detainees.  It was hurriedly introduced just before Congress just as it was about to leave town with the message that it had to be passed immediately, there was no time to wait.  And Congress did so.

WO:  You said that there had been negotiations going on and you were vaguely aware of them.  What does the “Protect America Act of 2007” do that the law didn’t do before?

CS:  Well, there’s a controversial component and a less controversial component.  The less controversial component is that it makes clear that if there are two people overseas who are talking to each other but their conversation or their email routes through servers on American soil before going abroad again, if the government wants to wiretap the servers and switches on US soil it doesn’t need a warrant to do so with purely foreign communications.  And that’s just a fix to a technology issue that arose because back when the law was written [in 1978] there weren’t the fiber optic networks that brought purely foreign conversations across US soil.  The more controversial thing that it does it that it also frees the government, while it’s sitting on those switches, to listen to calls that aren’t purely foreign but that have a foreigner on one end of the line and an American on the other.  The government is now allowed under this law to surveil those international communications involving Americans so long as the government certifies to itself that its target is primarily the overseas person. 

WO:  So the target is the overseas person and then as a consequence of listening in on that person’s conversation they hear the conversation of an American citizen (or email or whatever the means of communication).

CS:  Correct. There’s no need for court oversight or court permission to do that now.

WO:  And there was before?

CS:  There was when the communications were being intercepted on US soil before.

WO:  Can the government hold on to that information involving the US citizen who’s not a target?

CS:  Well, there are procedures which are called “minimization” which have long been part of this kind of national security intelligence and are part of this as well.  What it says is, if the government is targeting the foreign person (which can be an American citizen who just has to be located physically abroad) and they pick up another American, an independent American’s private information, they are supposed to delete the identifying information about the American from their files.  But they are allowed make an exemption from that and save that private information if they certify to themselves that, whatever that information is, it might have some foreign intelligence value or might be evidence of a crime.

WO:  You’ve used the phrase “to themselves” a couple of times.  Who are “themselves”?

CS:  This would be the attorney general and the national intelligence director and, more pragmatically, it would be the officials at the National Security Agency at Fort Mead, Maryland, who are the ones monitoring these communications.

WO:  And were they added at the last minute because of the concerns over the controversies involving the attorney general?

CS:  Well, obviously the NSA officials who are doing to be actually carrying out the monitoring would always have been involved because they’re the ones doing it.  What you’re referring to is the administration had proposed that Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, would be the sole authority who would decide whether or not various surveillance was acceptable and being carried out in the right way.  Congress said, “Well, let’s have a second person who’s not Alberto Gonzales at least in statute in charge of making sure procedures are followed correctly.”

WO:  So the basic idea here, as I understand it, is that previously you needed a search warrant in order to wiretap the phone of an innocent American in the US.  Now you don’t?

CS:  Well, it’s not quite that simple.  If you’re targeting a foreigner who’s talking to an American, now you absolutely do not need a warrant.  But if you are targeting the American, then you do need a warrant.  The catch is, what do you mean by “targeting”?  Or what if the government is interested in both of them?  Can they just say, well, we’re interested in the foreigner so that’s good enough to evade these warrant requirements?  It opens the door to that kind of potential game rigging.  Which is one of the reasons why some of the Democrats, at least, are upset that there is so little oversight into this law.  For instance, an earlier version of the bill, a rival bill, would have required the executive branch to tell Congress how many Americans’ phone calls were “inadvertently” picked up per period, and so forth.  And all those oversight provisions were dropped from the final legislation. 

WO:  Again, a complex piece of work by Charlie Savage, legal affairs reporter for the Boston Globe, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize.  His book, “Takeover:  The return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy,” is going to be released next month. 

Jack Balkin is professor of constitutional law at Yale Law School and he runs the legal blog, “Balkinization.”  Jack Balkin, you have been very critical of the Democrats over this piece of legislation.  You’ve called them the “party of fear,” “the party without a spine.”  Why?

Jack  Balkin:  Well, they’re not the party of fear.  The other party is the party of fear!  They’re the party without a spine!  The larger issue that Charlie describes is that we are moving toward a system in which government – for all sorts of reasons – has to do more surveillance and collect more information.  It’s what I call a “national surveillance state” which succeeds a national security state.  And really the issue is what kind we’ll have.  Will we have a national surveillance state that uses only information it needs?  Does it collect information it doesn’t need? Will it have a proliferation of secret laws? Or will it have more oversight?  That’s the choice.  Both parties are going to be involved in doing it.  And so far the Democratic Party does not seem to be interested in protecting the rights of American citizens.  It seems more worried about being accused of being “soft on terrorism.” 

WO:  You say the national surveillance state will succeed the national security state.  Do we have any choice about that? Or is that simply a function…

JB:   No.  That’s inevitable.  The growth of the internet, changes in technology, changes in the way war is conducted and also the Americans’ demand for various kinds of social services means that one of the things the government is going to do in the future is collect and analyze information and purchase lots of information from private parties.  These are just features of governance.  They’ve been with us for some time now and are becoming even more important in the future. So the most important thing to do is put in structures of oversight, rule of law protections, upgrade civil liberties protections, use technology and various auditing procedures to make sure that arbitrary uses of power don’t become central to what government does.  This is really not just about September 11, although the rhetoric is about September 11.  It’s really about the way in which government does its business.  And we happen to be falling into a situation where more and more of what government does is secret and not subject to accountability.  That’s really the issue.  And in that, both parties are going to have to play a role.  So far, neither party is stepping up and doing what’s necessary to make sure the government does what it needs to do in a way that protects our liberties. 

