Molly Ivins on InnerVIEWS with Ernie Manouse

her column is syndicated over 300 newspapers she's a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and she happens to have an opinion on just about everything hi i'm ernie manouse up next on interviews my conversation with Molly Ivins I guess the first place to start is what's a nice lady like you doing in politics haha I've been covering politics for about 35 years now and I have so much fun I really should be arrested where did the desire come from where was the passion the first time I ever set foot on the floor of the Texas House of Representatives I knew that this was reporter heaven it was the beginning of a session first day and they were slapping each other on the backs and slapping each other on the behinds and whispering it's like first day of school and I heard one envoy say to the other hey son you should see what I found myself last night and she don't talk neither this could be really interesting it has been water on covering Texas politics how does that compare to covering government in general well in theory it's the same it's just of course that the great state has this extra hitch in its get along that makes it just more surreal and bizarre and fabulous by the moment there's this quality about our politics is there is about the entire state is this sort of slightly lunatic sense of exaggeration of being bigger than life in a in a pie I'd weigh yeah and that just makes it enormous matter not so fun when did you realize that Texas was going to be playing such a major part in the nation well I sometimes think you know there's a country song Lovick on everything and it's something that seems to me that what we have in our Texas on everything it says though we had imported that whole style of governance and thinking about governance for the rest of the country I do not know why the other 49 have not succeeded by now take me back a little bit in time about writing when you first started writing what was it you were trying to do with your pieces well I'm assuming now that we were after I was already a journalist I had an extraordinary opportunity fairly early in my here I was co-editor the Texas observer which is a small progressive publication and what that gave me was the freedom to make my own mistakes which is absolutely a priceless gift and what and I made up or believe me I did what I was trying to do was to share with my readers all of whom were politically aware and sophisticated or they would have been reading the magazine in the first place how absolutely phenomenal it was and there were no bars on me I mean it wasn't his daughter writing for The Associated Press or establishment newspaper where the story's almost always begin House bill 327 was passed at a subcommittee by a unanimous vote on Tuesday I mean nobody ever read the second paragraph of that story and what I got to do was sort of begin by saying they're screwing you again you know when whatever the point really was and it was then I realized that you could write about sports the way sports writers write about they write about politics the way sports writers write about sports that you didn't have to leave out all the interesting funny fascinating irreverent insane bits because they didn't quite fit the formula isn't there though supposed to be a certain respect when covering politicians oh absolutely not politicians are like in a free-fire zone sometimes I try to remember that they have wives and children but mostly I figure yeah nobody ever held a gun to their heads and force them to go into politics and I the more the more skepticism in a reference we aim at politicians the better off we are believe me you should never make heroes out of any of them they're out there are great people in politics and they really are wonderful people but it's much safer to wait until they're dead yeah looking at the landscape right now are there any real heroes out there oh yeah they're always heroes out there and one of the sad things about our political system is how seldom the really great ones rise to the top a lot has an awful lot to do with success in politics and money has even more yeah when you're writing a column how much is or where do you put your emphasis I guess is it educating your audience or is it on entertaining them and how do you make that balance well it's in theory it's a little bit like you know if you can laugh and get them inside the tent like old timey preachers tell those terrible jokes there's nothing worse than preacher humor but they always knew that if you started with a laugh and you you could sort of get people's minds cleared of all the cobwebs we all carry around with us and given to pay attention to what you wanted to say and then of course there are times when it is deadly serious and I really write when I'm really angry but I've done that from time to time and I think it is called for it's one of the one of the weapons you should have any roars yeah what gives you the right to have your opinions so popular um you know that's interesting I was a regular reporter for a long time just out there one of the back taking notes and writing fairly boring stories and I was always interested in the process which is something that gets saysö sound so that sort of inside baseball with so much of politics is about the rules of the game and how they're played with you know how the game is played within those lines and how come I get to do this and nobody else did well they offered me a column and traditionally on newspapers of political column goes to the most experienced and presumably the best political reporter of his or her generations to get Tom wicker at the Times people like that what is happening more and more in the pundit business is that the Talking Heads you see on television and the people you read on the op-ed pages have never been reporters they're come in straight off the front lines of partisan political warfare they were speech writers for politicians when they were or they were campaign consultants they were aged aides to congressmen these are people who come out of the political world and then suddenly come into the media as you know people whose opinion you should pay attention to it I'm not saying that there is anything wonderful about being a newspaper reporter I mean it does not require