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THE BEST LITTLE ASS-KICKING COLUMNIST IN TEXAS | PAGE 2 OF 2_ What do you think makes the mainstream media hate Clinton so much? That's a very good question. I think a lot of the media took the novel "Primary Colors" as nonfiction. [Joe] Klein is one of those journalists who fell in love with Clinton in 1992 -- not the entire press corps but a significant chunk really did support him in '92 -- and they have felt betrayed by him. I continue to follow the three rules of political reporting: 1) look at the record, 2) look at the record and 3) look at the record. I went over to Little Rock in 1992 and crawled all over Bill Clinton's record. Maybe I'm just trying to justify my bad news judgment but I went to Madison Guaranty Trust and I didn't think there was a story there. I was with the Dallas Times in the 1980s and Dallas was ground zero for the Savings and Loan holocaust. So if there's one thing I know, it's how to look at a crooked S&L. I may be the only person that has never been surprised or disappointed by Bill Clinton because I looked at his record. He's a politician to the bone and he's a pretty damned good one. He's a master of persuasion, consensus building and compromise. The one thing he does not have in his arsenal is a hardball. I think it's because he spent so long as a governor in a Southern state. We all have that weak governor system. So nobody is afraid of him. If the majority leader of either party had said the kind of things in public that Newt and Lott have said frequently, Lyndon would have had their balls! Do you see anything shifting since Salon and the New York Observer have begun to cover the other side of the Clinton scandal? I think you all have made a real difference, I really do. I don't want to exaggerate this and I'm not saying this to stroke y'all. But there is finally somebody that has gone in and taken on the money behind this. The thing that has been so astonishing about the performance of the press -- particularly since the Lewinsky story broke -- is our complete abandonment of normal professional standards. For at least the first two weeks everything we knew about it was at least third-hand gossip. And the kind of people that were being put on without any examination whatever! I was on Chris Matthews' show on MSNBC, "Hardball," and what to my wondering eyes should appear but that poor woman Dolly Kyle Browning, who claims she's been having an affair with Bill Clinton for 33 years. Every reporter in Texas has been out to talk to her and they've all come away and not run anything because there's something not right with her. Then to put her on national television, never mind what it does to Clinton, what a hideously cruel thing to do to her! Here she was on television saying, "I have admitted to my sexual addiction and sought treatment for it." Oh God, what do we think we are doing? Do you have any response to Kenneth Starr's announcement that he won't be going to Pepperdine? Clearly someone has finally talked this man into some remote awareness of the public relations problem he's involved in. Here he is, waiting to take a high-paid job from the man who is one of the most unscrupulous of the president's enemies, Richard Mellon Scaife. Last summer you broke ranks with a lot of liberals and wrote a column (that appears in your book) in defense of Paula Jones. Yeah, feminists for Paula Jones. A small organization. We think she was picked upon for all the wrong reasons. But we have noted time and time again, the only problem with our girl Paula is that she doesn't have a case. She never did have a case and she never will have a case. Has your opinion of her changed as the case has unfolded? Let us just say that our opinion of the people who saw fit to make fun of her and look down upon her because she wears blue eye shadow and angora sweaters has not changed. I have a lot of friends who live in trailers. In your book you liken media conglomerates to plantations. Yep. We're all going to workin' for Massah Rupert before long. Do you think the corporatization of the media has had a pernicious influence on the content and quality of current journalism? I've been working for big corporations for quite some time -- though I still write for a number of independent publications that pay in the high two figures -- but I have never had anyone tell me you cannot write about X or cannot say Y. I think that the censorship is far more subtle than that, but it's still very real. There is self-censorship to a depressing degree. And secondly, the sins of journalism are not so much that of commission but of omission. What do you think that the media is not covering right now? I go back to the increasing predominance of money and its larger impact on the increasing inequality of wealth. I think we're dangerously close to no longer being a representative democracy. I think we are probably a corporate oligarchy ruled by the wealthy. The extent to which the entire system is tilted in favor of the rich is just appalling. All the things that need to be done in this country in terms of infrastructure, and what is the first thing we did when we made some money? We gave it as a tax break to the richest people in this country. I wonder why there is not more talk about