Life of the Party
Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack says he's not interested in running the country, but he has plenty of ideas for how Democrats can win it back and restore the "American promise."

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By Tim Grieve


May 18, 2005 | Iowans like their governor just fine, thanks, but they don't particularly care for the idea that he might run for president. Tom Vilsack was on the shortlist of contenders to be John Kerry's running mate, and he was briefly a candidate for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. But Iowans seem to have a hard time getting their minds around one of their own as a national political leader. An Iowa poll taken earlier this year has 55 percent of the state's population saying it would be a "bad idea" for Vilsack to run for the White House.

Poll numbers like that didn't stop Bill Clinton -- a few months before he announced his candidacy in 1991, a plurality of Arkansas residents said he shouldn't -- and they aren't likely to stop Tom Vilsack, either. Iowa's first Democratic governor in 30 years won't say whether he's running in 2008, but he won't deny it, either. He says he's concentrating on the current legislative term in Des Moines and on helping Democrats win governors races across the country in 2006. But in the next breath, he begins articulating the sort of centrist political approach -- strong on national security, big on values, a lot of talk about the "American promise" -- that is music to the ears of those who believe that the road to the White House runs right up the middle.

Ask Vilsack whether Kerry lost in 2004 because he didn't do enough to distinguish himself from George W. Bush, and whether the Democrats might benefit from a leader more in the Howard Dean mold, and the mild-mannered governor begins to bristle: "That's not where the country is," he says.

Vilsack believes the country can be found in the heartland, but he doesn't mean just geographically. Americans are worried about change, he says, and they need leaders who understand their worries, who can relate to them and reassure them that there's still reason to believe in the idea that each generation of Americans will have it better than the one before.

Vilsack recently spoke with Salon by telephone from his office in Des Moines.

Are you running for president in 2008?

My focus -- and I'm not being evasive or smart about this -- is on the legislative session that's under way here and the 2006 election cycle. There are 36 governors races that will be decided in the next two years, and that is also a wonderful opportunity for the Democratic Party to address some serious gaps that they have with ordinary folks. I'm intent on trying to help the party reconnect with those folks.

What are those gaps?

First of all, there's the "security" gap. Republicans, for the last 40 or 50 years, have done a wonderful job of convincing people that they will keep America safer than Democrats. They started this with communism in the '50s and '60s, they extended it to the war on crime in the '70s and '80s, and now [they're doing it] with the war on terror. Democrats have got to convince folks that we can keep them safe.

I think governors have a role to play in delivering that message. We are on the front line of homeland security efforts: It's our local police, our public safety departments, our emergency-management folks that will have to deal with situations. We can reassure people that we are absolutely focused on that mission -- figuring out a way to not only make sure that we're secure against an attack but also [prepare for] what is more likely to happen, whether it's a flu epidemic or a natural disaster.

But if Kerry, who served in Vietnam and who now serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, can't make that case, how can a Democratic governor make it?

I think we can make that case. In my particular case, I can suggest that it was this Democratic governor and other Democratic governors that suggested to this administration that it focus on agri-terrorism. For whatever reason, there didn't seem to be much of a focus on agri-terrorism until Midwestern governors, led by me, suggested that we put resources behind a regional effort to detect, prevent and respond to a potential agri-terrorism threat.

This isn't just about serving in a war. It's about having policies, it's about having ideas, it's about being able to say without reservation that you can and will keep people safe. Governors do this every day, as we battle methamphetamines, for example. The chances of people in my state being attacked by al-Qaida versus being affected by methamphetamines -- I can tell you the chances are much greater that they're going to be affected by methamphetamines.

Is part of it, then, switching the focus away from the narrower approach of preparing for the next time someone flies an airplane into a building?

I think it is. It's essentially saying: We need to be vigilant, and we need to be prepared for those circumstances, but we ought not to focus homeland security solely on those items. We need to look for ways to get a better bang for our buck. So, for example, if you're doing public funding for bioterrorism, maybe you create a stronger system that can respond to a flu epidemic, which can in some cases be just as deadly and just as dangerous to the population.

So is it a matter of convincing people that the other stuff isn't quite as important as they thought it was in 2004?

No. It's a matter of suggesting that Democrats understand that the first priority of any government is to protect its people. And protecting [them] involves a multitude of responsibilities, from homeland security to food safety to continuing the war on crime and the war on drugs.

Where did Kerry fail in making that case?

It really wasn't a failure on his part. I think it's just the natural consequence of running as a legislator. If you're a legislator, you have to make decisions in a variety of different circumstances, and you have to vote on bills and amendments all the time. And usually, when you vote, it's in the context of something you understand at the time you cast that vote. But in an election, [your votes] can be twisted. So, for example, Kerry voted against a series of defense appropriations and weapons systems. Well, there's probably a very good reason why both he and Dick Cheney voted against a number of those weapons systems. But [Kerry's votes were] used in the campaign to suggest to voters that this was a man who wasn't committed to keeping people safe.

What do you think are other areas in which the Democrats face challenges?

The second area is what I'll refer to as the values area. It's not necessarily our ability or inability to speak about our faith; it's the perception that the Democratic Party is a party of elites, whether intellectual or Hollywood, and that as a result perhaps it's more difficult for Democrats to understand where common folks are coming from. If the face of the Democratic Party is a movie actor or a movie producer or someone from a university who's got a theory about something, ordinary folks may think they don't really understand what it's like to try to find child care and pay for it on a fixed income, or to work two jobs and find time to get to Johnny's Little League game.

Why do Republicans get a pass on this? Bush is someone who doesn't know a whole lot about finding child care on a fixed income, either.

Because he comes across as a regular guy. He uses "regular guy" language that's simple to understand. Sometimes it's language that causes some folks to snicker. But you know what? There are a lot of ordinary folks out there that feel empathy and sympathy for him when he's in that circumstance.

And I think Republicans do a better job with language. They've spent a lot of money and a lot of time thinking about these things. Democrats have spent all of their time and energy on policies and programs that impact and affect people's lives. Republicans have spent all of their time on ideas -- how to couch those ideas, frame those ideas, and communicate those ideas.

Do the Democrats need to reframe the discussion, to reeducate the American people that the Democratic Party is the one that stands up for working people and regular folks?

In my view, our language has to be reframed in the context of the American promise -- the concept I grew up with in which each generation believed it had a responsibility to the succeeding generation to make life better. It's the reason why my folks sacrificed to make sure I had a college education, why people served in the armed forces and came back and built a strong and vibrant economy, then sacrificed to make sure that their children had a better life.

You've also talked a lot about values. When I read your State of the State address from this year, I stopped counting the number of times you used "values" as a way to describe the basis for various things you're doing in Iowa. Is that part of making a connection with voters again?

Absolutely. People have to understand that there's a reason, one they can relate to, why it's important to have funding for child care: that it's tied to a responsibility that we have, collectively, to make sure that our children have a great start. They have to understand that healthcare is every bit as important to someone's security as homeland security. And they have to understand that government's job -- at the state level, for sure -- is to help create an economy where jobs are created that will help support families and communities. This is a way of connecting people to their government.

We're out of power -- the last time I checked, anyway. We don't have the presidency, we don't have the Congress, we don't have the majority of governors. Yet we're the party that seems to be defending the status quo all of the time. You would think that the party in power would be the party defending the status quo and not proposing change.

Social Security is your Exhibit A here?

Yeah, Social Security, Medicaid, to name two.

What should Democrats be doing on Social Security?

I think what Democrats should do is say, "Mr. President, thank you for raising this issue. Retirement security is an important issue and needs to be dealt with. But it's not enough to simply talk about Social Security because, frankly, there are many more problems with healthcare security at this point in time. Unless we address the healthcare crisis in this country -- which is making our companies less competitive and making it more difficult for people to earn a decent living -- we aren't going to be able to generate the revenue to support a retirement system. So, Mr. President, let's talk about security in a broader context. Let's address healthcare security at the same time as, and in conjunction with, Social Security."

So that's the first thing Democrats should do on Social Security. The second thing is that, if at some point Democrats recognize that there's a problem to be solved with reference to Social Security, it will be incumbent on the Democratic Party to put a plan on the table. It's not enough -- people should expect more from us -- to simply say that we're against what the president is proposing.

You're a member of the Democratic Leadership Council, right?

Uh, yeah, I guess so. I don't know.

It lists you as a member. And you know, that tag -- centrist Democrat, New Democrat, DLC -- inspires a lot of groaning from folks farther to the left. How would you respond to those who say that Kerry lost because he didn't provide a stark enough contrast to Bush, that the party needs someone more like Dean as its standard-bearer?

Well, that's not where the country is.

But 57 percent of the country now thinks the war in Iraq was a mistake.

