How the left lost teen spirit

Essentially, you're arguing that the Democrats have spent 30 years running away from ideology and philosophy, and you think that's a mistake.

Yes, I think that's right. I think they've been scared of ideology and philosophy. There's this fetish -- it was part of Clinton's theory, and some of it worked for him -- that it's not about ideology, it's about problem solving. You get the smartest people in the room and they'll solve the problems. That's what we need, smarter people. But there are different ideologies. There are people who really believe that everybody for themselves is the best of all possible worlds, and the less government the better. And there are people who think that we have some collective responsibility to each other, and that government, flawed though it can be and corrupted though it can be, is a positive virtue. We have police forces and firefighters and emergency workers. Sept. 11 -- what a missed opportunity for Democrats and progressives! Suddenly there was this love affair with people who work for the government! It's the same country that was anti-government -- government is not the solution, government is the problem. Suddenly government really was the solution. You really can't have firemen who are all privately funded, and hospital emergency rooms need to be available to anyone.

There really are different ideologies that divide conservatives and progressives, and conservatives are not at all shy about expressing their ideology. There needs to be a moral context for progressives. Democrats have run away from that. I think everybody who is progressive has a secret, idealistic set of assumptions, and I don't think they accomplish a great deal by hiding it. I think it would be more attractive, certainly to younger people, who, in addition to self-interest, want some inspiration in their politics.

So here we are on the cusp of the 2004 election, and we've got a crop of Democratic candidates who all seem to have the same problem you're talking about. Even Howard Dean, the outsider populist, presents himself as a pragmatist, a fixer-upper. Only the marginal ones, like Dennis Kucinich or Carol Moseley-Braun, are willing to admit to an ideology.

Well, I think it's too early to judge. I think any of them except Lieberman could be a good candidate. Me, I wouldn't vote for Lieberman. Even against Bush. I think he actually would be worse for a lot of things I believe in. Not only culture but also foreign policy. I think he's probably to the right of Bush. I don't think you'd have a Colin Powell in a Lieberman administration. But I think Dick Gephardt or John Kerry or Bob Graham or some of the others could grow into this. At this stage of the game in the 2000 election, I don't think anyone had an idea that George W. Bush was going to become the iconic figure that he is today. He was on a podium next to Alan Keyes and Gary Bauer and Orrin Hatch and all these people, you know?

I've met some of the candidates. I think highly of Kerry, I think highly of Gephardt. I happen personally to be very fond of Al Sharpton. I don't think he's going to be president, but I think he adds something good to the conversation right now. So does Howard Dean and so does Dennis Kucinich.

Presidential campaigns are in such Day-Glo colors, so lacking in nuance, that any of these characters might end up running the right campaign. And the right campaign for me isn't defined by whether they win this time around, because re-elections are really a referendum on the incumbent. If they lose, if they can leave behind an identity and some footprints that others can walk in, it would be a lot better than the kinds of campaigns that Gore and Mondale and Dukakis ran. Barry Goldwater in 1964 is obviously the classic example of a losing candidate who gave rise to a tremendously successful political philosophy.

I was just going to bring that up. What do you think of the idea that this should be the Democrats' version of 1964 -- the beginning of something new?

Well, it would be better if the Democrats had a message and an identity, instead of just being against Bush. These people really are for something, in their heart of hearts. They really do have philosophies that are different from the philosophies of the Bush administration. I don't know why they can't explain that to people. Their habits are all wrong. The culture around the Democrats and the left is not effective. They need to rethink the way they go about connecting with the public. If they do rethink it, they can do what Tip O'Neill did. If they don't, they might do what Walter Mondale did.

You said earlier that the Democrats have drawn the wrong lessons from the '60s. What are the right lessons?

Somehow the political story of the '60s has been told as a negative thing. Exhibit A is the McGovern campaign -- that's what happens if you're too involved with the '60s. As I quote in the book, Sen. Zell Miller [D-Ga.] wrote an article just last year lecturing Democrats on how they should support Bush on the Iraqi war. Saying exactly that: "I went to the McGovern convention, people were smoking pot, McGovern lost, therefore you should be in favor of the Iraqi war."