rocket science on the other hand spending several years of your life doing things like covering interviewing all five eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened we'll give you considerable respect for the complexity of truth there's an old saying in our business that if you cannot cover a five car pileup on route 128 you should not be covering a presidential campaign and you would be amazed at how many people on the campaign planes these days have never covered a five car pileup is that dangerous then so many people are taking their information and learning their political lessons from these from people with partisan axes to grind exactly I think it's dangerous and I'm what you often see for balance on television panels is two guys from the right wing and two journalists who are more or less in the middle and they say okay it's balanced well that seesaw is not balanced and if even if you had two guys for the right wing and two guys for the left wing all you'd have is two people firing back and forth at one another nobody with enough experience objectivity and it's just a different way of viewing the world to try and give readers and viewers are more around an impression where you get are these gong shows where people they just fire back at one another whoever gets off the cleverest venous line is the winner it doesn't help no it's not to say that the opposite of gong shows is boring worthy toper television ladies and gentlemen you won't believe how bad it is today I mean good journalism can and should be fun all right when you look at the these shows that are out there and you hear all these people harping and yelling and screaming and how they're getting people upset about the things they're getting them upset about you have to wonder what happened to all of that liberal media that they're always talking about it doesn't seem to really exist anymore where did it is it is one of the great useful myths of politics the right wing years ago convinced the public that the media are liberal and in fact they're not they they're in the folk it says overwhelmingly shifted to the right in all media media nowadays and but this is still a useful myth so they like to bring it up and bang on that drum so you're pretty much a sole voice out there it's amazingly lonely on the left hand left left wing of the op-ed pages these days I promise you okay let's talk a little bit about what's going on in our world let's start off with California whole recall Fiasco oh thank you California how did nothing for California Texas would have been in the news all summer yes I went out to California to cover that race and you know I really am a serious power a policy wonk and I believe that government is really important in affects people shapes people's lives and I am dedicated to trying to help people understand that this is true there long how much their lives depend on this stations made of the political system so I get out there ready to do my you know deep policy analysis and the implications of this kind of stand against this guy stand and I suggest a big line Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts ray Davis makes mr. Rogers okay so he was on steroids I mean my reaction was just as shallow and rapid it is that entire campaign I get for writing is it a good idea to be able to recall a politician you know that was originally part of the great populist emphasis it comes out and I myself am a left-wing populist and that's in the old Texas tradition an initiative referendum and recall were all populist planks to give a greater voice more direct democracy and it has been like almost everything else in politics corrupted by money so that at this point it is a function of big money and it has nothing to do with democracy interesting race though yeah does something like that surprise you anymore if these things happen no I mean I'm like everybody else out I just say I rather pretend that you know oh well California they're all so strange how about out there there's some people from Texas got no business to be talking about degree of strangeness in politics but I get concerned about people who they have become successful in other walks of life and then want to go into politics and I was saying wait we need a little tell on it we can get ones right in it but they only want to plunge in at the level of governor or senator why is that these guys never want to run for the school board or the County Commission where they can learn you know how it's really played and whether or not they're gonna like it and I think Schwarzenegger in particularly it is a step beyond you know successful in some of the venue in life it's the whole phenomenon of celebrity in our time and to the extent that infotainment is more and more than marriage of information and entertainment then the whole phenomenon of celebrity and celebrity fication it begins it begins to make perfect sense here's a guy whose only qualification for office it that he had played at robot in movies good but we're used to thinking it really he's Arnold Schwarzenegger and so he can transfer that celebrity from one field to another yeah is that good or bad I think it's mostly bad but you'll see a you you'll see an interesting example of it on the other side not that he was a celebrity with Wesley Clark the general who's now running for the Democratic nomination here's the guy who's been successful in an entirely different walk of life and he's going to try and take this into politics at a very high level and he's already struggling he's already having trouble because he's never run for office and there really is not just politics is sort of in two parts there's the the fun rowdy raucous game of getting elected that's the political part of politics once you get to office there's something called governance and you'll get politicians who are very good at won both sided very bad at another our former senator Lloyd Bentsen was a dreadful campaigner check out his hand it would be sort of like shaking with a dead fish and he always so rather wished just so you could watch better before you came out to meet him but he was fascinated by finance at a large level and he was a very valuable player on the Senate Finance Committee for many years simply because of that you get an opposite sort of phenomenon for