You know, that's today. That's certainly not [how it was in] the beginning of 2004. We know more today than we did in 2004. And we are [in Iraq], and whether it was a mistake or not is somewhat academic. We certainly can't leave until the job gets done. I mean, if the United States were to pull out now, we would have absolute chaos, and all the parents and spouses of the 1,500-plus young men and women who have given their lives would certainly be able to question whether their sacrifices were worth it.

To be fair, that's Dean's view as well -- that the United States can't pull out now.

I don't think it's about contrast [with regard to Kerry vs. Bush]. I think people are troubled today by the pace of change. I think they're insecure; I think they're nervous, and with some justification, because things are constantly changing. What Democrats have to express to people is that we understand their frustration and their insecurity, and we are going to help deal with it. We're going to work hard to restore the American promise. We're going to rebuild the confidence that people have in the notion that the next generation can indeed have it better.

And here's how we're going to do it. We're going to transform the economy, recognizing that we have to have a different kind of economy than the one we have today. We're going to come up with an energy policy that ensures that no one dies for oil. We'll become more independent from an energy standpoint by utilizing the tools and the opportunities that God gave us, whether it's wind or solar or hydropower, or opportunities that grow from the ground, renewable fuels. We're going to transform the economy by having an education system that isn't about a bumper-sticker philosophy but about investing in quality in the classroom.

We have to address the healthcare crisis by approaching healthcare in the way that governors are approaching government -- by looking for and eliminating inefficiencies and waste. I've seen studies that suggest that as much as 30 or 40 percent of our healthcare costs are simply in pushing paper. Have we given a great deal of thought to how we can best utilize the nurses, the nurse practitioners, the support personnel? Have we looked at their scope of practice to ensure that they are given as much latitude and opportunity [as possible] to save money?

There are many things we can and ought to do, but Democrats have also got to give people an understanding that we have a plan -- that we know that they're frustrated and insecure, and we're going to address that.

You're saying that you've got to make people feel more secure, and less like the world is changing on them, all while persuading them to vote for a change in the party that's controlling their government. That's a tough trick to pull off, isn't it?

The way you do it is by suggesting that we are in a fierce competition, one unlike any we've ever seen. We have to stimulate the competitive juices in Americans. When Russia put up the Sputnik back when I was a kid, the competitive juices started to flow, and we decided that we were going to beat them to the moon. Well, we are now in a global economy, and to preserve the standard of living that we have in this country, we have got to win the competition -- by being innovative and creative and by coming up with ideas that nobody else has thought of. I think Americans can do that. I think they're looking for leadership that will inspire them to do that. It will require creative approaches to how much we spend on various aspects of government.

Do you think that having you on the ticket would have made a difference in 2004?

[Laughs, with a long pause.] Boy, that's a tough question to answer. Let me put it this way: I've never lost a race. And the reason is in part because I have a wonderful spouse who is a great campaigner. I know that we would have given every ounce of energy to Kerry and to Kerry's team. I don't know what the outcome would have been. And, really, it doesn't make much difference at the end of the day. John Edwards is a great guy; Elizabeth Edwards is a great woman. They did their best, and they just came up short.

Edwards sort of disappeared once he was on the ticket.

Well, we saw a lot of him in Iowa.

You saw a lot of everyone in Iowa, but Bush still won the state. What will it take to turn around Iowa and the rest of the heartland?

I was at the White House Correspondents Association dinner [last month], and I was sitting close to [Republican National Committee chairman] Ken Mehlman. I leaned over during Laura Bush's performance and indicated to him that the reason Bush won Iowa, in my view, taking nothing away from the president and his team, was Laura Bush. She did a terrific job campaigning for her husband in Iowa. She went to communities that were on the outskirts of the major metropolitan areas in our state (where the major media would cover her) and sent the message that small towns and small-town values were important to the Bush administration.

Iowans want to know that you understand the trials and tribulations and struggles and aspirations and hopes and dreams of ordinary folks, and that you're going to work hard and do your level best to make a better life for them and their families. That's why I think I won the governor's race in '98 and why I was one of the few folks reelected in 2002.

It sounds like you've internalized a bit of Thomas Frank.

I don't know if I have or not. But I know what I believe, and I believe strongly in this concept of the American promise. I was thinking about it the other day. My father was not a very successful business guy. I remember the last time I talked to him, on April 14, 1972. I called him from college to let him know that I had been accepted to law school. He had just suffered a stroke and wearily explained to me that he wasn't sure where the money would come from but he'd find a way to help pay for law school. Two days later, he passed away.

Veterans benefits, Social Security benefits, student loans, my work, Christie's work -- all were part of how I was able to get myself through law school. But my father sacrificed just about everything he had to give me this educational opportunity, which in turn gave me opportunities to be a lawyer, to have success in that profession, to raise my family adequately, and then to get into politics. That's what this is all about. And if I can do it, starting out life in an orphanage, anybody can do it.

http://www.salon.com/news/lotp/2005/05/18/...sack/index.html

Life of the Party
MoveOn's Eli Pariser is confident that the Democrats can come back -- but first they have to stop cowering.

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By Tim Grieve


May 9, 2005 | This isn't how Republicans talk.

They don't say that their agenda is something they're "working on." They don't admit that people in their party are having conversations about "what we stand for, who we are, what we do." They don't worry out loud that a description of their political plans might come off sounding like a metaphor for "empire building." And if Republicans had taken the beating that Democrats took last year, they sure as hell wouldn't put 2004 at the top of the list of their "significant political achievements."

But MoveOn.org isn't the Republican Party, and Eli Pariser isn't Karl Rove.

Maybe it's his youth; Pariser, MoveOn's executive director, is just 24 years old. Maybe it's an outgrowth of MoveOn's decentralized, wisdom-of-the-crowd approach. Maybe it's the humility that comes from being beaten, or maybe it's just the realization -- the one that got John Kerry into so much trouble -- that politics may play out in red and blue but the road back to the White House doesn't always present itself in black and white.

Whatever it is, when Pariser speaks now, he speaks with a cautious introspection that's far removed from the swagger of George W. Bush or the self-satisfied braggadocio that marks some of MoveOn's public pronouncements. He hesitates. He hedges. He begins his sentences with "I think" and "I guess," and he's just as likely to finish them with a worry about "progressive self-loathing" as he is with a prediction about future electoral triumphs. In December, as Democrats sunk into the despair over their defeat and began making plans to choose a new party chairman, Pariser blasted out an e-mail declaration. The Democratic Party is ours, he said. "We bought it, we own it, and we're taking it back." Now Pariser says that all he meant was that the Democratic Party belongs to the people -- all of the people -- who support it with their work, their votes and their financial contributions.

It's not that Pariser feels defeated. He says he woke up the morning after the election and felt an "incredible opportunity" to start getting things right. He insists that MoveOn is stronger than ever, that Democrats are in a position to start winning back the White House through a strong showing in the 2006 congressional races. But he knows that the work ahead is going to require more than house parties and clever homemade TV commercials. Progressives, he says -- and maybe he's talking a little about himself here -- have got to get their "self-confidence" back.

"There's really a serious issue of internalization of the right's frame about us," Pariser says. "Progressives have begun to believe that they're fringy when in fact they represent a majority of the country." Iraq is Exhibit A in Pariser's diagnosis; the notion that the war was a "bad call still sounds to a lot of people like a fringy proposition," he says, even though the latest Gallup Poll has 57 percent of the public saying that the war wasn't worth the cost. But it's not just Iraq. It's Social Security. It's Bush's judges. It's a whole agenda that voters gave the Republicans the power to impose even if, as it turns out, they don't much care for the particulars.

Pariser says that progressives can turn things around, but only if they start remembering that however the Republicans might want to marginalize them, they're "regular people," and that a lot of other "regular people" share their views about the direction of the country. "We can't let ourselves get too cowed or too boxed in," he says, "by what our opponents want to portray us as."

Pariser spoke to Salon last week from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y.

U.S. News and World Report says that John Kerry is definitely running again in 2008. Is that something that you would be excited about?

Gosh, honestly, 2008 seems like a long time away. We're focusing on building toward 2006. On staff, we've always tried to avoid the sort of -- it's not even armchair general-ing, it's that everyone's favorite game in politics is who's going to do what when and how it's going to be. We prefer to defer to our members on this, partly because it's the nature of the organization and partly because you get better results that way. I honestly don't know how our members would feel about [Kerry] vs. the other candidates who may be running. Mostly, they're focused right now on Social Security and on judges and on other kinds of banner issues that are going down right now.

Are those day-to-day legislative issues important to MoveOn in and of themselves, or do they matter because they keep people interested, building momentum and money for 2006 and 2008?