To me, one of the main lessons of the '60s was that the Vietnam War was a mistake. That doesn't mean Iraq is Vietnam, but if you're gonna look at the '60s, that war was a mistake. It didn't have anything to do with the ending of communism, an incredible number of people died, it was very divisive for the country and it didn't accomplish anything positive either for the Vietnamese or the United States. The brilliant people who conceived of it made a terrible mistake.

Now, were there a lot of idiots who were against the war? Were there people who took too many drugs? Was there a terrible flaw in many of the left-wing movements of the '60s? Definitely. There were plenty of negative things. For me the '60s were a mixed bag. I don't see why you can't say that drug abuse and left-wing violence was wrong, but civil rights, feminism and rock 'n' roll were good. That's the way the public processes things. The Beatles are very popular, and the public embraces the values of the civil rights movement and feminism and the environmental movement. I don't think the McGovern campaign has any relevance to a campaign today. That was a unique set of circumstances.

This whole thing has a lot to do with the emotions of people who went through that period. A lot of us who grew up in the '60s thought we were gonna be young forever, and we're not really young anymore. We have a hard time differentiating that there are actual young people who have their own culture now. It almost offends us. I don't know what goes on in people's minds, but I know it's irrational. It's irrational to reject popular culture just because McGovern only got 40 percent of the vote. One thing has nothing to do with the other.

Does this dismissive, elitist attitude on pop culture come from underestimating the intelligence of the American people?

My experience of Washington is that it has people who are incredibly knowledgeable about federal policy, laws and political culture. They're experts in the business of a company town, which is business that affects everybody in the United States and everybody in the world. Culturally, it's a very unsophisticated place. It's not a place where you can see cutting-edge theater, eat in the greatest restaurants. It doesn't produce great poets. Yet people in Washington, because they have political power, believe that everything about them is the height of sophistication. They are incredibly sophisticated about tax policy and healthcare policy and Middle East policy. But they are not sophisticated about culture. So there's an arrogance there. I think they misread the country when it comes to culture. Not all of them do, but certainly the Lieberman types, and the people who think what Lieberman's doing is so pragmatic. I just think, if they're so pragmatic, how come they lost? They lost the Congress, they lost the Senate, they lost the presidency. So I don't see that as a pragmatic group of people. I see that as an unpragmatic group of people.

Who exactly are they trying to reach with this stuff? Every time I see Joe Lieberman on TV, I think of that running character on "The Simpsons," that woman who always says, "Think of the children! Why doesn't anyone think of the children?" Is that their target demographic?

I think there are definitely parents of teenagers who are susceptible to the idea that culture is to blame for their problems. I mean, it is a little shocking when your 10- or 11-year-old starts quoting rap lyrics. I have a 12-year-old at home. It's just that I don't think the government can do anything to solve that problem. That's between us and our kids.

I don't think they can appeal to the Pat Robertson followers, but I do think there are people who might like the economic issues the Democrats champion but who are uncomfortable with hip-hop or something. Maybe they feel Al Gore and Bill Clinton are more empathetic if they mention the dilemma of raising a kid in the era of violent video games and hip-hop. But I think that's a relatively small number of people compared to the price they pay for sending out a message that they actually have no respect for the tastes of young people who actually make these things popular in the first place. It's like they're saying, "They're not human beings, they're not Americans, they don't vote." That's irrational.

Look, Ronald Reagan quoted from movies. George Bush kibitzed with Ozzy Osbourne and Bono. Politicians normally try to associate with culture, at least as part of the packaging, so they can show some sort of connectedness. I don't think it's the biggest thing; it might be a disproportionate part of my book because it's a disproportionate part of my personal story. But it's a symptom of a mind-set that is dysfunctional and could be fixed.

You're calling your own generation on the carpet a little bit here, for its relationship with younger people.