WO:  Speaker Pelosi and other Democrats have said – they who are opposed to the bill in the first place – that it has a year-long sunset date on it, that it can be taken up again within six months, and that they’ll do it even sooner than that.  Do you think there’s a chance, then, that they can fix the problems you see in this before they cause any problems? 

JB:  Well.  As you said, a surveillance program that began with this new statute will extend not just simply for six months but until the very end of the Bush administration.  And so if one is surveillance of American citizens under the guise of surveilling people outside the US – Charlie pointed out and I want to emphasize that the surveillance of those outside the US does not have to be because of terrorism or even criminal activity, it simply has to be of some interest to foreign intelligence gathering.  If one is worried about that, then the damage will be done [already] for many folks.  And, I should say, there is nothing that the president and his allies have said now that they won’t say again in six months.  They’ll make the same claim – that, unless you do exactly what they tell you to do, basically our cities will be bombed and we’ll be destroyed and it’ll be unsafe to live in Washington, DC.  The same rhetoric will be used.   The real question is, in six months will the Democratic Party or indeed Libertarians and people who love freedom in the Republican Party, will these people be willing to stand up to the president then?  So far it doesn’t look like they will.

WO:  Robert Turner is associate director of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia.  He was counsel to the president’s Intelligence Oversight Board during the Reagan administration – the dark ages, I suppose in terms of technology of the sort we’re talking about…  Professor Turner, do you share the concerns of Jack Balkin about the development of the national surveillance state and the need for more oversight and for shedding some light, at least, on these kinds of laws that risk the violation of privacy, rather than doing everything behind closed doors?

Robert Turner:  I don’t in this case.  He portrays this as some sort of last minute scheme that was not really an emergency.  What happened, according to press accounts, is that the judge in the FISA court declared that emails going from Osama bin Laden in Pakistan to another terrorist in Afghanistan – if they passed through the US through some internet circuit, they then were protected by the FISA statute.  A primary purpose of this bill is to make it clear that’s not true, that when foreigners communicate with foreigners, the fact that their communication happens to pass through the US does not make it subject to a requirement for a FISA warrant.  So there really was a problem. It was an emergency. And, as I look at it, this is not much different from domestic law.  If I buy a lamp on eBay and unbeknownst to me it’s being sold by a Mafia figure for whom the FBI has a wiretap warrant, they can intercept my conversation with him saying, “Where do I sent the money?”  I become collateral damage.  In the same way, in a time of authorized war, we know we have terrorists who want to kill Americans.  The idea that when they communicate with somebody in this country it is unreasonable for our government to listen in and make sure they’re not saying, “Go to point X and pick up the bomb to deliver to the Lincoln Tunnel,” is absurd.  The Supreme Court has held in many national security and safety situations that neither probable cause nor individualized suspicion is required for a search or seizure.  Classic case:  Every time any of us goes to the airport we get our baggage and our persons searched.  That’s a 4^th Amendment search and the Court held that, because of a threat of a high jacked airliner or an exploded airliner is so great, the search is per se reasonable.  I testified twice last year before the full Senate Judiciary Committee.  Not one senator of either party said that this TSP – this terrorist surveillance program searches – were “unreasonable,” which is a Constitutional standard and no one said they should be disconnected.  So I just don’t see the problem here.

WO:  …Mark Rotenberg is executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a privacy advocacy organization based in Washington. …Mark Rotenberg, can you be a little more detailed than we have been so far about exactly what the risks to privacy are in this new legislation as seen by people who are opposed to it?

Mark Rotenberg:  I think Charlie did a good job at the beginning of the program describing the significant that the changes to the amendments to the FISA will make.  The key point is that it is now the case that the director of national intelligence and the attorney general can simply believe that they are targeting a person outside of the US for a communication intercept -- which will take place within the US, by the way, and will be targeted toward a US corporation, and that intercept will go forward without any judicial review.  It means that the communications traffic of Americans, including the traffic that might be to the various call centers throughout the world when people are checking on their airline reservations or hotel reservations or vacation plans – all of that becomes subject to this new authority.  It’s a very dramatic change in wiretap law.  I really have to disagree with some of the points Professor Turner made earlier because he knows, of course, that in traditional wiretap law for criminal investigations there is always a predicate that the target was suspected of some criminal activity that justified the wiretap.  And even that list of predicate crimes was pretty narrow.  We’re now at the point where we allow a wireless wiretap by simply saying we think an American is talking with someone who might be outside of the US.  It is very, very far from where the Congress was originally on authorizing electronic surveillance.

WO:  And what abuses are you concerned about? 