I guess I think they're integrally related; they're part of the same thing. I think maybe the question stems from a little bit of a tendency on the left to segregate, in this sort of absurd and just totally awkward manner, the advocacy work that we do from the electoral work we do -- for the last 30 years, saying basically that electoral politics is junk, it's crass, we're going to focus on lobbying and setting up independent research arms and whatever, and we're going to ignore that stuff.

I think it also has to do with the balkanized structure of the left until recently. A lot of groups have a single-issue domain, and there isn't as much of an argument for being involved with electoral politics a lot if [their single issue] isn't on the front burner. But in the end, I think that distinction really hobbles us. People out in the real world don't draw that kind of distinction -- you try to influence your legislator to do the right thing on issues that matter, and if they don't, you fire the guy and pick a new one. Hopefully not a guy, actually.

People in the real world or people who are involved enough to be on MoveOn's e-mail list?

You know, I think the distinction is smaller than a lot of people imagine. I think one of the fundamental problems of the progressive community is this issue of self-loathing -- that we assume that people in the real world are different than us, that we're not members of the real world somehow. I think that [MoveOn's] members and the people who make up the core constituency of the Democratic Party are real people. They have real jobs; they do real things; they look and act a lot like the rest of America.

But how can you look at the 2004 electoral map and conclude that progressives represent a "majority of the country"? The latest Gallup Poll says that 57 percent of Americans think the war in Iraq wasn't worth the cost, but how do you back up that characterization more generally?

Well, I guess the strong and simple message that I draw from the experience of the last six months -- which was not the message I expected to draw -- is that whatever [reasons] people voted for Bush, they didn't vote for him because of [his positions on issues]: They didn't vote for him on Social Security. They didn't vote for him on judges. They didn't vote for him on the agenda he's pursuing. Bush was able to mobilize his base and cast the pallor of fear over enough of the electorate to cobble together a win. But I think we have to be careful about reading too much into it because if a football stadium full of Ohioans had voted a different way, we'd all be talking about the pluses and minuses of President Kerry.

So would you be happy to just replay the Democrats' 2004 campaign against a different Republican at a time when we're not three years out from 9/11 and in the middle of a war in Iraq?

I'm a little tired of the hypothetical -- I don't know what the right word is -- agonizing, hand-wringing over what we should or shouldn't have done. When I woke up on Nov. 3, the feeling that I had was that while it was a real blow, it was also a moment of extraordinary opportunity to get some of the things right that the campaign showed were wrong. One of those things is that Kerry not only had to cobble together a presidential campaign but actually make the ideas for that campaign, all in the space of the six months leading up to the election.

All while under attack from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Exactly -- while responding to the president's punishing assault. I think he may have done the best job he could given what he had to start with. The opportunity we have now is to recognize that there's an infrastructure that needs to be built, a movement that needs to be fed and nourished and tended to that will ensure that whoever is the candidate in 2008 or 2012 doesn't end up in that same predicament.

Is having Howard Dean in place as the chairman of the Democratic National Committee important to that work?

Admitting that there are some problems is the first step to recovery. I see Dean's chairmanship as a tacit acknowledgment that the party really needs to do some work. But, again, I think it's dangerous to look toward one person or a handful of people, whoever they are, to build a strong progressive movement. A movement requires a lot of people and a lot of joint responsibility if it's going to succeed.

How do you draw the lines of responsibility between what the DNC can do and what MoveOn can do in that movement?

I do draw a distinction between a movement and a party. One of the books I've been reading recently, which I found really interesting, is Richard Viguerie's book "America's Right Turn." If you simply substitute "progressive" for "conservative," it offers a pretty good road map of how to think about these issues. His basic point is that the job of a party is to get elected and the job of a movement is to promote ideas and an ideology. And unless the movement kind of understands that that's its role -- and not getting elected -- and unless the party understands what its relationship is to the movement, you kind of end up with a muddle. Which is not to say that it may not be strategic sometimes for the movement to back candidates who are not precisely in line with its ideology.

At MoveOn, we're the outsiders. We're definitely on the movement side of the equation. We don't want to be the party. We want to be the people on the outside keeping the party accountable to its best self.

But how do you square that with what you said in that infamous e-mail message about "buying" and "owning" the Democratic Party? Would you like to have those words back?

No. The mistake I made wasn't saying, "We, the people, bought it, own it, are taking it back." The point of that statement was that the Democratic Party is in a transformative moment right now where it can shift its allegiance from the large donors and corporate special interests that have been a part of it for some time and back toward the small donors who are really now the primary funders of the party. So the "we" there was -- someone had to speak on behalf of all these people who put $300 million in small donations into various entities to help elect Kerry, and who were being dismissed or ignored by some of the powers that be.

And with Dean's election as DNC chairman, do you feel that the "we" have taken the party back?

I do think that the "we" -- almost, the "they" -- have started to do that. But it's a long process. Taking the party back happens partly at the DNC chair level and partly at the grass-roots level in local meetings in towns across the country. And unless you work it from both sides, I don't know that you get there.

To the extent that the job of "the movement" is about ideology, what is MoveOn doing to build a positive agenda now? Obviously, so much of what's going on now is negative -- opposition to Bush's judicial nominees, opposition to his Social Security proposal ...

Let me just say first that a positive agenda is really important -- it's something we're going to devote a lot of time to with our members this summer. But we also need not be ashamed of stepping in at a moment when the nation needs us to stop some of these basic assaults to democracy and to the New Deal. Another part of the Republican frame that I think folks are to some degree internalizing is that opposition is inherently bad. I don't believe that's the case when someone is attempting to dismantle the basic functions of a democracy.

I think that the fact that [Democrats] have been holding the line on Social Security and judges is an accomplishment that we ought not dismiss. We could find ourselves in a much bleaker situation now had things gone slightly differently. What the last four months have been about is [like] Mongol hordes at the gates and a lot of people stepping up to man the barricades.

I know that you haven't talked with or heard from MoveOn's members about what the affirmative agenda ought to be, but in your mind, what does an agenda that is meaningful and can win elections look like?

A lot of people are having these conversations in different places -- about what we stand for, who we are, what we do. One of the problems is that most of the power brokers having those conversations aren't really having them with anyone who's out there in the country actually trying to live. So our plan this summer is to get people together in house parties across the country who are real Americans, and who can help figure out and polish some of these questions in ways that people locked up inside the Beltway can't.

My gut [tells me] that at the heart of what the party stands for is sticking up for the little guy in a bunch of different forms. And part of what has caused the Democratic Party to drift away from that is the influence of corporate money.

But how much of the problem is that the party has drifted away from the concerns of "regular people" and how much of it is -- as Thomas Frank would argue -- that the Republicans have been so successful at persuading people that the Democrats aren't with them, that it's more important to vote for someone who drives a truck or goes to church like you do than it is to vote for someone who has your economic interests in mind?

We ought not to be afraid to go on the offensive on the cultural front as well. I actually think it's kind of a noble thing if you put the morality of your country ahead of yourself.

But that would suggest that you're going to have to find enough people who agree with your vision of morality.

Well, right, but I think Democrats have a lot of space to work in there. They've mostly been totally petrified to be there. The Terri Schiavo case is a perfect example of a cultural issue on which the overwhelming majority of the country would have sided with Democrats if Democrats had had anything to say about it at all.

But isn't that a case where it made sense for Democrats to just get the hell out of the way and let the Republicans hang themselves?

You know, Josh Marshall made a point recently that I think was great. Democrats often get too strategic; they overthink. What comes across to the public when you're opposed to something like that but you strategically decide to defer is that you're either cagey and untrustworthy or mealy-mouthed and you don't know where you stand. So I think the place you have to start on every issue is what you actually think about how to resolve the issue, not what is politically the best position to be in at that particular time. I think the trust you build with the electorate that way more than compensates for the fact that they'll sometimes disagree with you.

In an article in Slate in December, Chris Suellentrop wrote: "Since its creation in 1998, it's hard to come up with a single significant political achievement that can be credited to MoveOn." Do you accept that?

Absolutely not. I think there are a lot of achievements that we can point to, starting with the election. We were more rigorous in our testing of our ads than virtually any group that I'm aware of, and then spent through the MoveOn Voter Fund $20 million and through the PAC another $10 million to put those ads on the air in key states. During that program, we saw statistically significant declines of support for Bush in some of the key battleground states, especially early in the spring and early summer.

But still, Bush won.

Right. OK, so I think that this is a dangerous kind of lens through which to look at it. The problem with it is that it doesn't necessarily attribute cause correctly. So the statement that "Bush won" as a repudiation that those ads had an impact doesn't follow because Bush could have won for a lot of other reasons.

Sure. But when you're talking about your "significant political achievements," to then talk about 2004 ...

OK, I would say that we helped stall the energy bill for the last few years. On the FCC, we helped turn back the regulatory rule change. We have been involved in a lot of the signature progressive battles over the last few years, and our members have supported dozens of candidates who have won and made other races that were walks for Republicans competitive.