example george w bush is really good at the political side of politics and center said it's game and he loves it he's very competitive he doesn't care at all about governing he just heated policy boys him just like yeah what are we gonna do i know from your books your writings you were probably not a huge fan of the bush presidency what are we gonna do about it i mean what the damage from the point of view he can do right now how can that be undone um what every night again i look at it I'm really taking it back I think the damage he's already done would take generations to undo and the mistakes first of all there's the financial disaster five hundred billion dollar gotta see that is simply going to consume what resources are available to do anything useful and good for the people for generations the second one that really concerns me is I think a couple of a couple of years people are gonna look back and say what was wrong with those fools they knew about global warming and they did nothing yeah what about when you talk about the deficit people say but no one could have known 9/11 was gonna happen that it was that we were gonna have to do something about it it was gonna cost money it's not his fault that he acted or reacted to a situation here and there were two things one is that he passed a second tax cut after 9/11 the same kind of tax got lopsided like going to the rich overwhelmingly I mean and he was just as disingenuous about the tax cuts as he was about the reasons for going to war in Iraq I mean he kept saying and the average American family will get $1,000 hey average is a very dangerous figure what that means is if you average out the enormous tax cuts at the top with you know the piddly $50 at the bottom it winds up an average of $1,000 that doesn't mean that's what most people god and the second thing you have to remember is when you look at the total deficit yes some of that is attributable to increase spending on Homeland Security all the additional expenses we had after 9/11 but the bulk of it is directly the result of tax cuts disproportionately skewed to the very people who didn't need them could a different person in that position have gotten through this period in our history without causing such a deficit oh absolutely I'm telling you again that the bulk of the deficit comes from tax cuts heavily skewed for the wealthy and that the extra additional expenses are the small end of that large deficit number and the reason I ask you that again is because there are people out there who will say no anyone with less that we've got a great president doing a great job in office how do you get them to understand this then well we try to avoid China the Chinese water torture effect if I tell you this over and over again you're gonna believe it it's always hard to get people to listen through you know we all sort of like carry a bunch of luggage around in our brains it's like the Attic so trunks and lamps have been stuck up there and it takes a lot of effort to sort of move the furniture around and get a different view of things and I think one of the ways you talk to people who make up their minds about bush they don't want to hear anything is you have to sort of be able to say to people this is not about I'm threatening you one of the things that's happened in political discourse and you'll see it often is people who get so angry their faces get all flushed and the tendons and their neck stand out and they're what will shake like a turkey gobblers you're a fine I really think we have to become used to the phenomenon of being able to talk politics with people with whom we disagree in a way that is not only civil but is actually fun it's fun to talk politics to discuss politics with people who don't agree with you let me take you a whole different direction for a minute here there is a pig that was named after you why don't you exploit one of my greatest honors I know I thought that was funny do you consider it one of your greatest honor yes I do I was a police reporter in Minneapolis Minnesota at the beginning of my career and when I got the guys christened their mascot Pig after me Molly bigot March for years in the st. Patrick's Day Parade it's out there why is that something you're proud of oh come on what their honor that you possibly have except of course the other one I'm terribly proud of which is I was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M and I want to know why it's one of those stories where the punchline is better than this story am you say have a rule for all I know they still do very little changes at the school saying you couldn't have political speakers on campus and the administration had had both very cold water and John tower and to speak that year but said the administration they didn't give political speeches so there's a group of kids on campus who want to test this rule and we went that we wound up having it we couldn't have it on campus we went across the street to the Methodist Student Center where I get my dead-level best to incite a riot I think seven people came out to hear me and when I was through they tried very politely and we all went out for a beer you have all of these opinions and you have a great way of sharing them with people why don't you run for office oh good heavens you know it takes an enormous amount of patience to be in politics and I'm I don't think I have it I really don't I I'll tell you where you get it if you have raised two or more children successfully you will be very good at politics because it's just you understand the degree of patience it takes and raising kids in politics are actually a lot alike you know there's two things that all good moms know there's what to do when there's one cookie and two kids first kid gets divided the cookies second kid gets first choice which every what all moms know that what to do if there are two kids in the back seat hitting each other each one I'm started at first it hit me first I did not if you are good driver you will first pull over the side of the road but it has been scientifically proven that this is not necessary this is well your voice and you say I don't care who first you will now stop all political problems from how to divide the federal budget to how to achieve peace in the Middle East are just variations two hits of