Says Flanders of the administration’s spin:
“The missile shield is useless, but the estrogen shield really
works.
Photos: Margaret Michniewicz
Laura Flanders is the host of “The Laura Flanders Show,” heard weekends, 7-9 p.m. on Air America. She is the author of Bushwomen: How They Won the White House for Their Man, an investigation into the women in George W. Bush’s Cabinet. She was the founding director of the Women’s Desk at the media watch group, FAIR, and writes regularly for Tompaine.com, The Nation, Ms. Magazine, and Znet. She sat down with Vermont Woman before speaking at UVM last month to discuss political history, trends and her most recent book:
Says Flanders of the administration’s spin:
“The missile shield is useless, but the estrogen shield really
works.
Your book was written pre-election, and ends with Bush’s declining numbers at that time. Your new forward still seems hopeful regarding grassroots political activism, but less so in terms of the leadership. What happened in 2004?
I think, sadly, that 2004 proved the case that the “W Stands for Women” campaign was successful. They increased Bush’s proportion of the women’s vote from 43 to 48 percent — still a minority, but that was a huge leap in shrinking the gender gap. For Kerry to win the women’s vote by just three percent was feeble, down from sixteen percent for Clinton. Ultimately, as I write, the campaign boiled down to who was most macho. I still feel there is every reason for a candidate going against Bush to redefine macho…to say that a strong man in the 21st century America stands up for human equality; a strong man plays with others, a strong man doesn’t hit first; a strong man preserves the environment and looks out for the weakest; and to say you, Bush, are none of those things. Instead of doing that, Kerry tried to prove he could be as strong as the other guy; he entered the macho contest, and lost
On the one hand you have this macho supremacist rhetoric playing out, and you also have this “W Stands for Women” effort that, along with other efforts like that, showed that the Republican Party was busy pursuing its own version of identity politics at the very same time that the Democratic campaign chose to soft pedal exactly that. So you had John Kerry telling “Women for Kerry”, you know ‘I’m not going to pursue the women’s vote’. It was an interesting and unfortunate timing of events, the Democrats were saying they didn’t want to be associated with women and people of color at just the time that Republicans were figuring out how to make their pitch to those constituencies and, while Republicans didn’t even come close to turning a majority of votes there, they did shave away at that Democratic base.
2004 brought millions of new voters to the polls — what is the next step for them?
Unfortunately I think the Democratic Party has a habit of keeping at arms length the very people who could save it, as compared to the Republican Party, who for the last 30 years has never found a marginal, radical group on its flank that it hasn’t figured out how to incorporate and bring into its electoral base. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, has gone to great lengths to distance itself from fair trade organizers, radical feminists, racial justice activists, even the trade union movement around NAFTA. In 2004 you saw that with one million women at the March for Women’s Lives – and the candidate didn’t even show.
I think the way forward is in those grassroots groups that even in 2004 managed to increase the minimum wage in Nevada and Florida; that rolled back an anti-gay initiative in Cincinnati, even as the state of Ohio was embroiled in this discussion about gay-marriage. There is a way to do progressive politics in America right now and I think there are examples of hopefulness. The organizing tends to be very local, very personal, very full of integrity.
What is your analysis of the current democratic leaders, including Howard Dean’s election to chair the Democratic National Committee?
I think the rise of Dean to the DNC is an example of really good organizing by Howard Dean who is one heck of an organizer, and his message, which is that he wants to reinvigorate the party from the ground up. It is one thing to reinvigorate the party; the question is, on what principles. One thing that concerns me about Howard Dean is that one of his first trips after becoming DNC chair was to Mississippi and the South — good, go to the South — but his message was immediately that we can embrace pro-life Democrats, we don’t want to be the party of pro-choice. That I think is a ridiculous message for a party whose most loyal, most generous voting base is pro-choice women and pro-choice people more broadly. I think these local initiatives suggest that people are not fixed in their views. They sure have been propagandized by the right for 20 years, but you can swing people on a person-to-person level around some of the scariest topics in the country like sexuality and discrimination. We have a majority of people in this country who favor a women’s right to choose, and that’s without the candidate even saying the word. So, I am encouraged by the commitment to invigorate the party, but I’m concerned about on what basis.
Are there any Democratic leaders with a more progressive message than what we have seen the last few years?
Author Laura Flanders says, "The one person carrying a progressive torch right now is Barbara Boxer."
The one person carrying a progressive torch right now is Barbara Boxer, who I think, unfortunately, with our East Coast-biased media comes in for a lot of anti-California bashing, and dismissive coverage. She was asked in Time Magazine recently if she had forgiven Condi Rice for suggesting that she, Boxer, had impugned Rice’s integrity and Boxer, said, god bless her, “I don’t think she’s forgiven me and I haven’t forgiven her for lying to the American people.” That gives you a sense of how this stuff is being covered - there’s no reason on earth why she should forgive Rice for anything, when Boxer was actually standing up for Congress and the American people. So there is some leadership there, but again it doesn’t come out of the blue. She has been elected by more people than any other senator, and she has been hearing from her constituents that they want her to stand tough.
