http://truthout.org/docs_02/11.25A.wrp.intv.lewis.htmt r u t h o u t | Interview
DNC's Ann Lewis
with
Willian Rivers Pitt
Sunday, 24 November, 2002 The following interview with Ann Lewis took place on November 20, 2002. Ms. Lewis is currently the National Chair for the Women's Vote Center, a new voter outreach program within the Democratic National Committee. From 1995 through 1996 she was Director of Communications and Deputy Campaign Manager for the Clinton-Gore campaign. In 1997 she went to the White House and was Director of Communications for President Clinton. Ms. Lewis left the White House in the spring of 2000 and went to work for Hillary Clinton in New York. In 2001 she taught at Brandeis University and at the University of Pennsylvania. As 2002 was an even-numbered year, she got back into politics and went to work for the DNC.
PITT: What happened on the 5th of November? What led to the setbacks that the Democratic Party absorbed in that election?
LEWIS: First, I want to put this in a little bit of context and point out that what actually happened - when you look at the numbers - is that a relatively small shift of votes wound up transferred, forming into a big shift of electoral power. The day after election day 2000 we had 50 Republican and 50 Democratic Senators. Today we've got 51-49...well, today I guess we have 51-48-1, with Mary Landrieu on the ballot in December. These are smaller shifts. The elections this year were taking place in territories that were uphill fights, in many cases, for Democrats.
Having said that about the landscape, the first thing I noted is that Republicans have very successfully adapted Democratic language and Democratic messages around issues like prescription drugs, protecting Social Security, education. I traveled around the country, and would turn on the television in a strange town to listen to the political commercials. You could not tell if you were listening to a Democrat or a Republican, because everybody was going to protect Social Security, everybody was going to make sure we have prescription drugs. This made it very hard to distinguish between the parties on those issues.
What happened - and I give the Republicans credit on this, because it was very smart politics - was that the GOP said, "The real difference between us is not on those issues that we know you care about. The real difference is on security, keeping our nation safe." This happened at a time when people are very concerned about security and keeping our nation safe. That wound up being decisive, as we now know, with that group of people who were really undecided until the end and made up their minds late. President Bush went and spent two full weeks campaigning, talking about national security, and that was enough.
PITT: Given the incremental changes you describe - a two or three percentage point defeat here and there - we can say that the outcome of this small shift is going to be seismic politically. How do you see the Democratic Party adjusting to this new reality? What will be their role now that we have Majority Leaders Trent Lott and Tom DeLay?
LEWIS: The first thing this means for Republicans is that they have now the power they asked for, but they also have no excuses. From this point we have to be very nimble about saying to people, "This is what they're doing and it is wrong. We are not responsible."
Let's look for example at Homeland Security. When President Bush went around the country campaigning on the need for a Homeland Security bill, he didn't say to people, "We need this Security bill because I need to protect this big drug company from being sued." He didn't say, "Give me a Homeland Security bill because we want to gut the Wellstone Amendment." That amendment prevents American companies, which set up shop in foreign nations, from ducking American taxes, in a time when we are asking American men and women in uniform to risk their lives. These folks are trying to dodge the obligation of citizenship. Bush didn't talk about that, and that is, in fact, in the bill they passed.
So the first obligation for Democrats is to make these differences clear. We are not responsible for them, but we will be responsible for them if we don't expose them.
PITT: You just referred to the ridiculous pharmaceutical pork in the Homeland Security bill. There was also, for all intents and purposes, the eradication of the Freedom of Information act on both the state and federal level. There was the loose redefinition of terrorism. There is the 'Total Information Awareness' program that is going to be run by John Poindexter, a man who was convicted of lying to Congress in the Iran/Contra scandal. With all this in mind, why was the vote in the Senate on this bill 90-9 in favor of its passage?
LEWIS: Because the American people said very clearly on November 5th that they wanted that Homeland Security bill, and I don't think you avoid or ignore the outcome of an election. We did see Trent Lott get on the floor of the Senate and promise to fix these things. I'm something of a skeptic about that.
I think the Party said to the people, "We heard you. We think these amendments are wrong. We fought them. We tried to prevent them from being in the bill." But we also know the American people feel that this bill should pass.
PITT: Some very loyal Democrats I know point to these circumstances as being one of the main reasons we suffered those setbacks in the midterm elections. They would say that one of the things the Democratic Party is going to have to do is to understand that the desires of the American people for a particular piece of legislation - like the Iraq vote, like this Homeland Security vote - must be balanced against aspects of the legislation that are very wrong. The people may want it, but if the bill in question does more damage than good, the Democrats need to tighten their belts and oppose it. Otherwise, they will run the risk of seeming to offer no real difference between themselves and the Republicans, a problem that, again, seems to have manifested itself in the midterm elections.