MR:  I think the history of abuse in this area, not only in the US but in other countries, is very well established.  The key problem, of course, is that once you create this kind of surveillance authority without some independent oversight – which is the role the courts have always played in the US and even the FISA court in the special circumstances of the FISA wiretap – you open the door to the use of the authority for a lot of unrelated purposes.  And that’s even suggested in the amendments that were passed by Congress.  Charlie mentioned the minimization procedures which do kick in, in the exception that the surveillance reveals some criminal activity of an American that’s now uncovered as a result of the wiretap directed toward the foreign party.  So we now have the legal basis for what might otherwise be described as a “fishing expedition.”   You target the foreign party, you get as much communications traffic on Americans as you can, and you go back through it looking for indications of criminal activity whether or not you’re aware that any of that activity existed in fact prior to when the surveillance was authorized.  It’s really a very far-reaching change.

WO:  Robert Turner..,why shouldn’t we be concerned about this?  Is it of authorizing a fishing expedition with no oversight?

RT:  This involves no change other than technology from the traditional American practice.  We need to remember that under the Constitution the business of intelligence – to use the language that John Jay used in Federalist 64 – was “confided to the president to be managed as prudence might suggest.”  Congress had never tried to oversee intelligence collection prior to FISA, the courts had never got into this business.  Henry Clay, as a member of the House of Representatives in 1818, said it would be improper for Congress to inquire into how the president spent money for foreign intelligence collection.  In ’68, when Congress passed the Title III of the crime control and safe streets act, it specifically provided that nothing in that title would limit the independent, constitutional power of the president to collect foreign intelligence.  I worked in the Senate when we passed FISA in 1978.  We set up, in addition to the FISA court, a court of review consisting of three federal court of appeals judges who were appointed by the US chief justice.  In 2002, they looked at this issue and they noted that every federal court that considered the issue had held that the president has independent, constitutional power to collect foreign intelligence.  And the appeals court went on to say and the court of review said, “We assume that is true, and if it is true FISA cannot take that power away.”  So what we’re talking about is the power of the president, right now, during a period of authorized war, to eavesdrop on what our nation’s enemies – members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, outside this country – are saying to themselves and, if they happen to communicate with someone in this country who may be a legal “US person” but who may also be a Saudi or Afghan citizen who’s over here on a permanent resident alien status, of course we should be listening into these calls.  And if they’re talking about where to sent the lamp they bought on eBay, then we erase the call – unless they happen to say, “Send payment to general delivery, Islamabad, and I’ll pick it up,” and if that’s bin Laden, then we try to send someone there to watch and intercept him.  Otherwise, if they pick up calls that are not related to terrorist attacks, we erase that.  We use minimalization procedures to protect any American information inadvertently picked up. But we ought to be listening.  If bin Laden is talking to someone in this country and our government says that because of 4^th Amendment concerns, we’re going to unplug the headphones every time those calls are made, they ought to be impeached for dereliction of duty.  We want to be listening to these terrorists when they talk to people in this country to make certain they’re not trying to kill Americans.  So I honestly – I’m passionate about some issues where I think the administration has gone horribly wrong.  But on this one, I think it’s much ado about nothing.

WO:  Jack Balkin, back to you…  Do you argue with the idea that the president ought to be able to listen into conversations between Osama bin Laden and some other terrorist if in fact they suspect that’s what’s going on.

JB:  No.  And I would support the following amendment to FISA.  It would say something like this:  “A court order is not required for the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not located in the United States, for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information, without respect to whether the communication passes through the US or the surveillance device is located with the US.”   I would support that.  That would solve all the problems that Professor Turner described.  Guess what?  The administration rejected that.  That was the Democratic proposal on the table.  It wasn’t the only one but it was part of it.  And the administration wanted more.  And Turner’s point, which I think is correct, is that there’s a real problem that has to be fixed because of the technology.  We should fix it.  That language would do it.  The administration wanted more than that.  Why did it want more than that? Because it didn’t want Congress engaged in oversight.  The other part of the Democratic bill would required the Attorney General to make regular reports to Congress about who was being surveilled, how many American citizen were involved, what was being done with the information.  Exactly the points Professor Turner was making them have to do.  And the administration refused repeatedly to have any form of oversight.

WO:  Professor Turner quotes John Jay and many others as saying the president has that authority. 

JB:  No. That’s not what the president has the authority to do.  You misquote him.  If Professor Turner really meant that, he would believe that FISA is unconstitutional. And I know he doesn’t believe that.  Rather, the point of FISA was to make sure that when the president engaged in foreign intelligence surveillance, as he has every right to do in the Constitution, and that intelligence is directed against US persons – right? – that certain procedures are put in place.  That was the purpose of FISA.  To make sure the president can do what he has to do with respect to foreign intelligence surveillance by agents of foreign powers, and to make sure that when intelligence surveillance affects Americans – US persons – there’s some set of procedures to affect it. 

WO:  So, Professor Turner, back to you.  Would you then go along with the proposal as described by Jack Balkin as being that of the Democrats?