Where do advocacy organizations like NOW, NARAL, and Feminist Majority fit in?
The fact that the Democratic Party did not give a budget to the women’s caucus, to Women for Kerry, that they had to raise their own budget, speaks volumes, and that was true also for African American and youth organizers. I think we’ve got to remake the women’s movement from the bottom up too, because the organizations we’ve got have, for better or worse, ossified in Washington. From the get-go of the early 1980s, they have had to be defending the few laws that were passed in the 1970s enshrining the principles of gender equality in the law. They’ve become very Washington-based and focused organizations, fighting the good fight around legislation, all of which is critically important — yes we must defend Roe v. Wade — but there’s much more that has to be done. On a certain level that has to go back again to the states because…on all of these levels, the gains that have been made are being challenged locally, and I think that could reinvigorate the movement.
Your book was really a counter to mass media’s lack of coverage of these women, but can you say more about what is wrong with the press? Why is it wrong and is it fixable?
The book I did right before this was Real Majority, Media Minority, and it was about how we pay for sexism in news coverage. I felt that feminist criticism of media issues had focused largely on representational issues and pornography and what was called exploitation, but very few people were paying attention to the way that sexism was actually affecting our news. There’s a lack of people and there’s a chilling effect on feminists who are in the media, in that they bend over backwards to pretend that they are not because it has become a bad word. There’s been a 25-year media campaign funded, fueled, and underwritten by the right to create that impression about what feminism is and isn’t, and whether its good or bad, and women’s groups have been too busying trying to keep health clinics open to fund a media response.
Vermont has a relatively independent media, compared with many other places, and we actually have women at almost every level in the chain of the newspapers, but there is still a huge void in coverage of women’s issues.
The women I know in the media, most of them are very under the gun not to be perceived as feminists in a way that guys are not. Men never have to be defensive on sexism in their coverage or for overemphasizing men, but if women start doing stories about women they get sort of ghetto-ized as a women’s reporter, and women’s issues are ghetto-ized as somehow less than other issues. In my other book I asked why the only time you read about the effects of policy on women are in these human interest stories and I would say, what other kind of interests are there? I think in the same way people think liberals control the media, people think feminist issues are old hat or out of style. There’s this phenomenon of surplus visibility — I know on the radio if I ever mention anything to do with gays they think that is all I ever talk about, and I think its probably the same with women reporters covering women’s issues: they are super sensitive of how often they do and don’t cover them.
Is it simply a matter of reframing? Do progressives need our own version of Karen Hughes to win, and if that is the case, is that a victory that we can be proud of or would we be sacrificing something along the way?
There’s two answers to that, Karen Hughes and the right have been reframing because they were on the losing side of the rhetorical battle in the 1970s and the early 80s with the rise of the anti-apartheid movement and the divestment campaign against the US intervention in Central American and nuclear freeze. They kind of looked around and said wait, the left has all the good language. That’s when they started talking about pro-life and protecting family security and peacekeeper missiles and victory through strength. Absolutely its time for us to do it again, to retool our rhetoric; but I don’t think it is only a question of rhetoric. We honestly have a Democratic Party that has to recommit to being the party of the majority of people in this country who are vulnerable and just getting by, and that includes women, working people, people of color, and immigrants. We’ve had a party for almost 20 years now that has been trying to be the “just as friendly to corporations” party, the “just as attractive to campaign contributions from Fortune 500 companies” party, what we saw in 2004 was the logical conclusion of that. We do have to have some substance there. If we retool the rhetoric to downplay our commitment to equality, to downplay our commitment to peace through negotiation, downplay our commitment to the environment or civil rights, we aren’t going to get anywhere. It’s like if Howard Dean tries to rebuild the Democratic Party on the basis of being open to bigots and anti-choice people, that won’t get us very far.
If this grassroots momentum continues but doesn’t seem to get anywhere with democratic leadership, are third parties the way to go?
I think so, if only as a model. Somewhere we have to show models of what alternatives are look like, and Vermont has more third party members than any other state in the union. You are developing in this state a model of politics as influenced by a third party — like the town meeting initiatives around the National Guard; you may not get everything you want but you are at least modeling alternatives, which I think is invaluable. Now when you get to presidential races it’s trickier, but I do think that again our media tend to focus on personality over principle, personality over politics. Maybe the most important politician in your life isn’t the president, but is your city council member, or the representative of your town, or the decision made by your town hall meeting. I think if our media weren’t so kind of unipolar and wasn’t such a celebrity system, star system of politics, there’d be more involvement at the local level. But in many parts of this country you have to dig really deep through the papers to see anything that is happening in your own town.
The chapter talking about Bush’s gubernatorial run and how Karen Hughes had been attacking Ann Richards for years ahead of time was very interesting. How do you combat politicians who use negative campaigning by proxy so that they can keep their hands clean, and continue to be seen as “nice boys”?
