Episode 24: #TakeThemDown

The nation reels from the devastating attack in Charlottesville, Virginia and confronts an administration that blames “many sides.” We discuss bringing down confederate monuments and bring you more coverage from Netroots Nation. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

In the wake of the attacks in Charlottesville, the debate about confederate monuments has reached a fever pitch, with municipalities across the country moving forward to #takethemdown, and brave activists in Durham, North Carolina tearing down a statue with their own hands. When arrest warrants were issued for those alleged to be involved, hundreds of allies lined up at the police station attempting to turn themselves in, in solidarity. Jeremy Slevin speaks with Professor Kirk Savage, an author and expert on civil war monuments, to discuss the troubling history of these monuments. Later in the show, we bring you more interviews from last weekend’s Netroots Nation conference in Atlanta.

This week’s guests:

• Kirk Savage, author of “Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves” and expert on civil war monuments
• Jason Kander, President of Let America Vote and former candidate for Senate in Missouri
• Keith Ellison, Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee
• Jon “Bowzer” Bauman, musician from Shanana and President of Social Security Works Pac

For more on this week’s topics:

• Check out Kirk Savage’s book, “Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves”
• Learn more about Let America Vote
• Watch the crowd at the UVA vigil for Charlottesville sing Amazing Grace

This program aired on August 18, 2017.

Transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. Last week’s horrific events in Charlottesville which should correctly be labeled an act of domestic terrorism, not just as a car crash or a clash between ideologies or so-called, ‘both sides’, laid bare the white supremacy that persists in America in the year 2017. It was especially gut wrenching watching this violence play out in the city I came to love during my law school years at the University of Virginia and where a number of friends and colleagues of mine live and work today. Ultimately, as has been discussed at length in the days following the deaths of three people and the injuries of at least 19, the white nationalist vigil held in Charlottesville was about maintaining power based on racial identity and specifically, white identity. Many watching these events, and in the wake of the Trump administration’s reversal on affirmative action just days before have asked in earnest, why in 2017 are we still talking about race and racial equity? The short version is because while we’ve traveled lightyears since the signing of the Civil Rights Act, we’re still struggling mightily to reach meaning racial equity in the United States of America. There are a lot of ways to measure this.

Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post points out a few of note in an article earlier this week entitled, “The ‘War on Whites’ in a Myth and an Ugly One”. White people, he points out, earn more money and own more stuff. For example, median household income for whites in this country is nearly twice that of the typical Black household income and the net worth of the typical white family of $132,000 is nearly 15 times greater than that of the typical Black households net worth of just over $9,000. Whites have greater rates of homeownership, they face unemployment at nearly half the rates of Blacks. They have significantly longer life expectancies. White people are far less likely to be incarcerated; Black men are more than 6 times more likely than white men to end up in prison, which itself is a major driver of racial inequities. And these are just a handful of examples.

With much of the discussion in the days following the Charlottesville violence focused on the significance of confederate monuments that persist in 2017, Jeremy Slevin A.K.A the Slevinator sat down with Professor Kirk Savage, the author of “Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monuments in 19th America” to get his take. And later in this week’s episode, more of my conversations at NetRoots about the future of progressive politics and policies. I speak with Jason Kander, former candidate for Senate in Missouri and now president of Let America Vote. Congressman Keith Ellison, one of the leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. And finally, Jon “Bowzer” Bauman, formerly of the band Sha Na Na and now a leader in progressive politics and President of Social Security Works PAC.

Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

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JEREMY SLEVIN: Joining me now is Professor Kirk Savage, he’s the author of “Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monuments in 19th Century America”, along with many other books and an expert in civil war monuments. Kirk, thanks so much for joining me.

KIRK SAVAGE: Thanks for having me.

SLEVIN: So I think what a lot of people don’t know about the history here is that most of these monuments were constructed decades after the civil war, around the turn of the 20th century. Can you give us a sense of the timeline and why that happened?

SAVAGE: Right, well that’s correct, the big boom in confederate monument building was sort of roughly between 1890 and 1920, and then there was a secondary boom in confederate commemoration that was in reaction to the civil rights movement in the ’50s and ’60s. So in both these cases there were political reasons why those monuments were erected when they were. The first boom took place of course during the consolidation of Jim Crow and racial segregation in the South, kind of final defeat of the ideals of reconstruction and racial equality in the South. And the second boom when, took place when that Jim Crow era came under threat from the civil rights movement. Now I should say that there were also you know, in the North there was a less marked but similar lag in monument construction, simply because the veterans of that war were dying off. But what really distinguished the southern commemoration of the lost cause, the white southern commemoration of the lost cause was the systematic campaign to build monuments, rewrite textbooks, put confederate flags and symbols in public schools so, and this was happening in the 1890s, in the 19th and early 20th century. A really kind of systematic propaganda campaign to advance the racial cause of the confederacy.

SLEVIN: And the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville was constructed in, sort of in the tail end of that first wave, somewhere in the 1920s.

SAVAGE: Right, in the early ’20s if I remember correctly. And yes, so that’s interesting in a way that it took them so long, you know, Richmond erected it’s monument, it’s huge, kind of magnificent actually monument to Robert E. Lee in 1890, and New Orleans a few years before that. But the Richmond monument really sort of kicked off that kind of campaign to make the confederacy respectable again.