RT:  That would be a good start. But I would go further.  I do think FISA – and I felt in 1978 – is unconstitutional in terms of usurping powers vested directly in the president.  Griffin Bell, Jimmy Carter’s attorney general, came before the Senate and testified on this, and he said, “ I know there is nothing in this recognizing the president’s independent power to authorize foreign intelligence.  Obviously FISA could not take away a constitutional power.”  That’s exactly the view taken by the Court of Review.  So yes, I like FISA as a prudential matter in most settings, but in reality it claims powers that belong directly to the president.  And it takes us back to the most important Supreme Court case of all times, Marbury vs. Madison, in which chief justice John Marshall said that an act of the legislature repugnant to the Constitution is not law.  And so I think this is an area that the Constitution gives to the president, both as the executive under Article II, Section 1, and as commander in chief.  And he ought to be doing this.  And if he happens, in doing this… Every president, even before we had a country, when George Washington commander in the Revolutionary War, he authorized the interception of all mail coming in from Great Britain, the opening of the mail, and resealing it and sending it on so we wouldn’t tip off that we were reading it.  Lincoln authorized the monitoring of telegraph traffic.  Woodrow Wilson and FDR authorized the interception of international cable traffic, of the transcontinental cable.  This is a long-standing practice.  The check against this is not Congress, is not FISA – because the Constitution is supreme to the law – it’s the 4^th Amendment.  The 4^th Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.  There’s a long line of Supreme Court cases dealing with what they referred to as “special needs” where they’ve authorized without any warrant, without any probable cause, without any individualized suspicion.  They’ve authorized such things as border searches when people try to come into this country, they can search their bags.  Every one of us who flies gets searched without any probable cause or warrant because they balance governmental interest against privacy interest. 

WO:  Jack Balkin?

JB:  I’m just astonished that Professor Turner would even suggest that FISA is unconstitutional.  That is just unbelievable to me!  I assume that he meant more than that.  I just simply want to say that both he and I are on the same side in terms of trying to update FISA with respect to technology.  My basic claim is that there’s a way to do this that produces more oversight of the executive to make sure it doesn’t abuse the liberties of Americans.  The most important thing we have to do is secure the US from terrorist attacks.  What Congress passed the other day doesn’t do just that.  It does a lot of other things that really are quite dangerous and we should be very concerned about them.

WO:  Kevin Drum writes the blog, “Political Animal,” published by the Washington Monthly. …You have argued that the Democrats got snookered by the Bush White House in this argument.  We heard earlier from Charlie Savage that all of a sudden, out of nowhere (a proposition disagreed with by Professor Turner) came this “crisis” that this law had to be passed before the Congress went off on its recess.  What to you think happened?

Kevin Drum:  Yes, I think that’s right.  I think it’s an old negotiating ploy.  You know, what you heard today is that on both left and right – Democrats and Republicans – agreed there are technical problems with FISA that needed to be fixed so we could monitor calls between two foreigners.  Everybody agreed about that.  What happened was that the Democratic leadership was negotiating with Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and because of this agreement the negotiations were going smoothly, everybody was happy, and they came to an agreement with McConnell about this.  At the very last second – literally on the day before Congress was about to be adjourned – they get blindsided by the White House claiming that McConnell didn’t quite know what was going on and they had to make some changes.  Because everything had been going supposedly so smoothly, the Democrats weren’t prepared for this.  I think they got blindsided by the White House.  They had no backup plan; they had no plan to get their own people in sway.  And about forty people – 40 congressmen and about 10 senators – sort of panicked and decided to go ahead and support the administration’s bill and it passed because of that.

WO:  Panicked because they were concerned that they were going to be accused of being against tough measures against terrorism?

KD:  That’s right.  And they had done nothing prior to that to get public opinion on their side because they thought everything was going fine.  I think the White House wanted them to think everything was going fine.  Any labor leader would have been proud of the negotiating tactics, I think, that the White House engaged in here.  It’s the oldest trick in the book, frankly.

WO:  Back to Mark Rotenberg at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.  Does this assume that Democratic veterans like Dianne Feinstein of California, who voted in favor of the bill that we are talking about, didn’t really understand what was going on?

MR:  I think they were surprised.  I think many people in Washington were surprised by how quickly things changed between Thursday afternoon – where there seemed to be an agreement on the narrow bill that Jack [Balkin] had described and the much more far-reaching proposal.  But if I could, I just wanted to come back quickly to a point that Professor Turner had made earlier because I think it’s important to clarify a bit of this history.  I’ve also worked in the Senate on wiretap laws and studied the history of privacy laws in the US.  In almost every example he gave where the president asserted the right to intercept the mails during the Revolutionary War or radio communications and so forth, both the Congress and the courts had subsequently stepped in and established privacy protections.  That was true when Ben Franklin wrote the first privacy law in the US for the Postal Service.  And it was true after the Civil War when the Supreme Court upheld the privacy of the mails.  And it’s true after WWI when there was also an important decision in Congress.  But I think what’s most relevant to our discussion today about these amendments to the FISA was the work of the Church Commission in the 1970’s which found, in fact, that the foreign intelligence surveillance capabilities of the US government were being directed to US political organizations, directed against war protesters and against civil rights organizers.  And that’s the legacy of this law that I don’t think we should lose sight of.