Following that line of logic, you end up in some pretty weird places, right? Because if you assume that everything that was done for the 2004 election was wrong because [we] lost, where does that leave you in terms of what to do for 2006?

But there's a difference between saying "it's all wrong" and you lost and acknowledging that your side didn't win.

Right. I guess what I would say is that in every one of these battles, our members have gotten more involved and our base has grown bigger. That means we're better prepared to fight now, in 2005 and in '06, than we were in 2004. If we're serious about winning by 60 percent or 70 percent on our issues and not squeaking by on 50, then we have to get serious about building a movement. And if it was the only thing we had done -- get 3 million people involved in politics on the progressive side and help them take action on issues that matter -- I think that would be an important thing to have done.

Looking back at 2004, what do you take away as lessons about what MoveOn should have, could have, would have done differently?

The only regret I have really is that we didn't exist in 1990, so that by 2004 we would be further along in our development. Our field program in 2004 was amazingly successful. It turned out 470,000 confirmed unlikely voters for Kerry in key battleground states, and more people than Kerry won by in New Hampshire and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. But next time we're going to do it bigger than that.

Is the candidate the Democrats run in 2008 critical to your ability to "do it bigger" in 2008?

That choice is very important, and we'll certainly be engaging our members in that process, as we did in 2004.

Can you see your members coming together around someone who is moving to the center on abortion or national security or talking a lot about Christianity? Or do you see resistance to a "centering" of the Democratic candidate?

There will be great concern about anyone who is trying to have it both ways. A candidate who does not speak in a principled way and is changing their positions for political convenience will not resonate. Call me crazy, but I always thought that Dean was a pretty centrist kind of guy. So at some point those labels become not very useful.

The thing that will mobilize our members and other key Democratic constituencies most is someone who is proud of what they are and who is not afraid to talk about that. Ultimately, that's going to be the winning formula for 2008.

But won't MoveOn's members expect the Democratic candidate to be against the war, in favor of protection for gay rights, unyielding on abortion rights ...

I don't think it's a contradiction to be pragmatic and progressive. I think we can do both. To think that by necessity the person who is most electable will not be with us on the issues -- I just don't agree with that. And that's where our members are too. They understand real politics, and at the same time they're going to fight for a progressive America. How that comes down in terms of a particular candidate is something I leave to them.

But you're obviously not a person who follows this only casually. Who in your mind are some of bright lights for the party in terms of candidates? I know that you're not speaking for MoveOn's members, but for yourself.

Hmm. I don't think I can not speak for our members on a question like that. And honestly, I don't have a horse in the race; I'd like to see how things shape up.

In my mind, 2006 is more important than trying to read the tea leaves about 2008 right now. First, 2006 has the potential to be a 1994, a watershed moment in which the electorate soundly rejects the politics of power, abuse and radical right-wing conservatism. But I also think it can be a 2002 in the sense that before the president had the full run in 2004, there was a dress rehearsal in 2002 where he proved to the Republican Congress that by running on scaring the daylights out of people and war you could do OK.

If we can make 2006 a referendum on the progressive issues that we care about -- maybe it's economic populism, or maybe it's something else -- if we can send a message to Democrats that this is a formula that works, then I think that's the best way to get them where we want them to be. In turn, I think that's the best way to get to a candidate in 2008 who is representative of progressives and self-confident in that.

I'm loath to leave our salvation to a person or the small group of people who are considering running for president. Ultimately if we're going to win in 2008 and establish a broad majority in the years to come, we have to start working right now to prove that this approach is viable. And that means focusing on 2006 and waiting before you start chattering too much about whether it's [John] Edwards or [Hillary] Clinton or who.

But to the extent that you can make 2006 a referendum on the Bush administration or the nature of a progressive government, what is the reason to hope that you can do it more successfully in 2006 than in 2004?

Well, there are a number of reasons. The dynamics of an off-year election are totally different. We will want [to win] a lot more in 2006 than the other side will because "stay the course," especially when your leaders are corrupt and failing to get done what you want them to get done, isn't a very appealing rallying cry to conservatives. But "kick the bums out" will resonate with our members and far beyond.

The second reason is, Republicans really are in the midst of a classical overreach at the moment. I think Tom DeLay's arrogant influence peddling and the battle over judges and Schiavo all are part of a narrative that is becoming more and more resonant for the public. So the time is right. And 2004 equipped progressives with tools and coalitions and information that we just never had before. At MoveOn, that means that the 10,000 precinct leaders and 60,000 other volunteers in our Leave No Voter Behind program are still moving forward. We have a lot of key pieces to the puzzle that we didn't have leading up to 2004.

People sometimes look at me weirdly when I say that we're stronger than we've [ever] been. But I really believe that. We've got millions of people involved who have never been involved before. We have leadership that's been tried and tested, and we now know what methodologies work and what ones don't.

One can't ignore the threat of all three branches of government being controlled by the opposing party, but from an organizing perspective, we're on the right course to win things back.

Do you see MoveOn's role to be one of reaching out to people in the middle who may be coming to terms with these issues now as opposed to rallying, and collecting money from, the base?

I don't know if you've ever played the board game Risk. With Risk, the way you win is to build out from your base. You get a heck of a lot of armies on Australia, or whatever it is, and then you reach out. And if you spread yourself too thin, you kind of implode from all sides because there's no center of gravity. At some point, absolutely, you reach out, but progressives are too quick to skip over the first step. There are a hell of a lot of people who are low-hanging fruit -- who agree with us, who are ready to work on behalf of these issues if they're given an effective way to do so. Why not start there and ... and ... and build -- I'm trying to say this without using some kind of empire-based metaphor.

It's the curse of progressives.

[Laughs.] I know I'm going to catch hell for it. But to the extent that right-wing evangelicals did unprecedented things in 2004, it was because Karl Rove and those folks understood that the passion of the grass roots was the greatest asset that the campaign had; they understood how to deploy that. I think progressives still sort of think that you can get by without that, but I don't think it's true.

How do you persuade the people in the middle? You get their neighbors to talk to them. If you don't start with their neighbors, then the vehicle just isn't nearly as compelling. To have your neighbor come by and say, "Hey, I want to talk to you about who you're voting for in Congress for 2006" is just a totally different experience than being yelled at in a TV ad. You've got to do both, but you have to start by building the core of people who are going to do that outreach.

Is it ultimately about convincing people that it's OK to be a progressive?

Right. Circling back to the beginning, I think you just have to have some self-confidence, goddamn it. What you believe about how the world should be is something that a lot of other people believe as well. I think this is easy to forget right now with a president who has the bully pulpit and a media that mostly caters to him and adopts his way of thinking about things.

What's been kind of wonderful about the last five months is that despite the president's best Iraq-war-show-esque presentation on Social Security, people just don't buy it. And on tearing apart the filibuster, people don't buy it. So I think that we've got some data that should make us self-confident.

It's not that we don't have work to do on the ideological underpinnings, on how to articulate the story and the ideas, on building the infrastructure. There's a heck of a lot of work to do. But I believe, and I think most of our members believe, that fundamentally we're starting from the right place.

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About the writer
Tim Grieve is a senior writer for Salon based in San Francisco.

http://www.salon.com/news/lotp/2005/05/09/...iser/index.html

Life of the Party
Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners, tells Democrats how they can attract moderate religious voters: Be authentic and don't be afraid to use the G-word.

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By Tim Grieve


May 2, 2005 | Two days before he lost the presidential election, John Kerry made a campaign appearance at Shiloh Baptist Church in Dayton, Ohio. It was the fifth time in five weeks that Kerry had stopped at an African-American church in Ohio, but that doesn't mean he was comfortable in the setting. As the church choir rocked through a long number that morning, Kerry sat stiffly in a chair near the pulpit, looking lost. Do I clap? Do I tap my foot? Do I sing along? And when Kerry rose to spoke -- when he invoked the Book of James and talked of the emptiness of "faith without deeds" -- he came across not as a fellow Christian but as a politician visiting a foreign land, trying to win over the locals with a few words in their native tongue.

While the importance of "moral values" in the 2004 election has surely been overstated, Democrats take it on faith that they've got to do better next time with people of faith. The problem: So few of them seem up to the task. For every Bill Clinton or Barack Obama -- "We worship an awesome God in the blue states" -- there's a John Kerry or a Howard Dean, who famously put the Book of Job in the New Testament during his presidential run and now quotes Scripture as if he's writing speeches with a list of the "10 Most Famous Bible Passages" sitting next to his yellow pad.