SLEVIN: And I was struck in your book that it wasn’t, these weren’t necessarily initiated by the government. In a lot of cases they were these volunteer sort of activists organizations that pushed for these monuments. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SAVAGE: Yes, yes in fact it wasn’t until really much later that state governments really got involved in the earlier days, late 19th century particularly, it was these activist organizations that were in the south, largely driven by women’s groups. And the United Daughters of the Confederacy was the outgrowth of that, that organization which then really conducted this systematic campaign that I just mentioned. And that’s the way kind of monuments, public monuments worked in general in the 19th century is that it was sort of elite civic organizations that erected them, and only certain groups had real access to public space in that period of time. So of course African-Americans, Native Americans, you know, people in general, people of color really had no access to that arena and no entry into that conversation.

SLEVIN: Was there public backlash at the [time]? Like I can’t imagine, I mean of course this is the Jim Crow south we’re talking about but was there public outcry to these monuments?

SAVAGE: There was some, which is interesting. So for example, to return to the example of Richmond and the monument to Lee in 1890, there was a Black newspaper published called The Richmond Planet, published in Richmond which published a fiery series of articles about that monument and in opposition to it and talking about the Black community’s relationship to that monument which was of course entirely different from the white community’s. So there were these pockets of resistance, they were largely overlooked by of course, by the mainstream white media and politicians. But they were there and so what it shows us is that kind of resistance, that kind of attitude to the monuments was always there, it just wasn’t reported for the most part.

SLEVIN: And as you mentioned earlier there was a second wave during the civil rights movement, which you know, many of us associate with progress and the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s and the Voting Rights Act. But there wasn’t a big systematic campaign to take down these monuments. In fact, we saw an uptick. Why do you think that was?

SAVAGE: Well, look who was in charge.

SLEVIN: Right.

SAVAGE: Of the state and local governments in the south. I mean they were still in white hands exclusively. And very worried about their loss of power and the potential, you know, that they might have to share power with African-Americans. So it was very much a backlash against that civil rights movement. So you see places like Alabama for the first time in the 1960s displaying the confederate flag on it’s capitol building. So very much a kind of defiant pushback against the forces that were trying to destroy segregation.

SLEVIN: And it sounds like that mirrors the iconography of the confederate flag as well. It became a symbol during the lost cause and then was taken up by segregationists in the 1960s. Have they followed a similar trajectory?

SAVAGE: Monuments and flags you mean?

SLEVIN: Yeah.

SAVAGE: Yeah, yes to so extent. It’s interesting to me that in this, after the Dylann Roof massacre in Charleston, in the Charleston church, the first symbols, you know, to be attacked were the flags. Of course he was shown in those photographs holding the confederate flags. And so it’s interesting, I haven’t really thought it through but it’s interesting to me that we have now that with the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville at the Robert E. Lee memorial, now the attention has turned to monuments. And but yes, in a sense these always went in a kind of parallel process. But the unraveling that sees to go flag first, monument second.

SLEVIN: In the book you write, I love this phrase, “public monuments were meant to yield resolution and consensus. But the process of commemoration often leads to conflict, not closure, because in defining the past we define our present.” What do you see as the next step? Is there a sort of closure? Do these monuments have to come down?

SAVAGE: Well, yeah, that’s a really tricky question because I have for a long time kind of been maintaining that, hoping that we could have a kind of truth commission type of dialogue around these monuments. That the monuments could inspire us, could open the way to really confront the legacy of racial slavery and white supremacy in this nation. The question of what to do with any particular confederate monument would raise the larger questions that I think we urgently need to explore and wrestle with as a society. Unfortunately though, I think what’s happened now with Dylann Roof and neo-nazis and Charlottesville is that the time for dialogue is closing around these monuments and you know, local governments seeing now, they’re put in a position where they sort of have to take them down because otherwise they’re going to be appropriated by neo-nazis or they’re going to be torn down by counter protesters. And so I don’t, it’s a little hard for me to know what the way forward is now because we need to have this dialogue. We can’t just simply take these monuments down and think that we have solved our problem because we won’t have.

But on the other hand the monuments are honoring something that we absolutely need to repudiate. And so the easiest way to repudiate them is to take them down. And I understand why that was down in New Orleans and I think the mayor there did a very eloquent job of explaining why they had to come down. But now everything is lightning speed now and it’s hard to know where we’re going to be even a week from now.

SLEVIN: Well, we shall see. I appreciate you joining me professor Kirk Savage, an expert on civil war monuments, thanks so much.

SAVAGE: Thank you.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: Welcome to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas and here at Netroots Nation in Atlanta, Georgia, and I’m so pleased to be sitting here with Jason Kander. He the president of Let America Vote but a lot of you listening or watching right now probably remember him as the candidate for a Missouri senate seat who had that campaign aid where he took apart a gun and put it back together again. I know that’s how I first figured out who you were. Jason, thanks so much for joining the show.

JASON KANDER: Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

VALLAS: So you’re here at Netroots, talking about a lot of things but before I let you talk about those things, I kind of want to ask, so that campaign was last year and it really catapulted you to the national stage in a lot of ways. What did you learn and what was that experience like running? Tell a little bit about that story, how you got there and what happened.