that. There is a lot of talk about how the economy is booming. You can barely even use the word economy without preceding it with "booming." It is like they entered it into our computers. Sixty percent of the people in this country have not benefited one iota. The median wage has gone down, went down for six straight years. Last year it took a tiny upturn, but it is not yet back to where it was in terms of buying power in 1988, before the last recession. And the consequences of it are almost incalculable. We have a tendency to look at politics as though it were an ideological spectrum that ran from right to left. It is not. Politics is a scale that runs from top to bottom. And when you look at politics that way, you realize that the only real questions are, who is getting screwed and who is doing the screwing. The bottom 60 percent, indeed the bottom 80 percent, of the people in this country are getting screwed. But when the people at the bottom of the scale get together and demand justice, they find some way to divide us up. Usually by race. Let's split the blacks and the whites. And this is always a good trick. This gets the people at the bottom mad at each other. And they will get people all mad at each other over stuff like gays and lesbians and abortion, get the bottom fighting one another furiously. That is not real politics. I understand many people feel passionate about those issues but they are not, as far as I am concerned, real ones. There is an enormous amount of anger in this country, very well justified anger. People understand that they are getting screwed -- they are just blaming the wrong people. We blame the people at the bottom. Illegal Mexicans, welfare mothers, unwed teenagers, people on drugs. Now when did any of those people have any power in this society? Are they running things? Capitalism is a wonderful system for the creating of wealth. It really is. On the other hand, it is also well known that capitalism does not give a dog for social justice. And unless you regulate capitalism you will wind up with an ungodly mess. And what has happened now, of course, is that our political system is on the corporate payroll. And we are rapidly undoing the regulations that have long been in effect on the capitalist system. And it will wind up a disaster if we don't stop it. Just one deregulation at a time. Well, you notice this remarkable thing the other day. Citicorp and Traveler's Group Insurance Company came out and announced in public that they were going to break the law. And then they all but literally crooked their corporate finger and said to the Congress of the United States: Come over here, boy, I want to talk to you. I want that law changed now, boy, and I want that law changed to suit my purposes. Got that? That is exactly what they are doing and saying. You say that if there's any theme in your book, it's campaign finance reform. I've seen polls that say that it's widely supported by the American people but it hasn't got through Congress and oftentimes the packages that have come to the floor have been rather limited in scope. What do you think it will take to pass good legislation? I am optimistic to the point of idiocy. I not only think it can be done but that it will be done and it's relatively easy to fix. I think the single most striking feature of American politics in recent years is the increase in the amount of money and the extent to which the people in public office are dependent upon special-interest groups. Now there has never been a time when money has not been a really big player in politics; it has never been a pure and pristine pastime. But it's the predominance, the preeminence of money over everything else. It seems to me that there's one of two ways that campaign reform will be fixed. The states are trying all kinds of things. The state of Maine has passed public campaign financing; Vermont probably will; here in California y'all tried to limit both contributions and spending but you hit the First Amendment. It's coming up from the grass roots. I also think that Congress would pass it if they were allowed to. All those cynics in Washington say, "Nyah-nyah, look at what they did, it just proves that there's no way to get it done." Look at those votes again: It got 54 votes in the Senate, it would have gotten a majority in the House had Newt let it come to a vote. He had to take an extraordinary parliamentary measure to move it to a special committee where it required a two-thirds majority vote. I hate to quote my book but I've been on tour for so long I'm unable to think of an original way to say anything. I actually like politicians, and it's so unfashionable I'm going to take up interspecies dating in hopes of winning more friends. But there are not many people in politics who went into it with the intention of becoming whores. And they have to spend up to 50 percent of their time kissing behind in order to get campaign contributions. And they hate it! And if you gave them the chance they would change it. What is keeping them from doing it then? The R's have a distinct edge since they get the majority of campaign contributions. So they have a vested interest in the status quo. Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott made the right call from the perspective of hardball politics. And the D's did the same thing when they had control of Congress. The answer is public campaign finance. It's not radical, it's not socialism, we've been doing it in this country since 1976 and it's worked successfully for over 20 years. You talk in your book about corporations being increasingly treated as people. What do you mean by that? It's a very curious development. The first decision that held that a corporation was the same as a person was in the late 19th century and for the purposes of contract law it makes a lot of sense. If one corporation breaks a contract with another corporation, they should be able to sue just like an individual would. But more and more, these odd legal fictions have rights under the Bill of Rights and this seems to me absurd. In Texas we believe in the death penalty. Not only three strikes and you're out, but two bad ones and we fry you. And we have some serious corporate recidivists. We have corporations like General Electric, Lockheed, Westinghouse, many of the major defense contractors that have been convicted of major fraud, time and time again. It is time to give them the death penalty: Just pull their corporate charters. A three-strike law for corporations. You betcha. As the divide gets greater between rich and poor, one would think that there would be an increasing pressure for change. Instead there seems to be more people pulling away from public life or believing in politics. People think about politics as though it were a picture on the wall or a show on television. About which you could say, well, I just don't care for that. I don't think I'll watch. Oh, they are all crooks. That is not the way it works. Politics is the warp and woof of our lives. I do think that citizenship is not emphasized enough these days. In a democracy we are all responsible for how it runs. And we have a national habit of thinking of politics as them. Those people in Washington. Government is not just about those people. It is us. It is ours. You and I run this thing. Do you have mentors or sources of inspiration? One of my role models was a Texas oil man, ungodly rich. His name was J.R. Parten. He died a few years ago in his 90s. When Mr. Parten went to the University of Texas, he had a double major. Business and government. Because he knew he was going to go into business but he also knew all his life he was going to be a citizen of this country. Whatever you do in your life, butcher, baker, candlestick maker, you are always going to be a citizen and you are always going to have responsibility for how this country is run. Where does your political passion come from? I grew up in East Texas before the civil rights movement. I am 53 years old. And it was clear to me at quite an early age that the way black people were treated was not fair. And when there came a movement to do something about that, I joined them. I was 18 years old; I was so politically unsophisticated it was pitiful. In fact the entire East Texas civil rights movement, I might add, was direly unsophisticated. In fact it was probably the only place on earth where there was ever a tacky civil rights movement. Just a bunch of uppity niggers and a couple of us local communists. That is the way we were stigmatized by the neighbors, of course. And we used to get thrown in jail. We did not even know the words to "We Shall Overcome." We sang Bob Wills songs. "Deep within my heart lies a melody, a song of old San Antone." And that was sort of my first introduction to politics. And it was a good one. The enduring lesson I got from the civil rights movement was that when people, just plain ordinary people, get together and move for change, they can be heard. Not great courageous heroes. My God, I was scared to death. It was always hot and we were always scared. I wet my pants every time I got arrested. In that movement the government was the good guys. The second movement I got involved in was the movement against the war in Vietnam. And there the lesson was how hideous the government can be when it is wrong. And how dangerous the government can be. Those are good dual lessons to start out with. Lately there have been a lot of reports about whether or not welfare reform is working. You were outspoken against the bill that Clinton signed, what do you think of all these studies? The only returns are that it is not working big time. The last one I saw says that in two-thirds of the states, 36 of them, it is clear that the poor are far worse off than they were before they started. The recent statistics from New York City are saying that, yes, the welfare rolls are dropping dramatically, but the employment rolls are not climbing. That is where President Clinton lost me. The fact that he signed that bill. I didn't vote for him last time. You didn't vote for Clinton the second time? Who did you vote for? I didn't vote. Do you have any advice for people who have become totally disillusioned with politics? I sure do. Fun. You have to work on it just as hard as you can to save the environment, or to create social justice. It is just as important to have fun while you're fighting for freedom as it is to fight for freedom. Why not go on a march and dream up wild costumes. You know, make it a party?
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