Good question. We saw it with the Swift Boat Veterans and Kerry and we are seeing it now with some kind of 527 group campaigning against Hillary Clinton that will have no official ties to the White House, but obviously is intending to do exactly the same thing, to take her down before she can make a run for office. I think the only thing you can do to combat it is good reporting, which reveals who these people are. It wouldn’t have been impossible for people to document what Karen Hughes was doing and pull back the veil on how this thing was working, the same way that it wasn’t impossible to pull back the veil, finally, to show that the White House press conference room was cozy territory for White House operatives working on the GOP dime. It took a while but wasn’t impossible. The only way to meet subliminal messaging or covert operations is with more publicity, more exposure, more open discussion of what is going on. I don’t see why local politicians can’t be held accountable for the campaigning that the party does on their behalf.
UVM’s Ira Allen Chapel landed a slot on a national book tour courtesy of the Vermont Progressive Party and International Socialist Organization last month. Authors Tariq Ali and Laura Flanders were on hand for a well-attended political discussion on “Bush’s Wars: Abroad and At Home” on Monday, April 18th.
Frank Nicosia, a professor of history at St. Michael’s College, introduced Tariq Ali by saying, “no introduction can ever do justice to his life of activism in the cause of peace and justice in this world.” Ali is Afghani by birth but grew up in Pakistan. He was forced into exile after demonstrating against that country’s military dictatorship. He is the author of more than a dozen books on world history and politics – the best known is On Western Imperialism and the most recent is Bush in Babylon: The Recolonization of Iraq. “His books provide what the media and pundits cannot or will not provide: namely, historical context for today’s problems,” Nicosia said.
Ali is an engaging speaker, wringing frequent laughter from the audience by juxtaposing the claims of various officials with the facts of reality. “The second goal of Afghanistan was to bring back Mullah Omar and what happened? Omar, with one eye, who can’t see and has a limp, has disappeared,” he facetiously marveled. “When last seen he was heading towards the desert on a motorbike – like Steve McQueen – and hasn’t been seen since.” And on the argument by Laura Bush and Cherie Blair that Afghanistan was really about freeing women from the Taliban, he said, “If this were the case, it would be the first time in the history of imperialism they had fought a war in support of women’s liberation."
Underneath the humor, however, Ali painted a bleak picture of a world where decisions are defended without reference to current or historical fact. “When Bush said that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were linked, the whole Arab world roared with laughter,” he said. “Anyone who knew anything about the history of the region knew that they’d both vowed to destroy each other – so why tell these lies?” He referred to memoirs by Bob Woodward and Paul O’Neill that describe an administration obsessed with Iraq from day one that decided to use September 11th to remake the world as it chose.
Ali also spoke about the complicity of the American media in covering the invasion and occupation of Iraq – and when coverage becomes propaganda. The images of people cheering the troops pulling into Baghdad, and pulling down the statue of Saddam were completely orchestrated, using six busloads of Kuwaitis as a “rent-a-crowd”. “We found this out because there was a Moroccan worker whose mother saw him on television and said ‘oh my god, what are you doing in Iraq’,” Ali said. As for the statue, he added, every television reporter there worked overtime to portray this event, and filmed it in different ways to show a crowd; but an independent media company filmed the whole event and showed all the cameramen standing in an empty area with a handful of people while marines pulled the statue down.
Laura Flanders – radio host of Air America and author of Bushwomen, an investigation of the women in Bush’s Cabinet (see interview with Flanders, pg. 18) – followed Ali with an analysis of ‘Bush’s wars at home.’ She also questioned the validity of official spin, beginning with the characterization of Laura Bush’s radio address in November of 2001 as the “first presidential address of a first lady all by herself” – ignoring Eleanor Roosevelt’s regular radio appearance decades earlier. “Timing is everything,” Flanders said. “The macho ‘dead or alive’ rhetoric was wearing thin, so the she went on to reassure people that the war was not about revenge, but about liberation, and the bombings became an act of defense. The missile shield is useless, but the estrogen shield really works.”
The 2004 elections were the culmination of culture wars fulminating since the 1960s, according to Flanders. “The white supremacist male was dethroned, but he wasn’t shoved out altogether; he was waiting in the wings and in the election it came down to who was more macho. Bush paraded his crotch on the deck of the carrier and no one even laughed,” she said. Flanders hope for the future is a collective reaction against “killer capitalism”. “I don’t think we like occupation by Wal-mart any more than the people of Iraq like occupation by Marines, but it requires us all to get out of our isolation,” she said. “In the past we knew it was worth it to leave the mainstream because we knew the seeds of the future would be sown in the margins, and there is power in that.”
The event was also sponsored by the Burlington Anti-War Coalition, The Peace and Justice Center, UVM ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies, UVM Departments of Economics and Sociology, UVM Students Against War, UVM Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and Vermont Livable Wage Campaign.
Mary Fratini is a freelance writer and photographer living in Montpelier.
She can be reached at 229-6178 or maryfrat@yahoo.com.