WO:  Let me go back to Kevin Drum… What do you think is going to happen when Congress comes back into session and the Democrats try to take another look at this?

KD:  I hope they’re going to do a bit better.  They really need to learn how to play in the big leagues, and with six months to prepare I can only hope that they’re able to do a little bit better.  And not quite take everything at face value the way they seem to have done the first time around.

Thomas Ricks and US troops discuss Petraeus, Iraq

An interview with Thomas Ricks and members of the military about the effectiveness of the “surge” from NPR's "Talk of the Nation," August 1

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NPR:  Some six months ago, the Bush administration decided to send several thousand more troops to Iraq – to Baghdad and Al Anbar province – to try to calm sectarian violence there.  Since then analysts have argued over how effective this so-called “surge” has been.  …Today we want to hear from soldiers who have fought in the Iraq War… about the president’s “new way forward,” about General David Petraeus, about the mood among your platoon or company.  We’re also joined by the Washington Post’s Tom Ricks whose book, “Fiasco:  The American Military Adventure in Iraq,” is now available in paperback and with a new postscript.  Since the book came out last year, Ricks’ inbox has been crammed with emails from service men and women serving in Iraq which give Ricks unique insight into what American troops on the ground in Iraq think about the war.  …Tom Ricks, you post some of the emails from service members in your inbox feature.  Give us a sense of who’s writing to you and what are they writing about now? 

Thomas Ricks:  The US military is extraordinarily diverse.  So it’s everything from generals to privates, active-duty, gung-ho infantrymen, to laid-back, reserve, civil affairs guys.  Their views of the war are as diverse and as mixed up, in many ways, as the American population’s in general.  I was really struck.  I wrote an earlier book, “Making the Corps,” that was also reissued in paperback this week as a new edition.  For it, I’d gone back and interviewed marines that I’d known ten years ago in boot camp.  I was struck that they disagreed with each other as vigorously on Iraq – they were all over the place on Iraq – as Americans are that you see in the political debate these days.

NPR:  You take some justifiable pride in the fact that so many members of the services say you got it right in “Fiasco.”  Do you think you have brought something to that coverage that people in uniform are responding to?

TR:  I think what I did was give voice to what a lot of people in the military were thinking.  I told them, first of all, “You’re not alone.”  There’s a lot of other people in the military who hold this view.  And gave them a coherent narrative.  Gave them them the documentation that what you saw in your little corner of Iraq was not unique.  That these problems were generalized.  That you did indeed have poor generalship under General Sanchez.  That Tommy Franks probably did put on the table the worst war plan in American history.  One battalion commander wrote to me,      “Thank you for finally saying publicly what we’ve been saying privately.”  And so, I was struck by how quickly the book has been endorsed by the US military.  When I was out in Iraq in May, I got to see copies of my book with under linings on the bookshelves behind generals’ offices, and so on.  I was told, also, that the Army War College, where they send their colonels to learn how to be generals, has made the book required reading this fall. 

NPR:  That’s a pretty heady responsibility!  Do you feel like you need to keep updating it and make sure it doesn’t become anachronistic?

TR:   Yeah… I mean, Iraq is the biggest story in the world and I think it’s likely to be the most important story in my beat – national security – for the rest of my life or the rest of my working life.  And so it’s a natural thing for me to keep on paying attention to it.  The important thing for me is to remain open to possibility.  And so one thing, when I do online chats with readers of the Washington Post, is to mention that we have to be aware of the possibility of a turnaround in this war, a turn in the tide.  At the same time we can’t rush to optimism and come to overly optimistic conclusions in the way the US military and the Bush administration has done repeatedly for the past five years.  So it’s kind of trying to walk a tightrope between seeing accurately what is happening without getting too entrenched.  One thing I expressly don’t want to do is have people say, “Well, he wrote the book, ‘Fiasco,’ so he wants it to be a fiasco!”  In the first four years of the war, absolute a fiasco, in my mind.  Where it goes from now?  It could change.  I’m open to that possibility.  I don’t think it’s going to change.  I think it’s going to be a mess for many, many years to come.

NPR:  Even acknowledging the diversity of viewpoints in the emails you’re getting, have you seen over the past year and a half – or even in the last six months since the troop build-up – a change in attitude among the soldiers there?

TR:  Yes.  I think I’m seeing two trends.  Neither of them particularly good.  The first is real worries among soldiers, an awareness that they have now been fighting this war longer than the US participated in WWII.  And on top of that, the nation isn’t engaged in the war as it was in WWII.  We’ve always had the alienation of the returning veteran.  Go back to Vietnam.  Go back to the movie, “The Best Years of Our Lives,” after WWII.  Go back to the Odyssey.  But the different is, when the soldier comes home now, he finds society disengaged and not paying attention.  It’s a bit more painful because he’s conscious he’s going back in 12 months.  And he’s going back into a war that he now knows the majority of the American people don’t like, don’t support, and want to get out of.  Yet he’s going back into this cauldron, an extremely difficult environment where there is no area where you’re safe, the climate is horrific, where the main killer of American troops is roadside bombs – basically an invisible enemy that may be in any dead animal or garbage pile or box along the side of the road.  The entire environment is threatening.  And he’s going to go back with the certain knowledge that if he’s a frontline troop, he’s going to lose some of his closest friends in the world.  So on the one hand there’s this kind of gnawing sense that we’re stuck in a war out there they’re busting their hearts for, they’re bleeding and sweating for.  Yet America doesn’t seem to be really engaged in the war.  The second trend, which worries me even more, is what I think is the emerging “stab in the back” narrative.  This is the view that the US military did everything right.  We fought well.  We did what we needed to do.  But we were “stabbed in the back” by American society and specifically by weasely politicians who didn’t support us, by media who undercut us by focusing on the negative, and by the general impatience of the American people.  I worry about that, because if that’s the lesson the US military takes away from this war, it’s going to be very bitter and demoralized for many years to come.