I'm a little disappointed in people from my generation, the baby boomers, at least when it comes to electoral politics and public interest groups. We were so anxious to get into the game and get power and get our voices heard. The Gores, the Liebermans, these are people of my generation, the people running the public interest groups. So many times I'll run into political people my age and they'll say, "Oh, isn't music terrible?" And I say, "I don't think so." Is music not as good as it was when we were young? Well, we're not the same people we were when we were young. Nothing is going to touch me the way Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" touched me then. But today, to my daughter, Pink is somebody she's going to remember 30 years from now. Kids who like the White Stripes, or like Jay-Z or Eminem, these are artists who are touching them in a similar way. They're 16 and we're not.

In the book you discuss the issue of the 2000 election, which is still a sore topic for many on the left. You went back and forth between Gore and Ralph Nader and weren't necessarily all that happy with either of them.

I think that Nader gave many of us a sales pitch. He faxed many of us an article that Molly Ivins wrote, saying to vote with your heart if you lived in a non-swing state, like New York, Texas or California, and to vote with your head if you live in a swing state. He himself faxed me that article and told me that was his strategy, to try to get a national total, to show politicians that there were a lot of people who didn't like the narrowness of the differences between the two candidates.

I bought into that. I feel that he got seduced by the glamour of speaking in front of thousands of people and the type of response that he got on campuses, and he went back on his word. He did campaign in swing states and a lot of people who supported Nader prior to the last few weeks were disappointed in that. We [Goldberg and his wife, the attorney Rosemary Carroll] raised 15 or 20 grand for him in one event at our house; I don't think that made any difference in the ultimate outcome.

Ralph Nader is not somebody who I would support again, because I thought he was not honest with me. I feel that he did not have a helpful role, and I wish Gore had won. But the reason Gore didn't win was because of Gore. If Gore had said anything to the people who were voting for Ralph Nader, a lot of them would have come to him. But what was their strategy? Their strategy was to send Jesse Jackson and Gloria Steinem and Karenna Gore to campuses and tell people, "How dare you think of voting for Ralph Nader? What's wrong with you? We're older and wiser."

I think if Gore had said, "I understand why people like Ralph Nader. He speaks about the environment. I care about the environment. When somebody is in a minority position, maybe they can take more extreme positions. But if you look at my track record, believe me, I'm going to be better than Bush is." It wasn't Ralph Nader who was the problem, it was the millions of people who voted for Ralph Nader. They don't disappear from the planet just because there's 50 articles demonizing and bad-mouthing Ralph Nader. Those millions of people are still hungry and unsatisfied and need to be addressed.

There's even more millions of people who opposed what Bush did in Iraq. I don't think you have to have a Democratic candidate who opposed the war in order to get those people to vote for him. But you have to have a Democratic candidate who respects those people and who doesn't ignore those people and who doesn't think they're unpatriotic. You've got these pundits from the Democratic Leadership Council saying that no one can be president if they disagreed with Bush on the war. Well, I don't know if that's true or not. But I know that no one can be president, as a Democrat, if they alienate people who are against the war. The challenge for a Democrat is to say, look, this was a very close call, there were reasons on both sides. You have to show some respect for both sides, not just pretend that those people don't exist, which seems to be the theory of the DLC. Let's just pretend that the 50 or 60 percent of Democrats who were against the war don't exist, because they have nowhere else to go.

But they do have other places to go. Ralph Nader proved that they can go other places. The theory that the left has nowhere else to go is another one of those things that supposedly pragmatic people say who have proved to be extremely unpragmatic. The results of that kind of thinking have been disastrous. Let's face it: Pat Buchanan is a far more telegenic, articulate spokesman for his views than Ralph Nader is. He has infinitely more experience on the national stage. Yet he only got a tiny fraction of the votes that Nader got. Because Bush was able to reassure his base and Gore did not reassure his base.