KANDER: Well so in terms of what I learned, really more than anything the experience just sort of confirmed for me something I already believed about politics and still believe. And so for a little context, I’m a progressive from a red state, Trump won Missouri last year by 19, I lost by 2.8 percent. A few years before that I was elected statewide as secretary of state in a year, on the same day that President Obama, 2012, actually lost Missouri by 10 points. And in both cases, what I did is I went out and I made my argument, unapologetically made my argument for what I believed. As a progressive I believe that progressive policies are better for every American, not just certain folks, like everybody so as a result I’ve always believed in making my argument to everybody. So I didn’t run as a conservative Democrat, I’m a progressive and I outperformed the top of the ticket last year by 16 points, 220,000 folks who voted for Donald Trump also voted for me, that’s more than in any other competitive race in the country and though we didn’t win I do think that we demonstrated that voters will forgive you for believing something that they don’t necessarily already agree with so as long as they know that you really do believe it. And that you believe it because you think it’s best for them meaning that they know that they’re included in your vision.

VALLAS: Say more a little bit about that, give me a concrete example of that, maybe a policy.

KANDER: So for instance, maybe I would be on a given day in downtown St. Louis at a Planned Parenthood event and I’d be giving a speech about equal pay. Well you know, if a few hours later I was in a rural part of the state, didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to talk about equal pay, I was going to make the argument, maybe to a room mostly full of men, I would make the argument that hey, if your wife is going to work and making less money than somebody doing the exact same job as her you both have less money to send your kid to college and that’s a vacation, if not college, that’s a vacation you’re not going to take that year. That’s the exact same values, it’s the exact same argument. Whether you’re in the city or whether you’re in a rural area. But the point is is that you can’t arguments you don’t make. Now a lot of what I’m doing is focused on voting rights, fighting voter suppression. People say to me all the time, they say, you know Democrats have been losing this argument on voting rights for a while and I always say, no, we’re just not participating in it. You can’t win an argument you don’t make.

Look at the issue, look at health care, look at what happened on health care. Democrats were running away from Obamacare from the moment it was passed and then everybody wondered why it wasn’t very popular. I backed a public option in Missouri, I backed a public option in 2009, I was one of 1,000 state legislators at the time in the country to sign on in the country to say we needed one, I believe health care is a right, I’ve been very vocal about single payer. And what that all comes down to is we’re trying to convince people and so when people are running away from embracing the fact that it was a good thing. That if you had a pre-existing condition it was not, it didn’t mean you weren’t going to get health insurance anymore. The good things that have Obamacare has done. Well when the Republicans took over the White House and Congress, I think everybody sort of, I have a friend who likes to say courage sometimes is just the lack of options. And I think that’s what happened, I think everybody said let’s forcefully make this argument no matter the odds and lo and behold, we experienced a victory and not we’ve got to keep that going.

VALLAS: So you didn’t win, that’s spoiler alert for folks who haven’t been following, you didn’t win but you came very close as you said and really defied expectations in a lot of was by how much you actually managed to swing folks in your direction even if not quite enough. I’m curious what you feel the lessons that progressives and the progressive movement should take away from your candidacy and from your race and from how you ran it in an era where there’s a lot of discussion about well maybe we should move to the middle to try to get folks who voted for Trump and bring them back over to the Democratic party.

KANDER: So yeah there’s sort of this, I get this question a lot that sound of assumes there’s two possible directions, right, like you just mentioned it. One is do you go after and try to convince people who voted for Trump to vote for us, or do you go after the folks who you think already agree with you and speak to them? And I kind of reject the idea that that is a binary choice, you can only go one way or the other because my experience, you know winning a statewide race in a year where it was pretty tough as a Democrat in Missouri and then just barely losing in a year where it was a lot tougher, having that red state experience as a progressive, what I’ve learned is look it’s 2917. So with technology and with how interconnected the world is, the idea that you can go and speak to a group and say things that are different from what you say to the people who tend to agree with you, that’s just gone. You can’t do that. Like the folks who agree, they’re going to know. And then the people who you’re trying to convince, if you’re going to use this tactic of trying to, all this triangulation and massaging of this and that, like voters are pretty smart. And they’re not looking to be pandered to or tricked and they’re willing to forgive you for saying something they don’t believe if you are really saying what you believe. They want to trust you.

VALLAS: There’s an authenticity piece there.

KANDER: Yeah, it’s like being a good person, don’t say things you don’t believe. In politics that’s kind of the rule too and it’s interesting how if you, when you go to the folks who may not have always voted with you and may not agree with you on everything, you’re making the same case just as passionately as you do with the people who are already in your corner, two things happen. One, you have a greater chance of convincing people that you’re talking to but the other thing that happens is the people who were on your side to begin with, they know about it. They know that you are not saying something completely different when you’re not with them. And they get understandably even more excited because they’re going, what he said to us, he really means. And he’s going out and he’s preaching about what we all believe. And it just goes back to you don’t win arguments you don’t make. And when you try and act like something, if you were that good of an actor you’d be in Hollywood. But Americans, they want TV, they see really good acting all the time, when they see bad acting it doesn’t look like bad acting, it looks weird.

VALLAS: Well it cuts right to the heart of I think one of the major criticisms that’s often lobbed at unsuccessful candidates, particularly on the left, there’s too much message testing, they look too poll tested, they’re not even a real person, they’re a robot. I’m not naming names, I think a lot of folks can conjur up their own ideas of which types of people have received that kind of criticism. You’re describing something that sounds a lot like the progressive version of what so many people found appealing about Trump which was he might have typos in his tweets and he might say stuff that sounds either grammatically correct or maybe like really shocking and weird but hey, we know he’s real.

