E-mail a friendLaura Flanders
airdate February 12, 2008
Long involved in media, Laura Flanders hosts Air America Radio's RealNation. She previously hosted the award-winning Your Call, on public radio, and was producer-host of the nationally-syndicated radio program CounterSpin, from the media watch group FAIR. In '00, she hosted Crashing the Party, a series of independent TV broadcasts from the Democratic and Republican conventions. Flanders' books include Bushwomen, a study of the women in President George W. Bush's Cabinet, and, her latest, Blue Grit.
Laura Flanders
Tavis: Laura Flanders is the host of "Radio Nation" on Air America and the author of a number of books, including "The Contenders." Her latest is called "Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable, and Inspirational Political Change in America." Laura, nice to have you on the program.
Laura Flanders: Great to be here, Tavis.
Tavis: Is it just me, or is the word "change" this year being bandied about more - it always comes up, but what is it about this season this year that has this word change coming out of everybody's mouth?
Flanders: Well, I think it's been bubbling up for a while. I don't know, but the roots of this book lie in 2004 when I could hear it. I could hear the people wanted this country to be off on a different direction. It didn't happen. We were told kind of a tissue of lies that it was the voters' faults. The country was too conservative; it was all gays and lesbians or abortion; that was the problem.
That's not what I think was the problem. I don't think the problem was that there were too few Democrats. I think the problem was that there was - the way we were doing politics wasn't right. Democrats weren't too few, they were too feeble. And I think what we started to see then was people deciding to take the reins of the political picture back into their own hands and that's what's paying off this year.
Tavis: The irony for me, though, Laura, is that you're hearing that notion, that formulation of change, coming from left and right this time around - Republicans and Democrats.
Flanders: Well, we're seeing change, aren't we? It's gone from being a kind of bumper sticker slogan pooh-poohed by the pundits to something real in the sense that you have two very long-shot candidates - Barack Obama on the one hand started the race very much the back-runner, and on the other, Huckabee's candidacy.
These were not races that were supposed to succeed, and yet we saw even just this weekend the underdog candidates moving forward. We still have the problem of money and politics, but people power, I think, will out.
Tavis: Tell me how you process the grassroots component of a Huckabee campaign as squared against an Obama campaign. Because clearly, they're both tapping into some grassroot level of support.
Flanders: Yeah, well they both are, absolutely, and I think it's not as if they're the same. They're very different, certainly, at the level of policy.
Tavis: Absolutely.
Flanders: But what they've both got going for them is that on-the-street passion, is that people power that the religious right have had for years, but Democrats over the last couple of decades have relied more on national television, on big money contributions, directly communicating the candidate to the voter - kind of lost that power on the streets.
And I think that's what we're seeing come back, thanks to some new technology, the Internet, and a lot of new folks, young folks, who've had it with the way things have been going and want to make a difference. And they're making it.
Tavis: I could have started this conversation with this question, but what do you mean when you suggest by the book's title "Blue Grit?"
Flanders: Well, I think of grit as that impermeable stuff that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, it gets in your shoe, it causes you a blister on your foot, but also that kind of John Wayne spirit of we're going to take on the tough stuff and the tough challenges and be courageous no matter what. I think of a lot of kind of John Waynes with left-wing politics, and that's what I see out there, a lot of it.
Tavis: I'm not casting aspersion on the book title, but I want to just unpack this a little bit. When you look at a subtitle like "Making Impossible, Improbable, and Inspirational Political Change in America," it sounds like a speech. And yet part of what certainly Obama is hearing is that that speech sounds good, but he's starting to get hit on the vagueness of the message.
Flanders: Yeah, well, I think he is getting hit, but let's talk about the historic significance of what is going on in this country. Segregation is not a detail in this country's history, it's been central. The effort to kind of keep the lid on popular participation is what brought us the Electoral College, the winner-take-all system, the two-party system.
So to have two candidates, actually, Obama and Clinton, who are putting people who've been sidelined at the center of the race, that's important. But I think you're right - we don't just need cosmetic or symbolic change, we need the concrete, real stuff, and I think that's where this race is getting to right about now.
Tavis: Put in context for me the arguments that you make in this book, "Blue Grit," about Democrats specifically with that whole red-blue map that we're going to be seeing just a few months down the road.
Flanders: Well, that Electoral College map I think really messes with our heads. We're given this notion of the country as kind of blue on the outside and red on the middle - it's not that way. Every city with a million people or most of the cities with half a million vote Democratic, and there are progressive little cells all across the country. I see it more as a kind of smorgasbord than this red-blue sandwich.
What we're seeing this primary is fascinating. The Democrats are outnumbering Republicans turning out to primary races to the point where in most states we've seen the winner Democrat attract more voters than all the Republicans who turn out combined. So that makes you wonder about those red-blue states. There's an awful lot of Democratic voters turning out in places that on that map show up red.