It can be argued that the American people want the Freedom of Information Act. It can be argued that Americans do not want every transaction and record of them to be collected into a database that will be managed by a guy who was convicted of lying to Congress. It can be argued that the first order of business for Democrats is to become more strident in opposition to these pieces of poison-pill legislation that are going to continue to come. How would you respond to comments like this? LEWIS: They are definitely going to continue to come. An area where I would disagree is the idea that we would be strategically better off to say, on a bill like this, that because there are these provisions included that we disagree with, we are going to vote against Homeland Security as a whole.
I do think that, when you listen to people and talk to them, given the concerns about terrorism, they do feel that Homeland Security bill is a good idea. Look, we Democrats came up with the idea for a Homeland Security department. The question you have raised is whether or not, because those provisions were so bad, Democrats should have voted against it. That is not advice I would give a Democratic elected official, because, again, ultimately - and they concluded correctly - they would vote for the bill to move it forward, and it is now up to the Republicans who said on the floor that they would fix it, to fix it. We have two obligations. One is to say that this is not the bill you told people they were going to get. The other is to demand that they fix it.
PITT: Could the Democratic Party have said that we want Homeland Security more than anything else, we came up with this idea, but these added amendments cause more damage than good?
LEWIS: I think it would be very, very hard to get that through to the public. The fact of having opposed it, I think, would simply speak too loudly.
PITT: What role do you see the Democratic Party playing in the new Republican Congress?
LEWIS: I think we have to be the voice of opposition. I think it will be more important than ever for Democrats to say, "We disagree and here's why." But there is a difference between opposition and self-immolation. What we have to do is make the case, to try and make the case as best we can. But we are not in charge right now. The Republican Party is in charge.
The second thing we learned from this election, pretty poignantly, is the difficulty that comes when you do not have a single head of the party, and you have many, many voices. One of the most difficult factors we had to deal with in this election was the President's full-time campaigning. This was somewhat ironic, since we are, as he would say, in a very dangerous international situation, and yet he spent his time campaigning, flying from state to state. Every night on the TV we saw the President of the United States getting off a plane. You saw flags. He spoke about homeland security. And then the scene would change, and you would see a variety of Democrats, people you've never heard of, who talked about a variety of issues.
You stated earlier that what we should have done was explain to people that we were for the Homeland Security bill. Our ability to make that case was greatly hampered by the fact that we had so many different candidates. That's what happens when you don't have the Oval Office. The good news for Democrats is that we are now beginning the Presidential cycle. At that point, we will have a single person speaking for the Democrats who will have a much better chance to break through.
PITT: In regards to the lack of a single leader within the Democratic Party, do you see Al Gore moving into that leadership role? This is not a question about 2004 or who will win the nomination, but a question about filling that leadership void right here and now, until the primaries are finished and the Party has a standard-bearer for 2004.
LEWIS: I think that is unlikely, largely because the way most people find out about who is speaking for the Democratic Party is by seeing who appears in the media. None of us have the money or the capacity on our own to create a communications network, and as the Presidential race begins - and it's beginning very soon - the public will see the leaders of the Party. It is hard for anyone to self-appoint in the middle of that process.
PITT: It was difficult to miss the glee on the faces of the CNN anchorpeople as the midterm election returns were coming in. It is a fairly easy argument to make that the 'liberal media' is a myth. I was wondering what the DNC feels it must do or is planning to do in order to get an undiluted message out before the American people. Right now, the message is passing through an unfriendly filter, to say the least. How does the Party overcome this?
LEWIS: You're quite right. The idea of a 'liberal media' is a myth, and any of us could explode that myth in many ways. It was very smart how the conservatives spent so much time complaining about the 'liberal media,' because now we have a media that bends over backwards to prove they're not being liberal. This is the reality, but it doesn't leave us with an easy solution. We don't have a liberal media, and we don't have a Fairness Doctrine, either, which would enable us to get our point across.
What I've said to people who complain is, "You know, it's like the weather. It isn't going to change." We need to figure out alternative forms of communication. That's why, at the Women's Vote Center, we talk a lot to women about how they have to get out there and speak up, whether it is on coffee break or around the kitchen table with friends and neighbors. I have a friend who calls the workplace 'The New Community.' We get information there from other people, and we have to take the responsibility for being communicators.
PITT: How aware is the DNC of the dynamic, vigorous and dedicated Democratic/Progressive movement that is happening right now on the internet?
LEWIS: I think those websites are terrific, and I get a lot of my information for talking points from them.
PITT: How do you see the DNC making use of this, bringing these people to the forefront? I ask because I get a lot of emails in response to my Truthout columns, and almost all of them ask the same question: What can I do? What do you think the DNC can or should do to take advantage of this, to get people more involved?