KANDER: Here’s the thing about that, is that the basic deal, and it’s wearing off, but the basic deal that Trump made with the American people was he was kind of saying look, you don’t like me very much, you don’t like the way I treat people, you don’t want your kids to behave this way but, and there’s obviously a lot of game playing in this statement, but he was saying, but I’ve made myself really successful doing it and I talk to a lot of voters, remember, a lot of people knew I was a progressive and voted for me who were voting for him and a lot of people said to me, you know they said, I don’t like him, I don’t like the way he treats people, but if he did it for himself acting that way, if he does that for the country and does that for me they would say I’m willing to give that a try. The problem that he is going to have now, rightfully so is he never made that transition. That is one of the biggest betrayals of everything having to do with the Trump presidency is he’s never stopped being the leader of the Trump Organization and transition to becoming the leader of the country. He’s still not very nice at all, he’s still mean, people don’t like the way he acts, but he’s still doing for himself. He’s never started doing for the American people. And so I guess the other side to that coin. It’s not even the other side of that coin. I don’t want to compare the two to be honest.

VALLAS: Different coin, folks, different coin.

KANDER: Different coin, different coin, maybe not even the same currency. [LAUGHTER] It’s just always been for me that people know; an example. You’ve seen a million times, candidates in red states, Democratic candidates who when President Obama came to their state or when the presidential campaign or when the more liberal members of our party come to their state, they go running for the hills as if voters are going to think well, they’re a Democrat but clearly they don’t support other Democrats. No one’s going to think that. So when President Obama came to Missouri, gave a speech, better believe I was there and I spoke at every event the presidential campaign asked me to last year. The Republicans ran that footage like crazy but I knew I was just doing what I do which is being real, being honest with people. And when I invited Senator Warren to come and campaign with me people said I was either crazy or had, quote, a lot of political courage.

VALLAS: Which one was it?

KANDER: They said, I don’t even think political courage is like a real term. I mean I served in the army and volunteered to go to Afghanistan, like I’ve been around people who had to have actual courage to get up and go to work. And you know, I agree with her on a whole lot of stuff, most things. And so you know I was out there saying here’s who I am, I think I’m right and I’m doing this because I think it’s the best thing for you too and people will hear you out.

VALLAS: So you’ve transitioned from your candidacy and from serving in statewide office to now being, as I mentioned at the top, the president of Let America Vote. You’ve moved into a space that really is about voting rights and the name of the organization says it all. I would love to hear you talk about what you guys are doing and why that’s important as sort of a compliment to the more front and center policy discussions happening as both a policy discussion in and of itself that maybe doesn’t get quite the airtime it deserves but also as sort of a mobilization and behind the scenes piece of what’s going on here.

KANDER: So the Republicans act like voter suppression versus voting rights is a policy difference between the parties. It’s not a policy difference. What they’re doing is a political strategy. They’ve decided, the Republicans that rather than reach out to minorities, the disabled, low income folks, other groups, rather than reach out and try to include them in their party with policies and ideas that would be more inclusive, they’ve just decided it’s easier to exclude them from the democratic process. So this should be thought of no differently than what they say in their TV ads, who they send mail to, which doors they knock on, it is a political strategy to win elections. It’s not a policy difference. You’re statistically more likely to be struck by lightning as an American than you are to commit voter impersonation fraud. And what the president is doing when he tells what I argue is the biggest lie a sitting president has ever told which was that 3 to 5 million illegal voters voted in the election —

VALLAS: And lots of media outlets repeated it and didn’t fact check it so it became something a lot of people still believe.

KANDER: Yeah the whole idea there is to undermine faith in American democracy which is step one in the GOP voter suppression playbook. I was the chief election official, the secretary of state in a state, Missouri, that had a GOP supermajority for four years and I’ve seen it up close. Step two is you create obstacles to voting and step three is you create obstacles to the obstacles. So that’s what they’re doing and I believe that in an age where, or in a time when you have Jeff Sessions in charge of the Department of Justice and it’s literally switching sides in the cases and you have Donald Trump picking the judges, that means that the legal fight remains really important but now we urgently need to expand the argument beyond the court of law and into the court of public opinion. So I started Let America Vote five months ago and our mission to create political consequences for folks who make it harder to vote. Basically, if you make it harder to vote we’re going to make it harder for you to get re-elected. And we’ve got in the last five months about 65,000 folks nationwide have signed up at LetAmericaVote.org to volunteer and we’ve raised about $2 million. And we are out there and making a difference. We’re on the ground, knocking on doors and making sure that people understand that this is not a consequence free exercise.

VALLAS: And this is a heck of a week to be talking about voting rights. In particular you mentioned the Department of Justice literally switching sides in cases which is a new if not unprecedented phenomenon after transitions across administrations at the volume we’re seeing now. It’s happening several times a week. But one of those big cases in something that’s been called the Ohio voter purge case. So would you talk a little bit about that and the significance of the switch the Department of Justice has made?

KANDER: So imagine you’re in court, you’re in civil court, you’re suing somebody for something. I don’t even want to say you’re in criminal court because I don’t want to give them that context that they want to use on voting rights. You’re in civil court, you’re suing somebody for something and about halfway through the trial your lawyer stands up, walks to the other, to the table and says now I’m defending the people you’re suing. The judge would take notice of that, it would make a difference in court. You would be able to fire that lawyer but we can’t fire Jeff Sessions. And we can’t fire the Department of Justice that’s doing this; not right now. And so —

VALLAS: Trump might want to, that’s a whole other story.

