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FANATICS & FOOLS
Arianna Huffington
Columnist; Former Candidate for Governor of California; Author, Fanatics & Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America
We see how increasingly every candidate, whether Arnold Schwarzenegger or George Bush, is running on a platform of reform, because they all have pollsters telling them that the public wants reform. Therefore, they run on that platform; they govern very differently. You may remember that George Bush ran as a reformer, with results. Arnold Schwarzenegger runs as a populist who is going to clean up house in Sacramento, especially the power of the special interest. As it has turned out, he has taken millions from special interests and there hasn't been any cleaning up of Sacramento.
We don't have results yet, but at least we've changed rhetoric, which is the beginning. The public has to also recognize the difference between convincing rhetoric, backed by millions of dollars, and reality.
It takes a while, partly because the media are suffering from attention deficit disorder and they're mesmerized by power. We saw it when the media found itself embedded, not just during the war in Iraq, but before the war in Iraq, and during its aftermath. There has been sporadically good reporting, but in general, especially on the run-up to war, once you start the war we had this confusing period about are you attacking the troops or are you attacking the policy – that's when the media should really be investigating and offering challenges before something as important as invading another country preemptively was undertaken.
In the same way, here in California we see this acceptance of what Arnold Schwarzenegger is doing – even though what he's doing is completely contrary to what he campaigned on. He definitely did not campaign on cutting higher education. But we are now, for the first time in California history since 1960, breaking the promise that every qualified high school student will go to college. Just because the media are celebrating and everyone agrees, there's nothing particularly great about agreement if you're agreeing about the wrong thing.
One of the problems we have somehow accepted is the fact that it is more important to give everybody a car tax refund (worth $150 on average) than to make sure local governments have the money they need for police, for fire protection and even for community colleges. What has happened to this country when those kind of perverted priorities are accepted by the media and the public as the order of the day? The November election is a great opportunity to address these issues, because presidential elections are a very important moment for coming together and asking some of these fundamental questions, like: What kind of a country do we want to live in?
What you really need is the whole alternative vision for the state or the country, a whole alternative narrative. That's what I'm urging for John Kerry. It's not enough to have a brilliant attack of George Bush as a fanatic surrounded by fanatics. It's not enough to have a better Medicare plan. He needs to offer the American people an alternative moral vision for this country. The public is hungry for it.
Defining the Terms
I'm using the word fanatics rigorously, not loosely. There are three main symptoms of the condition. First is to not want to be bothered by the facts, it doesn't matter what the evidence is. You're invading Iraq or you are cutting taxes, and the fact that jobs do not follow the cut in taxes doesn't matter; cut them some more. The second symptom is the belief that you have a direct line to God Almighty – and I don't mean Dick Cheney – and it doesn't matter how nightmarish the consequences of your actions are. You're just doing the Almighty's bidding. The third symptom is repetition, repetition, repetition. Before we invaded Iraq, the president and his fellow fanatics so often told us that somehow Saddam was implicated in September 11. Sixty-six percent of the public believed it.
The fools are the congenitally spineless leaders of the Democratic Party who enable the fanatics to prevail, because the fanatics cannot prevail without the fools enabling them. Thank God something happened during the Democratic primary. The movement unleashed through the Internet, through the pent-up need for reform, led not to the victory of Howard Dean but to the co-opting of the message of Howard Dean by every candidate except Joe Lieberman. So there's been a bit of a spine transplant into the Democratic Party. Joe Trippi, who ran the Dean campaign, and I have come together and have put forward a petition to John Kerry, which is on my web site, fanaticsandfools.org, saying, Let George Bush own September 11 and the politics of fear. You need to own September 12 and the politics of hope. Because it was on September 12 when blood banks overflowed. People had to be turned away from Ground Zero because there were so many who wanted to help. There was an enormous outpouring of generosity of money, of time, and people had really come together as a community. It was the worst of times but it was also the best of times. That opportunity to come together was squandered. George Bush called us to do nothing beyond going shopping and going to Disneyworld.
Now is an opportunity for John Kerry to call on us to be part of a greater collective undertaking. This is a historic moment. The public is longing to be called to something greater – partly because of September 11, which did change a lot of things in this country; partly because of the threat of terrorism; partly because of what we're seeing now that the war in Iraq is coming home into our own living rooms with the deaths of young men and women, with the gulf in sacrifice that we see between those getting multi-trillion dollar tax cuts and those losing their lives. Idealism is the sleeper issue of 2004. That's why in this petition we're urging John Kerry not to run a swing-voter campaign, trying to appeal to the 3 or 5 percent he can pull away from the Republicans, slicing and dicing the message, and instead running a visionary, inspirational campaign, appealing to the 50 percent of Americans who have given up on voting. Even if we can get 10 percent of them back, it will dramatically change our politics and our country.