Can Democrats do better? Jim Wallis says they have to. Wallis, the evangelical Christian who founded the religious social justice group Sojourners, has spent the last three months on an extended book tour in support of "God's Politics," and he says he has seen signs that the right's one-sided conversation about religion is finally over. Americans are ready to hear a different, more progressive dialogue about the role of faith in public life, but they'll listen only if the Democrats' messengers can speak with religious authenticity, Wallis says.

"It's so transparent when somebody is being inauthentic about religion," Wallis says. "There are millions and millions of moderate evangelicals and moderate Catholics who are simply not in the pocket of the religious right. And yet Democrats haven't got a clue as to how to speak to them. They have no idea! And Kerry gave them nothing to vote for."

Wallis says that Democrats have to begin a discussion with voters about how faith drives their public policy ideas beyond the confines of abortion and gay marriage. And he says the party needs to find candidates who can talk about God -- or at least spirituality -- more generally, in ways that don't sound as phony to Christians as Ronald Reagan's invocation of Bruce Springsteen sounded to rock 'n' roll fans.

Salon spoke with Wallis last week as he traveled from his home in Washington to Philadelphia for another stop on his book tour.

The subtitle of your new book, "God's Politics," is "Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It." What's the "it" that Democrats don't get?

The left, the progressive side, has conceded the entire territory of values and religion to the religious and political right. That's the biggest mistake the left has made in years. It allows the right to define religion and values any way they want to, and that's what they do. That's what you saw on Justice Sunday. When only one side is doing the defining and the talking, when one side talks about what God says and the other side doesn't want to use the G-word, it's clear who wins the public debate.

The right can take an issue like the Democrats' opposition to a handful of George W. Bush's judicial nominees, turn it into this huge religious spectacle, and then argue that the Democrats' views are somehow an attack on people of faith. And instead of being able to engage on the religious level, all many Democrats can say is, "No, wait, this isn't about faith."

If the first time Democrats ever talk about faith is to say, "Oh, this isn't about faith," if you haven't been talking about faith for years and years, the [public's response is,] "How do you know it isn't about faith?"

You know, Martin Luther King Jr., in "Letter From Birmingham Jail," responded to white clergy who were criticizing him for what he had done [in the civil rights movement]. But he never said they weren't people of faith. In arguing on behalf of racial justice on the basis of faith, he assumed integrity on their part, and he appealed to the best of their own traditions. Now you have leaders of the religious right saying, "Anybody who disagrees with us on the filibuster is not a person of faith."

When the other side speaks in such outrageous terms, there has to be a real counterpoint. The Democrats were vitally connected to the civil rights movement, [which was] led by black churches. So how is it that they are now successfully portrayed as a so-called secular party and a party hostile to faith?

How can Democrats provide that "counterpoint" on something like the nuclear option? If you were advising Senate Democrats on their strategy in fighting Bush's judicial nominees, what would you tell them about getting their own conceptions of morality into the debate?

There's a much broader context. The right gets it wrong by saying there are only two moral-values issues, only two: abortion and gay marriage. Now, those are important issues, and we need a better, deeper moral conversation on all sides on those issues. But to go along with the idea that there are only two moral-values issues is to give away the whole discussion.

I'm an evangelical Christian, and I'm bound to a Bible where there are 3,000 verses on the poor, which means fighting poverty is a moral-values issue, too. Protecting the environment, otherwise known as "God's creation," is a moral-values issue. And the ethics of war -- whether we go to war, when we go to war and whether we tell the truth about going to war -- these are profoundly religious matters. So you've got to broaden the conversation.

You can't just dive in to talk of religion in the middle of the feud about the filibuster.

There is no religious position on the filibuster. The filibuster is a Senate procedure, and we all know that it has been used for good and for ill. But it's gotten caught up in this battle over judicial nominees. And that battle is about more than abortion because judges [also] rule on things like workers' rights and human rights and environmental regulations and political representation and voting procedures. A lot of pretty important issues are at stake here.

The issue the Bible talks about most often, over and over again, is how you treat the poorest and most vulnerable in your society. That's the issue the prophets raise again and again, and Jesus talks about it more than any other topic, more than heaven or hell, more than sex or morality. So how did Jesus become pro-rich, pro-war and only pro-American?

There's a major distortion going on here, a major misrepresentation of Christian faith. It's almost like our faith has been stolen. And it's time to take it back.

The Republicans have made faith into kind of a wedge, a weapon to divide us and destroy us. Bridges, not wedges, is what we ought to be providing.

But can Democrats get voters to start thinking that there's more to religion than abortion and gay marriage -- that something like poverty is a religious issue and that the Republicans aren't doing much about it? In his first inaugural address, Bush invoked the Gospel of Luke, saying, "When we see that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not pass to the other side." And nobody jumped up and shouted, "Hypocrite!"

I would argue that when we're having over 2,000 people come out every night in every city [on the book tour], a lot of people do see the hypocrisy in such a profoundly religious matter. The Zogby poll right after the [2004] election asked voters what the greatest moral crisis was in the nation, and 64 percent said either materialism and greed or poverty and economic justice.

So there is a resonance there. What if we had a political leader who ever spoke to it? I mean, my goodness, when did we have John Kerry talk about poverty as a fundamental moral issue or lift up the plight of the poor as a high priority? John Edwards did for a short period during the primary campaign season, and bless his heart for doing so, but he and that issue got put on a shelf. You didn't hear about "Two Americas" ever again.

When you talk [to young Christians] about poverty as a test of faith, you receive a standing ovation every single time. So there is a deep resonance out there, but Democrats aren't really talking about this as a profoundly moral question.

Bush did that, at least to a degree, when he ran as a "compassionate conservative" in 2000.

That's why he won. Exactly.

I met with him before he came to Washington, in Austin, on poverty and faith-based initiatives. He had about 20 people there, and he knew that a lot of us hadn't voted for him. He came up to me at one point and said, "Jim, I don't understand poor people. I've never lived around poor people. I don't know what they think or how they feel. I'm just a white Republican guy who doesn't get it. How do I get it?"

I said, "Well, you have to listen to poor people and those who live and work with poor people." And he said, "Mike, Mike, come over here," and [speechwriter Michael] Gerson came over, and Bush said, "Write this down, write this down." And then, in his inaugural, he said, "Many in our country do not know the pain of poverty, but we can listen to those who do." That came right out of that conversation.

If you look back at that inaugural address, it talked more about poverty than anyone had done in years. But there have been no resources [provided]. I wrote a memo to Democrats in January, and I told them: "You've got to frame the budget in moral terms. Do a moral audit on the budget, talk about it as a moral document." When the president says, "I'm for faith-based initiatives," but then has no resources and no program, no domestic policy beyond tax cuts for the wealthy, it [turns the promises] into a photo op.

So you're saying that Democrats should actually do the sorts of things Bush said that he would do when he ran in 2000?

Yeah. You've got to reframe policy issues in the values context. Don't start with policies, start with values. Don't start with programs, start with principles. Let policies flow from values. And those of you who are people of faith, let your faith shine through. Don't be ashamed of talking about your faith. A lot of Democrats tell me they feel apologetic, marginalized in their own party, for being people of faith, and that's got to change.

Like I said to Howard Dean, you don't have to be a person of faith, but if you're not a person of faith, don't act like you're one. The worst thing you can do is to sound inauthentic. Putting the Book of Job in the New Testament wasn't a good move on his part. Just respect people of faith. Let people of faith in the Democratic Party -- Barack Obama, Rosa DeLauro, Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor -- let them talk.

But is the public ready to listen to Democrats talking about their faith?

You look at these town meetings we've been having [about the book], you look at the media coverage, and what's clear is that the monologue of the religious right is finally over and a new dialogue has begun. Their monologue has controlled the conversation, and a dialogue is all you need to get people thinking, "Well, there's this point of view [from the religious right], but here are some Christians talking about the environment."

Did you see the New York Times story a couple of weeks back about the National Association of Evangelicals saying that global warming is a religious issue? That was huge. It changed the politics of global warming in Washington overnight. Until then, the global-warming constituency wasn't a part of the Bush base, so what did they care? But all of a sudden, there are evangelical leaders saying, "You know, the environment is God's creation, and being good stewards is part of our responsibility." And I'm telling you, the same day, they got calls from the White House saying, "What don't you like about our policies?"

That's a change within the evangelical right. For Democrats, it seems so much harder. As Democrats begin wrapping their policies in the words of faith and religion, it often sounds like they're saying, "Hey, look at us, we're Christians, too!" Dean sounds like he has a list of Bible quotations next to him when he's writing his speeches.

And that's the wrong way to do it. It can't be just language, it's got to be content. It has to be authentic. It has to be more than words. And do it the way King did it, with your Bible in one hand and your Constitution in the other hand, in a way that's open and inclusive and welcoming.