[LAUGHTER]

KANDER: For a whole bunch of other reasons. But so my point here is what they were trying to do in Ohio, what they’re trying to do in voter purges is look, there’s a reason that they did this big data grab with their what I refer to as the voter suppression committee to reelect the president. The purpose of the big data grab is they want to figure out who you are voting for so they can decide whether or not to keep you on the rolls or kick you off. So when they say ok, folks who haven’t voted in a couple years, we’re going to exceed the law, push the envelope, we’re going to go really far and just kick those people off the rolls, they’re doing it because they don’t want people to vote who have a nasty habit of not voting Republican.

VALLAS: And now you’ve got the Department of Justice actually sanctioning a strategy that is being championed by one political party.

KANDER: That’s the Department of Justice being on the side of voter suppression which is not how this is supposed to work. So until the Department of Justice is back in the hands of people who believe in voting rights, we better have a good, strong political argument to make sure that people know they can’t do this with no consequences.

VALLAS: So in the last minute I have with you, how can folks get involved with Let America Vote, if this is an issue they care about, if they’re looking to get engaged in ways that are not just the policy debates but a really about getting obstacles and obstacles to obstacles out of the way so people can exercise their constitutional right.

KANDER: They can go to LetAmericaVote.org and sign up, there’s a lot of opportunities no matter where you live to be helpful. Right now the biggest operation we have going at the moment is in Virginia because of the November elections there. We have folks knocking on doors, we’ll probably hit about a half a million voter contacts just from our people focused on going after the governor’s mansion, holding on to it but also we’re targeting about 8 state legislative races where incumbent vulnerable Republicans have voted the wrong way on voting rights and we’re going to make sure that when their legislature reconvenes next year there’s some people missing because they voted the wrong way on voting rights.

VALLAS: Pink slips if people are not voting the right way on voting rights. Jason Kander is the president of Let America Vote, he is also a former candidate for a Missouri senate seat where you probably saw him do a great campaign ad taking apart a gun, putting it back together again but he’s got a lot more going on. Jason, thanks so much for joining Off Kilter.

KANDER: Thanks for having me.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: Welcome to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas live from Netroots Nation in Atlanta, Georgia and I am so excited to be joined here by the one, the only Keith Ellison. You know him as the congressman from the great state of Minnesota, how you doing congressman?

CONGRESSMAN KEITH ELLISON: You know I’m at Netroots Nation, what more can you ask. I’m having a great time, lot of energy, lot of excitement, lot of great ideas floating around. And in this era it’s inspirational.

VALLAS: So that gets into the question I wanted to ask you. I feel like the big question on people’s minds is looking back to November a lot of folks had a wake up call, a lot of folks in the Democratic party had a wake up call. But you’re talking to a lot of folks here, you’re also doing a lot of speechifying and hosting panels and such, do you feel like people within the progressive movement have learned the lessons we needed to learn from November and are we going to have that inform how we move forward?

ELLISON: That’s a strong yes, I really do. Now that’s not to say we don’t have a lot more to learn. But I think people really get how critical it is to be engaged, be energetic, be working with the grassroots of America. People understand that like, say, the Democratic party is really not for the Democrats, it’s for the American people. And we have to have a vision of the whole country and what’s good for most people, whether or not, no matter what their party affiliation may be. You know I think a lot of people get that when Democrats lose, bad things happen. And there’s so many examples. I’ve run out of fingers and toes naming them. But yeah so I think we get it. I think we’ve got to learn a few other things though. I think we’ve got to learn one, that the right wing is going to smear you. They believe in it, they do it, they’ve been doing it, they’ve even perfected it. Number two, that if the right wing has the money, we have the many and so we better mobilize the many, we better be all about engaging masses of people and for rallies sure, but also to the ballot box, also in terms of public opinion, we have to have massive education.

So you know, people people are pulling two and three jobs, feeding families, taking care, they don’t understand necessarily how this repeal bill is different from that one so we’ve got to constantly be helping our constituents understand what’s really going on. Right now what’s happening on the horizon is they’re going to try to push tax cuts for the rich.

VALLAS: Amen.

ELLISON: That’s what they’ve got tee’d up.

VALLAS: And they’re calling it tax reform but we know it’s not actually tax reform.

ELLISON: Tax reform my butt. [LAUGHTER] It ain’t no tax reform, this is redistribution from the many to the few, that’s what it is and they’re trying to basically, look, these people want to benefit from all this country has to offer them without paying anything back. They want the benefit of a military, police department, clean water, clean air, they want the benefit of all the things that this nations offers them. Public schools for their workers, but they don’t want to pay anything.

VALLAS: And when you say ‘they’ you’re mostly talking about the donor class and the Republicans in congress because you better believe polls show 75% of the American people, and that includes Republicans want to see taxes increased on people who are millionaires and billionaires, et. cetera.

ELLISON: And these big companies too. I don’t know anybody who thinks that Exxon Mobil, Bank of America, and General Electric are paying too much in taxes. I mean it’s just not a thing. But that’s what Republicans are talking about. Cutting their taxes and it’s crazy. Now this other myth that they try to tell that when you cut taxes it leads to growth. That’s a big lie, we’ve got to attack it at it’s source.

VALLAS: I’m glad you brought that up because I feel like that talking point which should’ve died years ago as soon it was not born out by research, by facts, by evidence, we actually just saw in Kansas great evidence of how actually not only is it not true, it’s the opposite of true and you’ve got this amazing kind of failed experiment with trickle down. Kansas being exhibit A on why we should be closing the book on that but we still have folks like Trump and his colleagues in congress, the folks across the aisle from you claiming that that’s their solution for helping everybody who isn’t a millionaire.