I think it's a challenge to put 51 percent together. You can't be too far to the left, you can't be too far to the right. I don't think it's so easy, believe me. But I think the key lesson for the Democrats is not what Ralph Nader did but what Al Gore did. You need somebody who doesn't make the mistakes he made. There might be a Ralph Nader again. There might be somebody more popular than Ralph Nader. You can't control that, if you're the Democratic Party. What you can control is the kind of campaign you run, and whether or not you reach out to people enough to get them to vote for you. If he hadn't talked about the lockbox, if he hadn't had Lieberman on the ticket, if he had been able to embrace the successes of the Clinton administration instead of obsessing about Monica Lewinsky, I think he would have done better, regardless of Ralph Nader.

Right now it almost seems like the left within the Democratic Party has no voice -- or rather its voice is people like you or Paul Newman or Sean Penn or Janeane Garofalo, people from the world of entertainment.

Yeah, which is a role that's not appropriate. Entertainers really had a disproportionate voice leading up to the war in Iraq. You had the national Democratic leaders and the front-runners for the presidential nomination all supporting Bush. There was a vacuum that Sean Penn and Janeane Garofalo, and to a certain extent Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, filled. That's a very bad thing for the Democrats.

There are people in office who are progressive and need to be helped. There are a lot of people in the House, like Jan Schakowsky [D-Ill.] and Jesse Jackson Jr. [D-Ill.] and Maxine Waters [D-Calif.] and Jerry Nadler [D-N.Y.], who all know much more about why they were against the war than some of the entertainment people do. But they didn't have the type of position that got media attention. The Democrats need to create a leadership structure that accommodates a diverse group within their own party. Again, the Republicans do it -- they have Tom DeLay and they have John McCain. You hear a diversity of Republican voices, whereas the Democrats have chosen to repress diversity. I'm interested to see how Nancy Pelosi grows into her role. She's certainly a progressive. It's not so easy being the minority leader at a time like this. She's got to figure out a way to have an identity, the way Newt Gingrich did when he was in the minority. She's an interesting figure, and I think that was an attempt to include another voice. It's going to take work.

You bring up an interesting idea in the book that the people in Washington, at least on the Democratic side, have problems with culture because they're "metaphorically challenged." They don't deal well with ambiguity or irony or shades of gray or individual interpretation, which are the tools of art and culture.

That connects with what I was saying earlier about the Democratic Party walking away from ideology. Ideology has both poetry and prose in it, whereas policy is all prose. You need a combination of poetry and prose to be politically successful. You know, it's just a different kind of person: You have the English majors or the music majors, then you have the law students. You have so many law students in the political world that there's a literalism that has too much power over the way messages are created. If you have a politics that's designed to benefit ordinary people, that's not in the service of economic elites, the only way you can win is if you connect with those very people. You can't do that with literalistic Washington jargon. There needs to be some poetry in there. That's part of what great political leaders do. We've had too much of the Dukakis and Gore types, the epitome of prose politicians. Both terrific people, I think, in their hearts, who wanted to do things that I wish they had been able to do. But they didn't know how to communicate with the people who would have benefited from them, so they never got the chance.

You tell a great story about Kurt Cobain, whom you managed. He was onstage, lecturing an audience about homophobia and how awful Axl Rose was. And then a fan comes onstage and says: "Kurt, I love you and I love Axl! I just want to rock! Why do I have to choose?" That seemed to sum up for me the collision of politics and culture, which is almost always uncomfortable in some way.

Kurt Cobain was the greatest artist I ever worked with. I mean, the only comparable genius I ever came close to was Allen Ginsberg, who was of another generation. So I kind of imbue anything Kurt ever did or said with a magical glow. At the same time, I really sympathized with the fan. I loved that Kurt was trying to use his platform to try to educate his audience about sexism and homophobia. He happened to be picking Axl Rose as the vehicle to do it, and I think maybe that was forcing people to make a choice they didn't need to make. You could focus on sexism and homophobia and still allow people to enjoy the fact that Axl was a great rock singer even though he acted like an asshole.

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