The dialogue has begun, and Democrats have to reassess. Some of it will just be crude and shallow demographics -- "Oh, I guess we lost that one; let's throw in a few Bible verses and few hymns and just sing the same song." That won't work.

But in "God's Politics" you suggest that talking the talk will help at least a little. You say there are two ways the Democrats can make inroads. They can start to reassess some of their policies in order to find common ground with more people of faith. Failing that, they can begin to talk about their existing policies in better ways.

You've got to have a conversation. I'm just saying that you have to be authentic. Some of the Democrats I talk with about their faith and what it means for politics [are] not just saying, "Give me some lines." They're wrestling with it, they're soul searching, they're trying to figure out how to talk about it. And I encourage them to just be themselves. Be people of faith -- authentically.

Kerry had a hard time doing that. Two days before the election, I watched him campaign at an African-American church in Ohio. I don't think I've ever seen a man look less comfortable --

I know, I know. And that just hurts. That's the worst thing. That's worse than saying nothing.

But how much of what the Democrats need to do is just a matter of finding a way to talk about this stuff better, explaining that moral values drive their concerns for poverty or healthcare or whatever?

A lot of it. Kerry has a strong environmental record, but we heard almost nothing about that during the campaign -- or about how his faith [influenced his politics]. He was just defending himself on abortion and the Eucharist. You know, "I was an altar boy!" But Hitler was an altar boy.

[The Democrats needed a candidate] who simply said, "These are issues of inclusion, fairness, economic equity, justice -- 9 million families in America are working hard full time, and they're not making it. They're playing by the rules and not making it, and that's wrong. If you work hard in America full time, you shouldn't be poor."

The Bible says you judge a society by how it treats the poorest and most vulnerable. On healthcare, on housing, you talk that way. You talk about the environment, about being good stewards of God's creation. You talk about the ethics of war. And then you say, "Abortion is a moral issue. We've got too many unwanted pregnancies in America, way too many. Let's work together, pro-life and pro-choice, to really target this abortion rate. We're all for that; it should be common ground. This is a tragic choice. We're not going to give up on the legal option for abortion, but let's make it rare." That kind of candidate would have won.

You sound a lot like Hillary Clinton.

Well ... [laughs]. That kind of candidate would have won this last election. I'm convinced.

Is there a similar approach to the question of gay marriage?

You know, the right says, "Vote against gay marriage and it proves you're for the family." This is a surrogate for saying you care for the family. But this is the wrong surrogate, and the Democrats should have taken that away. They should have said, "Families are in crisis. The breakdown of families is a huge problem, not just for the poor but for all classes. Kids are falling between the cracks." So you have that conversation, and then you say, "Most who are religious people also support some kind of legal protection for same-sex couples."

You can be pro-family and pro-civil rights at the same time. You can win with that. But you've got to get to it as a fairness question, a civil rights question. You don't get started by saying, "I'm for gay marriage."

Energy against gay people is coming from two sources. There's this very ugly, hateful, homophobic violent attitude -- the Matthew Shepard stuff -- and that has to be fought against and resisted. The other part is concern from people who are worried about their families, and they've been sold a bill of goods that that has something to do with gay people. That piece, we've got to disentangle.

You've described your book tour as a series of town meetings, and you've begun to talk of a "movement" springing up around the ideas in "God's Politics." Are you thinking about ways to institutionalize it or build on it? And can that work to the benefit of the Democratic Party?

We're starting to have some success on the ground in changing the [perception] of faith and politics, and in winning over a lot of moderate evangelicals and Catholics to a very progressive agenda. But the Democrats have to do their part, too, if they expect ever to appeal to these people. We're doing a lot of things. After [an appearance on] the Jon Stewart show, we reached a whole new kind of audience that had never heard that there's a progressive religious option. We've gotten thousands of e-mails from young people who say, "I didn't know you could be Christian and care about the poor or care about the environment or be against the war in Iraq. I never knew. Sign me up." So we're having some great success out there, and I'm really encouraged.

When it comes to closing the deal with those kinds of people, how important is the candidate that the Democrats run in 2008?

Totally. You saw Bill Bradley's piece in the Times about how the Republicans have this machine, and how who's at the top, who's the placeholder, isn't that important. The Democrats don't have a clear structure.

I spoke with a leading Democrat in D.C. -- you'd know who it was -- and he said, "You know, if the average Democratic canvasser ever went to the front door of a home and was asked, 'Tell me what your party is for,' he'd have to make it up. He'd just have to make it up." So in the absence of that, the candidate becomes crucial. I'm not endorsing, you know, Barack Obama, because he's probably not going to run for president anytime soon, if ever. But that kind of candidate -- forward looking, building bridges, comfortable with the language of faith, speaks in a moral vocabulary ... Barack is going to make faith in politics one of his signature issues. Remember when he said at the convention, "We worship an awesome God in the blue states"? That kind of candidate would be very, very appealing to these moderate religious voters.

But it's hard to think of a Democrat in a position to run for president in 2008 who would have that kind of appeal.

It is. It is. So that's going to be the issue. On the [positive] side, we've really had some success in the last several months in changing the debate in the media and on the ground. We've been quite stunned by the success of the book. But it's not about the book. It's that the country is really tired of the monologue, tired of not having their voices represented.

Do you think there's some connection between the success of the book -- or the success of the "movement" -- and the Republicans' overreaching on things like the Terri Schiavo case?

Absolutely. These guys are saying you're not a Christian unless you're for all of Bush's nominees. Well, even conservatives think this is nuts. I think they're overreaching. They're giving us a gift: They've been winning political battles, and now they're in the White House, that's true. On the other hand, people are really tired of their definition of religion. There's such an openness and a hunger for another way to be a person of faith or a Christian or religious. I'm finding it every single night.

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About the writer
Tim Grieve is a senior writer for Salon based in San Francisco.

http://www.salon.com/news/lotp/2005/05/02/...llis/index.html

Life of the Party
Brian Schweitzer, the blue governor of the red state of Montana, may just have the answer to the Democrats' woes.

Editor's note: Salon introduces the first installment of "Life of the Party," a series of discussions with policymakers, candidates, pollsters, analysts, big thinkers, bloggers -- you name it -- about the present and future of the Democratic Party. We hope you'll find the series provocative. Send suggestions for future "Life of the Party" subjects to lotp@salon.com.

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By Tim Grieve

April 19, 2005 | HELENA, Mont. -- The future is wearing a turquoise bolo tie wrapped around the open collar of a blue-and-white-striped button-down dress shirt. And if that doesn't sound quite right, then you haven't considered the mismatched gray suit coat or the blue jeans and boots down below. Meet Brian Schweitzer, the soil sciences major who grew up to be the governor of Montana -- and may be the next best hope of the Democratic Party.

On Nov. 2, George W. Bush beat John Kerry in Montana by 20 percentage points. On the same day, Montana voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage -- and elected as their governor a populist, pro-choice Democrat. Are Montana voters as schizophrenic as the governor's fashion sense, or is Brian Schweitzer just that good?

A lot of folks say it's the latter. Everyone from the Washington Monthly to the American Spectator has taken note of the rancher from Whitefish, Mont., and what the Wall Street Journal called his "well-spoken, gun-owning, dog-loving, native-ritual-doing, shot-of-whiskey-drinking true-west style." Democrats hungry for hope in the dark days after 2004 find themselves wondering whether another little-known governor from a small red state can somehow help them find their way back to the White House.

Ask Schweitzer about 2008, and he ticks off the names of Democratic governors who've proved they can appeal to red-state voters. What about him? "You know, all these people are saying, 'To be governor of Montana, he must have it figured out,'" Schweitzer says. "I'm telling you, I've broken more colts than there are days that I've been in office. I'm just a regular guy, getting things done in Montana. I don't know if that works nationally, but I don't care."

But it's clear that he does care. In an hour-long interview, Schweitzer gave impassioned advice on how Democrats can win back the rural West by "leading with their hearts" and recognizing that a one-size-fits-all platform on gun control won't play in hunting and fishing states like Montana.

A native Montanan who spent time in the Middle East before returning to start his own business, Schweitzer espouses a political philosophy that combines the class-based populism of a John Edwards with the budgetary pragmatism of a Howard Dean, all wrapped up in shit-kicking Western dialect that the Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas Zúniga calls "a genuine version of Bush's fake ranch."

Salon spoke with Schweitzer late last week in his office in Helena. To get to the governor, you park your car on the curb out in front of the State Capitol -- there are no parking meters here -- and walk straight into the governor's office, unmolested by bureaucratic gatekeepers or security personnel. Helena is a long way from Washington, but maybe not for long: Before I can even compose a question, Schweitzer is offering his prescription for what ails the Democratic Party.