ELLISON: Well you know, thanks for mentioning Kansas. But you could add Oklahoma to the list, you could add Wisconsin to the list, you know in Oklahoma, their cutting taxes made it such that they had to, the kids were only going to school four days a week and not five. I mean they had to literally cut 20% off of a kid’s education so rich people in Oklahoma wouldn’t have to pay taxes.

VALLAS: To buy a second yacht.

ELLISON: It is a scandal and I mean I love your show because you highlight these examples. So we’re not just talking theoretically when we say trickle down doesn’t help the economy. We say look at Kansas, look at Oklahoma, look at Wisconsin.

VALLAS: That’s exactly right. So as we pivot away from the healthcare fight, obviously continuing to stay vigilant, Trump is still trying to sabotage the Affordable Care Act anyway he can, even without legislation, a conversation we’ve had a lot on this show. Republicans are now saying oh it’s time for tax reform, code for tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires, second yacht for all those folks and all the large corporations, what do folks need to know in terms of the lesson we should take from healthcare for how we can win on tax and budget?

ELLISON: Lesson number one, if you’re active, if you raise your voice, you can win. It is important to know that you can win. Like when we went out there fighting against health care we said wait a minute, they got the presidency and both houses of congress, how can we win? We didn’t know. But now we know we won, and we won because people all over this country rose up and we didn’t the case to people who are historic Democrats, we actually expand our message to anybody who actually needed healthcare which ends up being quite a few people.

VALLAS: Basically all humans.

ELLISON: Right, you know, humans.

VALLAS: Give or take.

ELLISON: But the same is true on taxes. I mean the truth is as you are trying to drive down the street and not have your axle break because of the pothole that wasn’t fixed because there’s not enough money, if you’re trying to send your kid to get an education, if you’re trying to basically use public services, does it makes sense that the wealthiest, most well-off, most privileged people don’t have to pay anything? It makes no sense. So we need people to mobilize around this issue, and we need them to mobilize like, now. We need to start a public education program to show that if you cut the taxes for the rich, what they, first of all what happens is it blows a hole in the budget, things that need to get done don’t get done. But then what happens? They use the money that they’re not paying to just try to buy off more politicians in the form of donations and lobbying. So it just creates a vicious cycle that ends up hurting everybody’s livelihood. So this is what we need people to know, that you can win, we can win, that the most important thing is our First Amendment right to freedom of expression. And if we use it, the limits are, I don’t know what the limits are, I think there might not be any.

VALLAS: Now I have to be honest, one of the things that drives me nuts, almost more than anything about the policy debates we hear in Washington these days is how amazingly hypocritical Republicans are comfortable being when it comes to this tax conversation. Because on the one hand when it comes to spending money on say all the things you just mentioned, whether it’s social security or education or health insurance, oh no, we can’t do that, we just can’t afford that in this country, we’ve got all these deficits. But on the flip side, here they are actually paving a path to financing tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and huge corporations by digging ourselves into deficits that they said we couldn’t have which then they’re likely going to turn around and say oh, we’ve got these deficits now we’ve got to cut all these programs. How do you in congress and your colleagues need us to be engaged in a way that helps you stand strong to beat this kind of agenda?

ELLISON: Well we need people to know that one, government does good in the lives of people and if you cut it, and when they say shrink government what they really mean is starve government. And what that means is your mom’s or your grandmother’s Alzheimer’s, nobody’s figuring out how to solve that if you cut the budget for the National Institute of Health. Parkinson’s; we’re not trying to fix that problem if nobody’s researching it. That’s government research grants. And then all the stuff that we do have now that, it’s came from government, like, I don’t know, the internet for example, GPS, all types of stuff, discovering the humane genome that is now curing disease, all these things with government funds. So we’ve got to help people understand that government, good government means something good in their lives and we have not done a good job on that. We kind of just take it for granted but the fact is, who notices the water until you have none, right. And that was the case with the Affordable Care Act. It actually went up in popularity once the Republicans tried to take it away.

VALLAS: Soon as it was under threat.

ELLISON: So I just want to say that what we need people to do is to one, get ready for this fight, gear up. When they say tax reform, they don’t mean tax reform, what they mean is tax cuts for the rich. And I think not one cent for the top one percent.

VALLAS: Not one cent for the top one percent.

ELLISON: They don’t get no breaks, they got to pay their fair share and right now we know that people, hedge fund managers making money off carried interest pay a lower tax rate than a secretary. This is an outrage and people should know that when you cut taxes for the rich people it just means you’re going to have to pay more in fees and in other stuff. So make them pay and that is where we got to go right now, that’s where the fight is. And when we come out of this August break, it’s going to be game on, this tax fight, and I can think of no better fight to have.

VALLAS: Great words to end on, not one cent for the top one percent, folks you heard it here first. Keith Ellison, drawing a red line of where folks need to be on a fight that is not tax reform at all it is tax cuts for people who want a second yacht. Congressman, thank you so much for joining the show, got to have you back soon, always a pleasure, and go get it.

ELLISON: Take care buddy.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas, still broadcasting from Netroots Nation in Atlanta, Georgia. I am so pleased to be joined by Jon “Bowzer” Bauman, you know him from Sha Na Na, you know him from “Grease”, you might know him as the President of the Social Security Works PAC.

[LAUGHTER]

JON “BOWZER BAUMAN: You probably don’t know him from that. Well you might.