one cookie and two kids hit each other each one employment the other ones started at first okay you have those answers you know how to handle those situations so why don't you do it but living through it no it does require an enormous amount of patience to be in politics Garrison Keillor observed recently that in politics when you're running for office it's great you get to talk all the time and then when you win you have to sit there and listen to a whole bunch of other people who have a have a hair up their butt Arianna Huffington a few years ago wrote a book about overthrowing the government and how people should all get involved in the government what can we do what should people be doing to be more involved in their political system well this is something I feel passionately about and one of the statements that takes me back every time I hear it is well there's nothing I can do oh just one person I have no influence over those people in Washington those people in Austin what there's something I can do you know just by being a voting American citizen at this point in history you have more political power than 99% of all the people who have ever lived don't throw that away his country is not run by those people in Washington and it's not run by those people in Austin this country is run by all of us it is our deal we just hired those people to drive the bus for a while and we shouldn't ever let them forget it people will say but look what happened in Florida the last presidential election you know it didn't matter what the popular vote was so how is our vote matter um pay matters immensely now I'm not saying that the democratic system has not been corrupted of course it has been by the usual suspect money I mean to find me anybody in this country and I don't care where they come from on a political spectrum who does not understand that the big special interest money influences the way our politicians both more than we do but if we stand up in a holler loud enough when we raise enough hell as corrupted as that system has been by money and there's the way to fix that they'll listen to us okay you gave me my next question what's the way to fix that the way to fix the money thing is public campaign financing the oldest thing in politics is she got to dance with them what branya and that used to mean that you voted with the people who elected you no here's a bunch of people down in Texas who are all in favor of the Angora goat subsidy hive only in favor of Angora goat subsidies what has happened now is that because of the way campaigns are financed it's enormous amount of corporate special interest money portion of the coffers of politicians and when they get elected that's who they vote with often against the interests of their own constituents when you are an elected official how should you decide how to vote it's a question that often comes up writing to politicians and the debate goes back and forth are you there to represent the people that voted for you or are you there to represent what you believe and that they're voting for you to bring your best judgment where's the general consensus is that you most the time you vote the way your constituents want you to if you are having a serious group of conscience or your understanding of the problem is radically different from that of your voters then you're being paid for your best judgment and you go with it but those occasions are very rare the trickiest thing in politics people always think that it's going to be very simple oh there aren't very many 6040 decisions in politics they're awful lot of 5149 decisions and that's why they get paid what's the most surprising thing you think that's come out of politics this past year hmm thing that got you just the most incensed I really think that the administration pulled a giant bait and switch operation and I've never seen one done more effectively suddenly Osama bin Laden was gone and there was Saddam Hussein who had had nothing to do with 9/11 and you keep saying how did that happen what are we supposed to get Osama bin first you know it's a Texas thing lots of people think he has two front names no sound of them like Jerry Jeff Joe Bob I don't get Osama bin the first how are we gonna rectify all of that what do you think they're gonna have to do to straight know what's going on in the rest of the world well let me tell you something they part of it lives on is depends on your attitude I for the purposes of this new book bushwhacked my publisher wants me to mention the title we went through every speech that George study has made on foreign policy but before and after September 11th and what you get again and again it's quite striking is the language of fear he talks about threats and enemies and dangers and evil as though the whole world were lurking out there at dark a great thing waiting to come get it see nowhere addresses the idea of you know here's what we need to do to make a better world and here's how we can work with other countries to do it and we could get together on this and solve this problem we could get together here and solve that problem no it's always threat danger enemy and there's something about the language of fear that makes people feel helpless you know they sit there though oh I can't just roll that the air mmm this is bad people get so scared that centers they hurt themselves and we see that in this country is in the history of this country people get so scared of some terrible menace of crime or drugs or communism or illegal aliens or terrorism that we think we can make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free let's give up some of our rights that'll be safer actually when you make yourself less safe unless that's free you're not safer you're just less free you know that's a wonderful story to tell especially with the weather we have going on around us right I was like ending with a wonderful ghost story Moloch thank you very much for joining us all right it was my pleasure

Channel: HoustonPBS

Views: 12,324

Rating: 4.9220781 out of 5

Keywords: molly, ivins, on, innerviews, with, ernie, manouse, interview, pbs, houston, channel, newspaper, columnist, liberal, political, commentator, humorist, author

Id: b0gSCrcgq7A

Length: 26min 49sec (1609 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 09 2011