"You know who the most successful Democrats have been through history?" he asks. "Democrats who've led with their hearts, not their heads. Harry Truman, he led with his heart. Jack Kennedy led with his heart. Bill Clinton, well, he led with his heart, but it dropped about 2 feet lower in his anatomy later on.

"We are the folks who represent the families. Talk like you care. Act like you care. When you're talking about issues that touch families, it's OK to make it look like you care. It's OK to have policies that demonstrate that you'll make their lives better -- and talk about it in a way that they understand. Too many Democrats -- the policy's just fine, but they can't talk about it in a way that anybody else understands."

That sounds like a not-so-veiled criticism of John Kerry.

Oh, Washington, D.C. The problem is, they get to Washington, they drink that water, they get Washington-speak. This is not a criticism of John Kerry. It's the reason that people keep saying, "Oh, [the next Democratic president is] likely to be a governor." It's because governors are faced with this all the time: Their language has to be the language that is clear enough for Joe or Mary Six-Pack to understand. When you speak on the Senate floor or on the House floor or in a Cabinet meeting, you don't even have to use the words that we use. It's a new language -- you know, "budget reconciliation, blah blah blah blah."

No. When you're out visiting with folks in a way that touches their heart, you tell them, "We're going to find the money to do the right thing." Well, when a senator stands on the Senate floor, it'd take him two hours to explain that.

But is winning back the White House really just a matter of learning to say things in a clearer way?

A whole lot of it's visual. I heard somebody say, very early in the last presidential campaign, that they turned the volume off on their television and just watched the two candidates, and they said, "Bush is going to win." You know, when Bush walked in the room, he'd say, "Oh, hey, how ya doin' there?" giving somebody a high-five right there, giving somebody a thumbs up. When Kerry walked in, he found his way to the podium, and he described in painful detail -- with big words, in a strong way -- all the things that he was going to make right for the American people.

Please.

You need to have good solid policy -- that's important. But you've got to touch people. They've got to know you; they've got to know that you believe in what you're saying. And that's probably more important when people vote than your policies. Because how the hell are they going to raise their families, maybe work two jobs, go hunting on the weekend, bowl and drink beer with the boys on Tuesday night, and still have enough time to figure out who's telling the truth about the budget, about healthcare, about education?

So it's about the candidate himself -- about coming across as authentic and as someone voters will say is "one of us"?

They look up there and say, "That guy's a straight shooter. If I wasn't so busy bowling and working and fishing, and if I had time to spend on these issues, I bet I'd come to the same conclusions that that guy would. But it's a good thing that he's doing all that studying and stuff, because I'm busy fishing and bowling."

How do you build that kind of affinity? Do you have to show the voters that you're a regular guy -- the "who would you most want to have a beer with?" test -- or is it a matter of building some kind of link with voters on political or social issues?

You're asking me? Hell, I'm out here in Montana. I don't have any idea what the big shots in Washington, D.C., are doing. I don't think I've got any great solutions for the rest of the world, but I think I understand Montanans.

OK, let's talk about Montanans then. Did 53 percent of them vote for you because they thought you were a stand-up guy, or was it because they thought you shared their values and their positions on issues?

Both. They think I'm a stand-up guy and I'm a straight shooter. I'm plain-spoken, but the things that I say make sense.

But you've got to get people to listen in the first place. In a lot of the country -- in the South, in the rural West -- folks aren't particularly receptive to hearing what a Democrat has to say. They've made up their minds already, and they're not going to trust many Democrats on something like gun control, for example.

Maybe. But you know, when they see you pick up a gun, they know you've used one before. When you pick up a gun and you put in a round and you fire one off, they know that you know what it's all about.

In my Senate campaign [Schweitzer ran unsuccessfully in 2000], I had a great campaign ad. I stood in front of one of my barns, and I said: "Montana is not New York City. We don't need a bunch of new gun laws. We need to enforce the ones we already have." And then we moved to a shot where I was with one of my sons and my daughter, and I was holding a .270, which is a fairly good-size rifle. As I'm talking, I lifted the bolt, shoved in a bullet, put the safety on and handed it to my son as my daughter watched, and he touched one off. And as I was doing that, I was saying, "In Montana, we understand that passing responsibility from one generation to another with gun safety is part of who we are."

So it wasn't about guns, necessarily; it wasn't about family, necessarily; it wasn't about responsibility, necessarily. But it was the nexus of those.

But we didn't run it enough. What happened was -- consultants. "Oh, this issue, that issue, some other issue." They're all talking about the issues. And I just kept pushing them in the Senate race: "Why don't we just run the gun ad and nothing else?" And they said, "No, no we've got all these issues."

So this time around, when we started shooting ads, they had some polling data, and they knew what pushed the buttons of the people in Montana. And I said, "No. This is the way this campaign is going to work: The more times that we run ads with me on a horse or carrying a gun -- it's better if I'm doing both -- the more likely it is that we'll call me a governor at the end of the day. Because what those ads said is, "I'm a real Montanan."

Does that kind of personal authenticity trump everything else in the minds of voters?

There's more that the big shots from big cities will never understand. I probably shook hands with at least half of the people who voted for me, maybe two-thirds. You can do that in a place where there's only 920,000 people.

But you can't do that when you're running for president. How would you translate that sort of personal appeal into a national campaign?

You're asking me about a national campaign? What the heck would I know about a national campaign?

Look, I started this out by saying that Democrats can win if they lead with their hearts. Let people feel you! Don't try to verbalize. Let them feel you first. If you're not a passionate person -- I happen to be. If I'm for something, you're gonna know it pretty quick. And if I'm agin it, you're gonna know it too. I'm straight about those things. Some people can't do that. Maybe they've had a lot of time in politics, or they're lawyers, or it's just their makeup. And they have all these highfalutin pollsters and media people, and they say, "Well, there's this demographic that kind of bleeds into this demographic, and you don't want to lose these over here because you were on this." I don't believe any of it. I think most people will support you if they know that you'll stand your ground.

Even if they don't stand on the same ground?

That's right.

Is that why Bush won Montana by 20 percentage points -- because people thought he was the kind of guy who'd stand his ground?

Well, that, and he's a Republican. Wasn't he on the ballot with an "R" next to his name?

If that "R" is so important -- and if the West is where Democrats have to win to begin turning things around nationally -- then the party is going to have to figure out a way to overcome it. How can Democrats close the gap in places like Montana?

I understand that the Democrats in the big cities, on the East and the West coasts, have a grave concern about gun control. Frankly, as it turns out, so do Republicans. [California Gov.] Schwarzenegger supports gun control, I think. [New York Gov.] Pataki certainly does, [former New York Mayor] Giuliani does, most of these East Coast Republicans do. So I can appreciate that they've got a problem in their inner cities. But that's not what we have out here in the flyover zone. We have guns because we like them. We have guns because in some ways it just kind of defines who we are. We like having guns around. It's not necessarily that you're out shooting -- it's knowing that you could if you wanted to.

When you crowd a bunch of people together, when you've got people living on top of each other, they're likely to have run-ins. So you need a whole bunch more laws. When you've got more cattle than people and you've got blue sky that goes on almost forever, people have got room to roam without bothering each other. Live and let live.

Are there Democrats who can make that sort of appeal on a national level?

Sure, there's bunches of them. I'm not going to start naming names. I don't know who all the national Democrats are. I can tell you that my pal Billy Richardson is a good guy, a good governor, a big shot. Kathleen Sebelius in Kansas. You know, they still have the Democratic Caucus in a phone booth in Kansas, and she gets elected. So there's two.

Of course, my good friend in Michigan [Jennifer Granholm] -- she can't run unless they do the Schwarzenegger thing, which is unlikely. Ed Rendell, I wish I could do his voice; he's got the greatest voice in the world. Janet Napolitano in Arizona has been very, very successful. And let's not forget Tom Vilsack. He's a wonderful individual.

Howard Dean, who earned an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association as governor, has said almost exactly what you've just said about guns. But people in Montana probably don't think of him as a friend to rural gun owners.

Most people that matter in Montana have never heard of Howard Dean or anybody else we've talked about today. People who are into politics -- they've already decided how they're going to vote not only in 2008 but in 2012. They're not persuadable. The more people follow this, the less persuadable they are. Anybody that knows the names I just talked about is either a hard "R" or a hard "D." They already know how they're going to vote for the rest of their lives.

So Joe and Mary Six-Pack, they don't have time to watch "Hardball With Chris Matthews." They haven't any idea who Pat Buchanan is, or Robert Novak. They don't watch that stuff. They don't read about it. They open the newspaper; they read a couple of headlines on the front page to see if they know anybody that got in a pickle, and then they go right to the sports page or the comics. And if they see something about politics in there -- hoo, they're not reading that.

Don't you think any of it seeps through? The Republicans' involvement in the Terri Schiavo case, for example?