Our house is on fire. When your house is on fire, it's not the best time to talk about remodeling. This is the time to put the fire out. Send George Bush back to Crawford, Texas. Then we need to immediately begin again, in earnest, the critical work of political remodeling. That's where reform comes in. At the national and the state level, campaign finance reform is at the heart of any reform. Campaign finance reform has to mean public financing of campaigns. Everything else just leads to the creation of more groups, other ways to run campaigns, either with or without the candidates. Public financing of campaigns is the way to level the playing field, to make it possible for candidates to run who are not self-financed, who are not beholden to special interests or not willing to be beholden to special interests. At the same time, other electoral reforms, like instant runoff voting and same-day registration, will open up the system.
In California, we need to address our structural problems. It starts with the corporate tax loopholes, domestic and foreign, which, together with the loophole in Prop. 13 about commercial property tax assessment, would bring this state about $7 billion. It is irresponsible and immoral that we are not addressing this, given the alternative. It's not even a question of raising taxes; loopholes are not something that, whether you're on the Right or on the Left, you should count on – because ultimately it's a way to defraud the public.
If we're going to fundamentally reform our state and our country, we need to appeal to what is best in everyone. We are all a mixture of self-interest and generosity. Most of politics is pandering. What I'm talking about we haven't seen much of since 1968 and the death of Bobby Kennedy John Lewis, the congressman and civil rights leader, said that when Bobby Kennedy, died something died in American politics; something died in all of us. We need to recapture it; we need to bring it back. John Kerry is, interestingly enough, connected to Bobby Kennedy in different ways, including the fact that on June 5, 1968, Kerry is coming home from Vietnam on the night Bobby Kennedy is assassinated, and he's listening on the crackling radio to what's happening at the Ambassador Hotel. By the time he arrives at the docks, Bobby Kennedy is dead. That's the beginning of his coming of age as a leader, which, three years later, leads to his testifying in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urging his country to get out of Vietnam. That testimony is incredibly powerful, compelling; it has the moral clarity and fearlessness that we need to see from him now. Then he caught Bobby Kennedy's line, which is from George Bernard Shaw, but which, nevertheless, Bobby Kennedy made his own: "Some people see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and ask, 'Why not?'" Why not access to health care for everyone? Why not good schools? Why not clean air? Why not leaders who respect us enough to tell us the truth? We have the resources to spend $200 billion in Iraq, right? It's just a matter of priorities.
Politics and public policy are ultimately about priorities. They're never, in a country as rich as ours, about money. This election has to be about all that, not just about the questions that Karl Rove and George Bush want. I recall a conversation I had over Christmas with a family of Greek friends and an 11-year-old boy, who's a Bush Republican. He said, "Arianna, I'm going to convince you to vote for George Bush in November." Never one who will discourage a young boy interested in politics, I said, "Fire away." He said, "I have two questions for you. The first is, Do you have to pay more or less of your money in taxes? And the second is, Do you want to fight the war on terror?" I thought, Wow, Karl Rove really has the message down in such a simple way, so accessible, so clear, that even an 11-year-old can be on message. The correct answer to this wrong question is it's about time that we connected the dots between taxes and all the things that we want, like fire and police protection and good schools and clean air. Otherwise we'll be like Arnold Schwarzenegger, who railed against taxes and goes to Washington, calls himself "The Collectornator" because he's going to bring so much money back to Sacramento. Where does he think this money is coming from – movie grosses? It's taxes. Connecting the dots is the right answer to that question of whether we want to give more or less of our money. In terms of the war on terror, the answer is, Yes, I'd like to fight the war on terror. When do we start? Invading Iraq was not about fighting the war on terror. Indeed, it has made us less safe and less secure as a country.
This election should be about the key question: Isn't it about time that hard-working Americans were put first and that trickle-up, not trickle-down, was the order of the day? Wouldn't it be nice if we had fewer poor people every year in this country instead of having 3 million more people living in poverty since George Bush became president? The American people are ready for this larger question. It's just that we need to make them central to this campaign. Paul Wellstone, before he died, I asked him, "What should we be looking for in a president?" He said, "We should be looking for somebody to bring the best out in us." Our problems are not going to be solved simply by government. They're going to be solved when we all get involved in solving them. That is what leaders can do – evoke the best in us the way John Kennedy did with the Peace Corps and LBJ did with VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and FDR did with the Civilian Conservation Corps. These were moments when our leaders appealed to what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." This is the way to also bring back some of those 100 million people who have given up. This is the fundamental reform, because in any system, when you have half the people checking out, this cannot be a healthy, thriving democracy.
The bottom line is that there is a lot each one of us can do between now and November 2 to make sure this is a different election; that it's not business as usual and that the people who've given up on our system recognize it's not business as usual. The stakes are so high that we all have the opportunity and the obligation to do everything we can, because the result of this election will irrevocably shape the 21st century.