NPR:  When General Petraeus took over in Iraq, two big changes and emphases were to protect and to get away from big operational bases – to get out into society more.  Have you heard from troops about the day-to-day effects of that?  Is that being lived on the ground? 

TR:  It is being very much lived on the ground.  What you hear from troops is that their lives are tougher and harder, they’re not back on those big “FOBS” as they call them – the forward operating bases – where there’s a Baskin Robbins stand that gives you free ice cream you can eat as you walk out of the mess hall.  They’re out in these little combat outposts with very few amenities and suddenly showers or something you get maybe every couple of week or once a week if you’re lucky.  I think soldiers think generally it’s the right thing to do – to get out there – and it really is in theoretical terms.  It took us four years to get to the right strategy and the problem is that it may be too little too late.  At the same time, the purpose of this counteroffensive – popularly called “the surge” – the purpose of it is not just to improve security in Baghdad.  It’s stated strategic goal was to create a political breathing space, an opening in which Iraqi political leaders could achieve reconciliation.  And here were are seven months into this new stated strategy and there is absolutely no sign of that strategic goal being realized.  And soldiers know that.  So they’re looking around and saying, “Okay, what’re we going to do now?  The Iraqis aren’t showing up politically.  This whole purpose for which we’ve suffered and suffered increased casualties may not have the payoff we hoped for.

NPR:  Is it possible that is another narrative, as you called the “we did the work but the American people weren’t there”?  Is there also a sort of blame-the-Iraqis narrative going on?

TR:  Well, there is.  And that’s actually “freakin’ Iraqis” – my subtitle for part of this war for quite a while.  “Let’s blame the Iraqis.”  One thing I think Americans really don’t get is that Iraqis don’t share our agenda.  Iraqis have different goals than this.  We’re asking them to do things they basically don’t want to do, can’t do, or both.  Iraqis are in a very difficult position.  One of the things that General Petraeus has tried to do by getting the troops out there is really to get America back into the Iraqi conversation.  In 2006, the US was becoming irrelevant in Iraq.  A civil war, a chronic low-level civil war broke out, and we were having very little effect on it.  One of the purposes of this new strategy is to simply get the US back in the conversation.  Now we’re back in the conversation, but it doesn’t appear Iraqi leaders are listening to us.

NPR:  Joe is calling from New York [on a bad cell phone, breaking up].

Joe:  I just completed a tour in Iraq, in Baghdad.  We were serving on a “PRT,” a provincial reconstruction team.  We’re civil affairs soldiers and as civil affairs soldiers we fell under the command of the [inaudible].  Are you familiar with that term?

TR:  Yeah, I think so. 

Joe:  Yeah, it’s army civil affairs and psychological operations.  We were so stretched that they had to basically to resort to a back-door draft to get enough soldiers to be able to staff the positions they needed.  So we were [inaudible] PRT’s, probably one of the most critical positions over there [inaudible] interface with the provincial governments. The governors, the deputy governors, the director generals, provincial councils, etc.  To get them actually functioning – up and running.  … We were in a particularly crucial and sensitive position.  We were responsible for setting up the local and national government.  The problem we experienced [inaudible] was that [inaudible] had to resort to the back-door draft to stand up the PRT’s and the vast majority of people who were back-door-drafted and after-reserve activated in did not want to be there.  They had no interest in being there. They were civilianized.  And in a lot of cases they undermined the mission.  They did subtle things and at times active things that undermined the things that were going on there.  In my particular PRT, the problem was these gentlemen were [inaudible] and they were conflicted with the mission to the point that our work would come to a halt. 

TR:  When you say conflicted, are you saying they didn’t believe in the mission, or what? 

Joe:  They certainly didn’t believe in the mission.  They believed we should just go out to the borders with the Iraqis doing for themselves and let the country go.

TR:  I’ve been hearing that opinion a lot lately over the last year among officers.  I think you’re right.  Especially among reservists.  “These people want to have a civil war.  Let’s stand back and let them have it.” 

NPR:  Carl Levin, on the Senate floor, said that we couldn’t save the Iraqis from themselves.  Do you think that’s a growing point of view?

TR:  I think it is.  You’re hearing soldiers say that if these people are determined to have a civil war, let ‘em have it.  The other opinion you hear is that a civil war is inevitable and all we’re doing is staving that off – and bleeding and killing American troops.  That’s probably the best argument for simply getting out.  The problem with it is that it condemns tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians to death and raises the possibility of genocide.  That’s going to be really hard to live with. 