Sure it does. Maybe a little [on] Terri Schiavo because it was blasted on the national news. But I don't think anybody figured out what was going on there, except that it looked to them like it was a big political move by some rascals in Washington.

Do they make any distinction about which "rascals" those were?

You know, Joe and Mary Six-Pack, they don't disassociate. They're pretty much all in the same box.

They may not differentiate among Democrats, either. Again, Howard Dean has a record that's not at all unlike what you're trying to pull off in Montana, but it's hard to imagine Dean as the kind of national candidate who would do well here.

The first time people heard of Howard Dean, they heard of him as some guy from Vermont -- and people vaguely know where that is, but it sounds like it's where lots of hippies live -- and that he was against the war. So even before they saw him on TV, they figured he had a ponytail and a nose ring. Turns out, if they had gone three or four pages deep, they would have found out that the guy was a well-respected, moderate Democrat. But in the course of national politics, you've got about a blink or two to make up your mind whether you like somebody.

And then it was "electability." Democrats were thinking, "Oh gosh, we've just got to win. Let's get somebody that's electable." And they thought, "This guy Kerry, he's a smart guy, a senator; he served in the war, so they can't ding him for that; he voted for the war." So they started making it into a thinking thing rather than using the heart. Now, Kerry may have been the best candidate, but he wasn't selected because he was the best candidate from the heart. He was selected because in Iowa and New Hampshire people intellectualized it. They said -- and remember, this wasn't Joe and Mary Six-Pack making this decision -- "I love Howard Dean, but I think I'll marry John Kerry because Mom and Dad are going to like him better."

You're Catholic, but religion didn't play much of a role in your election.

I went to high school in a monastery. I understand Catholicism. But I don't have a need to carry my religion on my sleeve. It's something I have in my heart. Twenty-five percent of Montana is Catholic. Twenty-four percent are Lutheran. Eighteen to 20 percent are Episcopalian. This is not Baptist country -- I think it's a few percent Baptists. We have pretty mainline religions in Montana.

That's different from the South, where born-again evangelicals can dominate the political debate.

God, guns and gays.

But it's different here, politically?

I think that guns are probably preeminent in a place like Montana. When it comes to religion, people respect your own opinion.

If the question is, Is it important in the flyover areas, the Midwest and the West, to understand something about God, I think it is. I think people are likely to be more God-fearing. Are they in church on Sunday necessarily? No. They might be fishing. People have different ways of getting close to their maker. In Montana, lots of time that means getting out.

But what about the political issues that go along with religion?

Gays and choice, you mean? When you simply say, like I do, "I'm pro-choice -- I just think that's an intensely private decision that every woman and her physician can and should be able to make, period" -- what else is there? That's certainly not someplace for government to be sticking its nose.

When it comes to gay marriage, folks in Montana, they're pretty traditional about who ought to be marrying who. They're not thinking that men ought to be marrying men and women ought to be marrying women. I think that's pretty consistent across the country, except for a few enclaves on the East and West Coast.

John Kerry opposes gay marriage, too. But if you took a poll of Montanans today, I'll bet 85 percent of them would say that he supports it.

Oh, they'd probably think that he married some guy.

But understand that the Bush-Kerry race [didn't] matter in Montana because there was never an ad run in Montana -- not a single ad. It wasn't in play. Kerry didn't come here, Bush didn't come here, no ads were run. People didn't know who the heck they were. The things they heard about Kerry they didn't like from the very beginning, because the things they heard about him were what Karl Rove told them about him.

Many Democrats believe that the determining factor in the election was the war -- and the thought that George W. Bush was the one that would keep Americans safest. Was national security the driving issue in Montana?

No. Most people in Montana have never been to New York City. The twin towers are something they've only seen on television.

And Montanans have served in much higher numbers as a percent of our population in every conflict we've ever had. Part of that is the large number of Indians -- Indians are warriors, some of the greatest warriors in modern times and in ancient times -- and part of it is the rural nature of who we are. And it's one way to demonstrate that you're a stand-up guy, and I respect that.

But were Montanans outraged at the same level as folks in New York City or in other vulnerable cities? Frankly, is al-Qaida coming to Montana? It would be a bad idea for them to come here. To start with, if they show up here and start making some trouble, somebody's just going to shoot their asses and ask questions later.

But the point is, when you live in big cities, you see how many people can be killed by a single event, like flying into a building or a dirty bomb. I just don't believe that Montanans were so touched as they were on the East and West coasts about this. I mean, we were outraged that we were attacked, of course. But I will never know the feeling that somebody who is from New York had to have watching that happen.

How does the Iraq war play in Montana?

Oh, about 50-50, right now.

How does it play with you?

As you know, I lived in the Middle East, and I learned to speak Arabic. I had misgivings from the very beginning. We were told that this incursion was going to make the world a safer place. But that didn't square with me because I knew, in the Middle East, the days of the Crusades are like they happened just a few years ago. Any incursion of the West into Islamic cultures is going to be met with resistance. So now we say that, really, the reason we [went] there was to create democracies, and democracies will spring up [throughout the region].

But here's the problem. Our closet allies in the Middle East would be? Saudi Arabia, with a functional king; Kuwait, with a functional king; Jordan, with a functional king; Egypt, with a -- I don't know -- president for life. Israel, it does have a democratic republic. But what do you think our allies are saying when we're standing there saying, "We are going to let democracy rise up"? Well, that's pretty threatening to them. So I don't know what the endgame is here.

You know, I've had people say to me, "But when you're attacked, you've got respond." I agree. I think we should have gone to Afghanistan and turned over every single rock until we got Osama bin Laden. And I would personally put his head on a stick; I would do that.

That's the place we needed to be. The problem is that somehow we got diverted along the way and we went into Iraq. Now, we had Iraq tamed better than any other country in the world. They couldn't even take off or land a plane or even move a truck in the desert. We had airplanes over Iraq, 24/7, for years. We don't over Iran. So why Iraq? I haven't got the answer yet. I'm still asking the question.

We're there. I support our troops; I support the families. You know what? In Montana, we don't make the decision to go. We just answer when called. This is for the big shots in Washington, D.C. I'm just a rancher from Montana.

And you have the luxury of not having to deal with foreign policy from Helena. You're working instead on domestic issues with Montana's Legislature.

We've gotten just about everything I've wanted: a scholarship program, a healthcare program, a prescription drug program. We passed five [medical malpractice] bills -- five med-mals! -- no tax increases, some economic development bills that are very cool, and a "best and brightest" scholarship program, so every middle-class family in Montana finally can attain the dream to send the next generation to college.

Can the Democrats use an issue like that in a play for "moral values" voters?

Hell, yes. When every mother and father knows that there will be support if they have a kid that deserves the opportunity to make it to the top ... Education is the equalizer. It doesn't matter if you were on third base or were in the dugout when the game started -- you have an opportunity to make it to home plate with education.

And healthcare. You know, in Montana, 20 percent of the people don't have health insurance. They're not indigent, living under bridges someplace or in a culvert with a sleeping bag. Maybe Mom and Dad both work. They say prayers with their kids when they tuck 'em into bed, and then they close the door and they walk down the hall, and they get on their knees and they pray one more time that nobody gets sick because they don't have health insurance. They just can't imagine having a sick child and not being in a position to be able to get the help that they need.

That's something that we've got to fix, and we're fixing it in Montana. We've got a targeted tax credit for small businesses to buy insurance for themselves and their employees. We passed five med-mal bills. If that helps, we'll do it. If making [insurance] more affordable by pooling people together so they can buy insurance will help, we'll do it. We've put significantly more resources into something called the Child Health Insurance Program to get more matching funds from the federal government so that lower-middle-class kids up to 18 will get a healthy start. We're doing it.

And how do you persuade the most conservative voters -- the ones for whom abortion and gay marriage are be-all, end-all issues -- that they should think about education and healthcare as important "moral values" too?

The most conservative voters? The beauty is that I only need about 50 percent to win. The most conservative voters will not even give me a shot. I don't need 100 percent of the vote. Just do the right thing, for God's sake. And if that means I'm only going to be governor for the next three and a half years, so be it. Just tell 'em who are you are, tell 'em what you believe in, and tell 'em in a way that they're gonna believe you.

The Democrats spend a lot of time worrying about how to finesse these social issues.

Please. Please.

Just tell 'em what you are. You know, this polling stuff, having to go out and figure out which way the wind's blowing -- do you believe in something? Did you have something when you started? If you do, tell 'em what it is. You'll be all right. If you're a kook, you're not going to get elected. But if you're real, you're normal, you're halfway bright, and you're willing to stand up -- that's the most important thing.

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About the writer
Tim Grieve is a senior writer for Salon based in San Francisco.

http://www.salon.com/news/lotp/2005/04/19/...rnor/index.html