VALLAS: But Jon —

BAUMAN: Depends on who you are.

VALLAS: Depends on who you are but —

BAUMAN: Do you know him from this?

VALLAS: That is indeed what many of our listeners and viewers will know you from. Jon, thank you so much for joining the show.

BAUMAN: Well thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here. Now I’ll stop being Bowzer.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Well so I have to —

BAUMAN: This headset is the grease in my hair —

VALLAS: It’s sticking.

BAUMAN: Well it’s just kind of ruining the ‘do.

VALLAS: You’re going to end up with a dent.

BAUMAN: But what can I do, yeah, I won’t be recognizable, Bowzer doesn’t have —

VALLAS: Well this is a great segue into the question I want to ask you is people know you from Sha Na Na, people know you as a performer, how did you get into political work, why are you at Netroots?

BAUMAN: That is a really good question and the answer is as a civilian in the United States of America, I’m doing shows in the year 2000, when that election happened I kind of just couldn’t take it anymore and I said to myself, you know what, I’m never going to sit out one of these again. So in 2004 I picked myself up and went to Florida for two and a half or three months and worked on the state of, networked myself into the state of Florida Kerry campaign and had that experience and it all kind of has built from there. I’ve never sat one out since.

VALLAS: But there’s a big difference between sitting it out, which a lot of people understand as not voting, not actually going to the ballot box.

BAUMAN: Well that, I didn’t sit out in that way, I got actively involved. But I also recognize that I was in a better position, an easier position to get involved in a major way than a lot of people because I had some degree of celebrity to offer, particularly with regard to older people who largely my audience, we’ve discussed this before. People over forty or so do tend to remember the Sha Na Na television show.

VALLAS: Is that the definition of older people at this point because I’m dangerously close to being an older person if so.

[LAUGHTER]

BAUMAN: See is just my lexicon, it’s nobody else’s lexicon, my lexicon is like are you old enough the Sha Na Na television show or not?

VALLAS: Yup, that’s the line.

BAUMAN: If you’re not, then I’ve got to tell you about the movie “Grease”.

VALLAS: Which is how I know you.

BAUMAN: Yes.

VALLAS: To be honest, and your music.

BAUMAN: Most people who are under sort of 40, see people who are 40. Let me explain this to you; people who are 40 and up will often come up to me and they get that look in their eye that I had when I met Clayton Moore, the lone ranger, who you’ve probably never heard of. But —

VALLAS: I have, in fairness.

BAUMAN: Because the television shows that you watch when you’re a child are the ones that make the biggest impression on you and the only ones that you care about as you get older. So people really do come up to me who are like 40 or 41 now and they go like, they get that look, oh my God, oh my God! You, my mother, I was 4 years old and my mother said when Bowzer goes [SINGING], and says good night and grease for peace, he’s talking to you. [LAUGHTER] You’re out of here, it’s 8 o’clock and you’re done. So that’s a wonderful experienced to have lived long enough to hear that.

VALLAS: And I’ve seen it happen now a few times, hanging out here in Atlanta, this happens even in restaurants that rotate.

[LAUGHTER]

BAUMAN: We had that experience.

VALLAS: We did, we circled Atlanta without moving, while you did —

BAUMAN: We saw of Atlanta in an hour.

VALLAS: In an hour, an hour, exactly.

BAUMAN: Because Polaris rotates, people have no idea what we’re talking about.

VALLAS: It’s all inside jokes but you know what, I just feel like the fact that I have inside jokes with you now makes me cool enough that I’m just going to do it.

BAUMAN: You’re it.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: But so you got into political work. Tell a little bit about what have you experienced between 2004 and now? What has changed, where have we gotten it right, what have we learned? What haven’t we learned? And what do you hope Democrats learn from 2016?

BAUMAN: Wow, that’s a big question.

VALLAS: That’s what we do here on Off Kilter, we ask the big questions.

BAUMAN: And I think it’s the best question that there can be. What I’ve done since 2004 is grown into working inside campaigns to a tremendous extent, which is why I’m the president of Social Security Works PAC, because we’re going to do campaigns. Social Security Works for the first the time has been a policy organization, is going to now go into electoral work in this separate division that I’m in charge of. I’ve done dozens, probably hundreds, you know at this point, of campaigns. I often go in, we look at what the policy positions of a candidate are and figure out who to endorse and we will endorse people who are good on issues that involve retirement security, so Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, lowering drug prices are the things that are on the agenda right now. And the simplest answer I could give to this very comprehensive question is that we are looking for people who are going to run authentically, strongly on those issues. Our mission is to protect and advance the quality of life of older Americans.

So you’re going to have to be good on that. I think that the real answer to your broad question is that people need to run authentically and strongly on Democratic values with regard to everything. When they run, when people run milquetoast or wishy-washy or try to control the center by being all things to all people in what they perceive to be the center, they pretty much always lose. And that’s why Netroots Nation is a good thing for advancing progressive values and imparting to candidates who come here the importance of running on progressive values unapologeticly.

VALLAS: And I think a lot of people feel like maybe they learned that to some extent in November of last year, right. The great wakeup call that was for many had a lot to do with, for some people, authenticity, for other people it had to do with boldness of an economic agenda, for other people it had to do with messaging. It depends on who you talk to but a lot of people saw November last year as a wake up call. You’ve actually been there for a while and have been trying to nudge Dem, and sometimes not Dem —

BAUMAN: In November we nudged candidates, big candidates in November to adopt positions that they weren’t at to begin with.