Tavis: You've used the word progressive two or three times now in our conversation. Let me try to explore that for a second here. Do you really think there is a progressive agenda being discussed? Is there a progressive candidate in this race? I want to go a little further than that, but let me (inaudible).
Flanders: Well, I think there's not enough, and that's why I think it was an interesting moment in the South Carolina debate among the Democrats when the anchor asked Barack Obama and the others who did he think Dr. King would endorse? And he said, "I don't think Dr. King would have endorsed anybody because Dr. King was about building a movement that keeps everybody, holds all the politicians to account."
So I think if you're looking for real progressive change in this country, that's not going to come from inside the establishment, it's going to have to come from outside in, people holding their politicians of whatever stripe to account. At the same time, there's no question - people who have been criticizing the deployment of U.S. forces to Iraq, who have been criticizing the abandonment of people on the coast, have pushed those issues into the center of this debate, and I think that that has shown that there is a hunger and a constituency for progressive change.
Now we've just got to make sure that the politicians who are supposedly working for us actually pull it off.
Tavis: I guess the question for me, though, Laura, is if you happen to be a Democrat and you're talking about change, no matter which candidate you might be, if you're a Democrat and you're talking about change, which both of them are, but the agenda, that change is not connected to, not wrapped around a progressive agenda, then what are we talking about here?
Flanders: Well, we're talking about an opening of a door, and I think what we're talking about with this election is an opening of a door. And that door is a door to reconfigure what we think of as America. In the same way, Obama got into trouble for referring to Ronald Reagan, but it's true - Ronald Reagan kind of retold America's story to itself, and he retold that story to say government is bad, rugged individualism is good, and the best thing we can do is unfetter people, and more importantly corporations, from government constraint.
I think with Barack Obama's talk about "we," we have an opportunity to take that seriously and say if we're going to talk about "we," we have an opportunity there to break with that Reagan ethic of individuals and instead reimagine, revisualize a real commitment to inclusion and equality. If there are policy implications of that word "we" and change, again, I think it's up to us to force the point, but I think there's a potential there.
Reagan didn't deliver for the right; it took years for them to really get what they wanted in terms of taxes and regulation rollback. But he opened a door in the same way that I think Barack Obama is maybe making possible a shift in the atmosphere, and that's good.
Tavis: Clearly, there is blue grit on both sides of this Democratic primary. There's blue grit in the Hillary camp, there's blue grit in the Obama camp. They're both bearing down, trying to win this thing, and yet we are in a dead heat, basically, as we sit here tonight. What do you make of that?
Flanders: Well just on one topic, I've kind of been dealing a lot with people's discussion of racism and sexism in America, and it does seem that this contest is summoning us to address some of the stuff none of us want to talk about. On the Barack Obama side it seems like a lot of recovering racists really love Obama, and he gives them a chance to show just how recovered they are, at least in public.
On the Hillary Clinton side it does seem like her candidacy has given a whole lot of license to be sexist. They say, "Oh, it's not prejudice; it's politics," but it's prejudice when they're making nutcracker toys made out of her, or using words about her to describe her that rhyme with witch.
If you want to talk politics with respect to Hillary Clinton, I've got my complaints. But there's no question, this has been a brutal race and it's, I think, played out differently on both sides.
Tavis: The flipside of that for me is I think that there are some people who think that simply pulling the lever for Barack Obama eradicates America's Jim Crow past. And for some White voters - some White voters - it's easy to vote for the guy who happens to be Black than it is to really deal head-on with Black issues that are challenging the community.
On the other side, for Hillary, there are people who think that by pulling a lever for her that America's predilection for patriarchy just goes away. I don't buy either one of those arguments.
Flanders: No, I think you're absolutely right. I think a lot of people voting for Barack Obama would like to see him put issues of racial justice more central in his campaign. It's amazing to me that Democrats don't make reenfranchising felons a central piece of their agenda. It was not standing up for Black, disenfranchised voters in Florida that lost them 2000. We wouldn't be in this mess if they'd done it right -
Tavis: But that argument isn't tough enough on crime.
Flanders: Exactly. What they're more concerned about, they're more scared of being pilloried in the media for being too soft on crime than they are actually winning. That's a serious problem. On the Clinton side, I come down ultimately realizing sexism is bad but war is worse, and there is no group in Iraq that suffered more from the U.S. invasion than women. Four hundred abducted in the first weeks, made penniless, homeless, denied the right to work.
With the rise of religious extremists, you've seen women's fate set back decades. That is something that the women's movement around the world was able to anticipate - the fact that a woman running for president was not is problematic for me again. Sexism's bad, but war, I think, is sexist too, in its own way.
Tavis: The new book, the latest book from Laura Flanders is "Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable, and Inspirational Political Change in America." There's that word again. We change now from Laura to our next guests, but not before I say thank you.
Flanders: You're welcome. Thank you.
Tavis: Nice to see you, Laura.
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