NPR:  We have an email from Claire in St. Louis asking for some clarification.  She says, “Did General Petraeus develop the surge strategy?  I thought the president had picked that strategy and then found someone willing to implement it.

TR:  No, I don’t think that’s the case.  But I think General Petraeus really came along when a bunch of lieutenant colonels and colonels with some advice from people in Washington had put together a surge plan.  By the time General Petraeus showed up, they had not only had the plan written, they were beginning to implement it.  So it’s a bit of a misnomer to call it the “Petraeus plan.”  But I don’t think it was something thrust on the military by the White House. 

NPR:  Let’s hear from Chris in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. 

Chris:  If we’re going to go over there and do it, we need to go over there and we need to do it.  We can’t go over there with a small amount --  if we’re going to go over there, we’re going to need to use our entire force. 

NPR:  Have you been there, Chris?

Chris:   Yes, I have.

NPR:  And are you heading back?

Chris:  I won’t be going back.  No. 

TR:  We have used our entire force.  When you ask the Pentagon about additional troops, they’ll tell you we’re outta Schlitz – there’s no more troops on the shelf!  So what do you want them to do that they’re not doing now?

Chris:  They could activate inactive reservists.

TR:  Done that.

Chris:  They need to extend the cycles and just mess around with how our deployment cycles are right now.  Just keep more people in there, because all we’re doing is we’re just playing a game of cat and mouse.  We go out, we clear an area, we push ‘em out.  When we go and move to another area?  They just move right back.

TR:  Well, this is the point of the “surge.”  They say, “We’re going to clear, hold, and build, and the holding is going to be done by Iraqi forces.”  Now, as you and both know, the problem is that repeatedly Iraqi forced has failed to hold areas.  What they’re counting on now is Iraqi forces performing better than they have in the past.  Do you think that’s going to happen?

Chris:  Um, yes, from my experience… I’ve seen two units of Iraqis.  One of them was real bad.  The other one was real good. They were really well trained.  So I think they’re capable of doing it, you just have to keep training them.  If we pull out, I’ll tell you right now they’re probably going to quit.  Because the conversation I had they said that once the US pulls out they’re goners.  They’ll just go back to their normal lives.

TR:  I see that worry again and again among American troops.  That if we just leave, all we’ve done is trained up Iraqis to fight in a civil war.  They think the Iraqi military will fall apart along Sunni-Shiite lines and all we’ve done is pour gasoline on that fire.  The problem we have in Iraq right now is not training or equipment of Iraqi forces.  They have better training and equipment than anybody else.  The problem is the guy who’s fighting in a Sunni insurgency or who’s a member of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army – he knows what he’s fighting for. He’s motivated.  The guy in the Iraqi army frequently isn’t as motivated because he isn’t even sure there’s going to be an Iraqi army next year.

NPR:  Do you think the military has a communication problem?  If someone like Chris feels that not enough people have been deployed, do you think they have not necessarily communicated to their own troops how far they’ve gone trying to get more people on the ground?

TR:  Well, I think what you’re hearing from Chris is a frustration that, Man! there must be something we could do better here!  I think they actually are doing better now, four years into this war.  The problem was we fought in Iraq longer than we fought in WWII before we started getting our strategy basically right.  The US military went into Iraq ignorant about how to wage and maintain a counter-insurgency campaign.  It took them four years!  Finally General Petraeus says, “Here are the basic facts.  Study this.  This is how you do it.”  And the US military effectively threw the ball to the dissidents.  Guys like Petraeus who, back in ‘03 and ’04 said, “You guys aren’t doing it right.”  It was kind of, “Hey!  You’re so smart?   You do it!”  But it may be too little too late.

NPR:  Let’s hear from Tim in Lodi. 

Tim:  I retired in ’04, in September, after I got back from Iraq in February of ’04.   I was in the first Gulf war and I was in the first go-round of the current insanity.  I spent 4 months in Kuwait, executive officer of Camp New York, which was one of the northern staging bases. 

TR:  A place I knew and hated, yes!

Tim:  Same here!  Then I spent 4 months in Baghdad as the [inaudible] officer for the C-4 section of what they used to call the combined joint task force 7.  My comment would be that, having been there for one and having been there for the second one, the first one was run like a well-oiled machine.  The second one made me lose all my faith in the ability of the people in charge to do something effectively and competently.  I think that many of the higher-level generals and people in the Defense Department who knew better didn’t speak up soon enough and loudly enough.  I saw a lot of insane directives come down from on high.  Just one, for example – I think it was in July of ’03.  They said, “We going to train 30,000 Iraqi soldiers in 30 days.  We’re going to get them vetted, trained, and equipped.”  And I remember thinking to myself, we can’t even do that with our own people.  It was just a mess.

TR:  Well, Tim, you’re right.  But remember the generals were assigned a plan back then that had us down to 30,000 troops by 2003.  It was a very unrealistic approach...

Tim:  My unit was going to be going back and then they sent the entire unit forward to Balad.  And they ran the logistics up in Balad. 