LEWIS: The first thing people can do is take the information being exchanged on the internet, all these talking points, and carry it around with you. Give it to friends. This is what I meant by alternative communication. Take it from the people on the web who are writing it and give it to the people you see every day, the twenty or twenty five people you see, work with, talk to. Forward it to your own personal email list. Get the word out.
The second thing to do is take it back to the old media. Write letters to the editor. I remember reading a Republican manual once that said people were four times as likely to read a letter to the editor as they are to read an editorial. That makes sense. Letters to the editor are signed by people you might know. They are identified by city or neighborhood. They're more interesting than editorials, which tend to be kind of faceless and blah. Nobody is going to do this for us, so get the word out.
The third thing we need to do is to have people figure out what their particular focus will be. What will your activity be, either in a local race or getting ready for '04, whether it is a candidate or a party structure? The good news about this country is that we have elections every two years. The only people who are going to have power are the people who can put it together and win. Find somebody - if you don't have someone in your immediate community, then find a candidate you can help from a distance. Adopt a candidate.
PITT:
A lot of loyal Democrats on the leftward side of the spectrum are feeling very disgruntled nowadays. They will say that the Democratic Party supported the Bush tax cuts, supported the resolution for war on Iraq, and now have supported this Homeland Security bill with all those poison amendments attached to it. These people will point to all this as being one of the problems that presented itself on November 5th. The idea here is that the Party did not sufficiently differentiate itself from the Republicans. With the rise now of Nancy Pelosi into the House leadership position, do you see the Party moving leftwards a bit in order to distinguish itself from Bush and the GOP? LEWIS: I think it is a mistake for us to do that. It is a simple matter of mathematics. If you're choosing between base and swing voters, you will never get to 50%. If we say, "Uh oh, we have to make an ideological shift," I am afraid we will simply doom ourselves to becoming a minority party in ways I am not prepared to settle for. There is much too much at stake.
I do think we have to work harder at differentiation. Again, I am just fascinated by the ability of this Republican team to adopt Democratic programs, as long as they sound popular. Now we're going to see if they can get away with leaving them behind. I think it is much more important to say that we are the folks who have been for this, we're still for it, and you Republicans told people you were going to do it, so where is it?
But no, I would not agree that the way to handle this is with an ideological shift, because I think that narrows your potential support. It doesn't broaden it.
PITT: Do you worry about losing the base to third parties?
LEWIS: I am always concerned about people who would conclude, as I have heard people say, that there is no real difference between Republicans and Democrats. It is incredible to me when I look at what's at stake - the question of who will sit on the Supreme Court, or decisions about ending United States support for UN family planning - when I think of the lives of women, who are the most vulnerable people on the planet, being sacrificed to satisfy the right-wing allies of this administration, I have a very hard time understanding how people can think there really are no differences between the parties. There won't be all the votes they like on every issue they like, issues that are literally life and death for women around the world, but there are big differences.
PITT: There was a recent article in the Boston Globe about how American military involvement in Afghanistan is going to broaden and deepen significantly.
LEWIS: I certainly hope that is true, for the sake of the women of Afghanistan whose lives are in danger. We've had examples of girl's schools being torched, threatening letters being written. One of the serious concerns I've had with this administration is that, too often, our rhetoric about Afghanistan has not matched with reality. The reality has to be that you cannot just walk into a place like this, get rid of the Taliban, who were terrible people, and then just walk away and say we're done. We're not done. There is a rebuilding job that must be done.
One of the reasons that Afghanistan was vulnerable to the Taliban to begin with was that the great powers had gone in there to play Cold War politics, and left the country behind to the strongest guy on the block. We cannot do that.
PITT: How do you see the American military, and the American budget, sustaining a large-scale and long-term involvement in Afghanistan at the same time as we appear to be pursuing a war in Iraq? Are you concerned about our ability to do both of these things simultaneously?
LEWIS: Well, the President told us that we have more than enough money to do everything important. I distinctly remember him saying that.
PITT: The other day Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was asked a very similar question, and responded that the American military is stronger than it has ever been. This is from the same group that rode the military down during the campaign.
LEWIS: I have a friend who noted that it was very bi-partisan of Bush to fight the war in Afghanistan using Bill Clinton's military.
PITT: How do you feel about the manner in which the Bush administration has pursued its Iraq policy?
LEWIS: I am pleased that our current policy includes working with the Security Council to focus international attention on Iraq's flouting its previous commitment to allow inspections, because I believe that this approach maximizes the likelihood for international support. I have serious concerns with a policy of "pre-emption" or unilateralism as an end it itself, such as the statements by Vice President Cheney this summer that disparaged inspections or the value of international cooperation.
PITT: Thank you very much for your time.
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