TR:  Tim, I think you’re putting your finger on something that has struck me in this war.  This war is so different from a lot of other American wars in a variety of ways.  The first ever American occupation of an Arab country.  The first war of preemption.  A war we went into on false premises. The first all-volunteer force war of a sustained ground war overseas.  But another anomaly here is the lack of accountability of generals.  I think you put your finger on that.  I was struck that during WWII, 17 division commanders relieved.  4 corps commanders were  relieved.  In this war, not a single general has been relieved.  Except may with an asterisk for Janice Karpinski, the Abu Ghraib commander.  It’s not clear why she was relieved.

NPR:  I think he also brings up that not only is it different from any other war, it’s essentially different from the first Gulf war, which seems counterintuitive.

TR:  Well, the first Gulf war also – I almost hesitate to call it a war.  It was a 4-day ground campaign.  It was a blip.  And I think probably 100 years from now it will be remembered not as a separate war but as the beginning of a 25-year American war in Iraq which began with that ground campaign and then we had 12 or so years of this no-fly zone stuff with sort of operations on the periphery and special operations inside Iraq and the CIA inside Iraq.  Now we’re stuck in Iraq.  I don’t think we’re going to get out for a long time.  We may be there for another 12 or 15 years. 

NPR:  Let’s hear from Nelson in Pennsylvania.

Nelson:  I was over with the Marines at the beginning of the war and special operations groups.  We were sent over to reestablish government like civil affairs troops usually do, usually in a permissive environment.  What happened over there and why this is going to be going on for years is because when they put Bremer in office, the guy essentially knew nothing about the Middle East.  I think he had a two-week training on the Middle East, a brief-up essentially.  And then he goes and fires the whole Baath party.  I questioned that at the time.  I said, “He did what?” I mean, who were we supposed to work with?  The Baath party were the only people in Iraq that had the skills to get the country moving again.  They’re the only people who had jobs.

NPR:  We should just clarify here.  We’re talking about L. Paul Bremer who implemented the de-Baathification policy in 2003. 

Nelson:  Exactly.  So currently our special forces troops, which are the best-trained troops in the Army, they’re working with the equivalent of tenth-string rejects.  All the good people left Iraq including the Royal Guard, people who ran the hospitals, people that ran the public facilities, offices.  Essentially anyone who had a job in Iraq has left. 

TR:  I agree, but I think it’s part of the larger problem.  I have a chapter about this in “Fiasco” called “How to create an insurgency.”  Ambassador Bremer did three things back in ’03 that helped create the insurgency.  He had de-Baathification – basically anybody who’d held a position of authority in Iraq was told they were banned from participating in the future of the society.  Second, he dissolved the Iraqi military after we had leafleted the Iraqi military for months, saying, “Don’t fight us, we’ll take care of you.”  And then he implemented free-market policies and they shut down inefficient government-owned factories.  So a Fallujah brick factory is shut down.  And suddenly you have young men out there looking for work and you have people saying, “I’ll pay you to plant bombs.”  Bremer basically solved three problems facing the insurgency as it emerged.  Any group of rebels has three basic problems:  recruiting, arming, and financing.  Through American mistakes, Bremer’s and the military’s, we solved the three problems for the insurgency.

NPR:  Tom in San Francisco.

Tom:  I have a question.  About Bremer:  his excuse was that Saddam’s army was primarily Sunni and they’d been oppressing Shia all that time so the thing to do was to dissolve them and reconstitute them on a more democratic basis. 

NPR:  It’s right that there was a Sunni leadership out there.  But there were a lot of Shiite officers, and you had many, many Shiites in the enlisted ranks – privates, corporals, sergeants, and so on.  You didn’t need to massively dissolve the entire army.  And you didn’t need to and probably shouldn’t have kicked out the Sunnis because suddenly these guys were out of work and they knew how to operate weapons.  And that would up killing American troops.  So a little bit of sophistication might have said, “Let’s keep these guys on the payroll, ease them out in the long term, but don’t give them an excuse to take up arms against us.”

Tom:  Okay.  I served with the Petraeus and the 101^st during the invasion which, if there was a happy time, that was it!  We were actually being waved at as we went overhead in helicopters.  Some good will was there.  The thing that’s not brought up about him is what a remarkable physical person he is.  He was both a distinguished and honored graduate at Ranger School – I’m a Ranger myself – and you’re competing with 20-year-olds, Marines, the best the farm has to send and that kind of determination is just remarkable.

TR:  I agree with you.  Petraeus is kind of a force of nature.  He’s famous, for example, for his one-armed push-up contest against privates.   You know – challenging a guy half his age to one-arm push-ups.  But basically Petraeus’ determinated is he’ll do one more than the other guy will, no matter how many the other guy does.  And also remember:  Petraeus, in addition to having this real will, is also quite bright.  He’s a PhD from Princeton in International Relations.  So he really is a unique leader.  My worry is just that I wish we’d done in 2004 what we finally did in 2007.

NPR:  Yes.  There seems to be a fair amount of “if anyone can do it, Petraeus can – but maybe no one can do it.”

TR:  Yes.  I think that’s a very good summary of the general feeling I hear among lieutenant colonels and colonels these days.