VALLAS: Do you have any specifically you want to talk about?

BAUMAN: Yeah, we pushed Hillary Clinton to go for Social Security expansion rather than the safer no cuts policy that she was at to begin with. And it worked, it worked. Now whether she convinced people that she meant it is another question. But you know, I actually deeply feel from having been involved in that campaign that she did mean it. But I also feel that the campaign started out too cautiously and consequently paid a price, paid a price for having to be pushed to get there. And conversely the Bernie Sanders campaign, which ran but Bernie Sanders has always been authentically there. There was no need to push him anywhere and that made a difference. It resonated with voters.

VALLAS: Most attention is undeniably paid to the primary and then into the general of last year’s presidential, but you’ve worked with a lot of candidates at the Senate level and the House of Representatives level and kind of down ballot races as well. Many of which don’t get as much attention as they deserve. We’ll be talking later in this episode with Jason Kander who ran for Senate in Missouri and you actually endorsed him.

BAUMAN: And I did an event with him and he was terrific.

VALLAS: Is he an example of what you’re talking about?

BAUMAN: Yes, and a good example is right now, which I’m going to say out loud here, I haven’t spoken about this publicly very much but our first two endorsements were in the two special elections that just happened. So we endorsed Rob Quist in Montana for Congress and Jon Ossoff here in Georgia, in Georgia’s 6th for congress. And they ran very differently from each other. You know, Rob Quist ran really hard and unapologetically on economic security, retirement security, and Ossoff really tried to win the center by being like someone in the center. And you know honestly I think you can look, Donald Trump won Georgia 6 by a point and a half. Karen Handel won the race against Jon Ossoff by 4 points, so he actually gave up two and a half points in that race and I feel like it was by running milquetoast. Rob Quist, Donald Trump won Montana, the entire state is involved, it’s one congressional district.

VALLAS: And I always forget that, right.

BAUMAN: So it’s the entire state. It was also fun because we covered the entire state in one day. I was there for three days. We went from Missoula to crow country, which is basically most of the state in one day on May 18th. I drove my own car and so it was like 380 miles I believe in a raging snowstorm on May 18th.

VALLAS: Uphill both ways.

BAUMAN: Having to follow, you had to follow ruts of the truck in front of you in order to stay on the road so it was really kind of fun and I liked Rob a lot, you know he picked up 15 points on Trump in Montana, lost by 6.

VALLAS: And what was he doing?

BAUMAN: Trump won by 21.

VALLAS: What was he doing right there?

BAUMAN: I think he ran authentically as himself and he ran on our values.

VALLAS: But to take it out of platitudes —

BAUMAN: He didn’t try to thread a needle, but here’s what I’m really trying to say. It’s saying it another way. The biggest mistake that I think is made with regard to Democratic values and issues is that it is important to win the center, especially big elections. You don’t win big elections, congressional, senate, house, senate, presidential without winning the center. Barack Obama won the center. You need to win the center. But you don’t win the center by being wishy-washy in the center. People in the middle of the electorate, many of them are my fans. They’re often not that ideological. That is true, but that doesn’t mean that by being on all sides of every issue and being wimpy on issues, you’re going to appeal to them. Because they’re not that ideological, they normally are looking for people who have real values, seem to be authentic to them, and feel right to them like they have a real point of view, they’re honest and they’re going to stick to what they’re telling you in their campaign. That’s really how you win. And that’s the most important lesson that I think we have to learn. People can disagree with you and still like you and vote for you. They can disagree with you certain issues but if they like you’re passionate on those issues, they can like you and vote for you and that’s how you win.

VALLAS: So last question because I know we have to send you off elsewhere to hang out with.

BAUMAN: But this is more important.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: And I appreciate you saying that on camera.

BAUMAN: And we haven’t even discussed the movie “Grease” yet.

VALLAS: I know, I know but maybe we have to have you as a second special segment for next week. Viewers, get excited.

BAUMAN: You’re mine, I’m yours.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: I’m just going to take that. I’m going to take that and go with it. So, a name that is everywhere right now within the progressive space and who actually, he is here at Netroots, I’m hoping to talk to him, if you’re listening come on by Randy Bryce.

BAUMAN: He’s my fan, I found this out.

VALLAS: I’m sure he’s your fan. Is Randy Bryce the real deal? Is he what you were just describing, that authentic person who really is bold on certain things and isn’t going to be that wishy-washy guy? Can he pull it out over Paul Ryan?

BAUMAN: I think he can pull it out because I think he actually is that guy. He is totally authentic, he’s entirely this ironworker you know, from that district, that district is not what people think it is. It’s not a slam dunk, it’s got a lot of working people in that district. It’s not a massive wealthy, tech oriented suburban district. It’s a real down home district and Randy is much more like the people in that district than Paul Ryan is. Paul Ryan has somehow developed this reputation for being a policy wonk which obviously I don’t think he’s very good at, at all.

VALLAS: Nope.

BAUMAN: But at this moment in time, what’s really on the table is that Paul Ryan is the architect of a bill that was going to take healthcare away from 22 to 32 million people! Depending on which incarnation of this bill we are talking about. And Randy Bryce has a tremendous personal story, intergenerational himself having survived cancer. His mother and father and his son all having preexisting condition problems and things that they have to deal with, he is the guy to tell the story of why Paul Ryan does not represent you, Wisconsin number one, first district.

VALLAS: And I’m excited to hear you’re working with him because it makes me infinitely more optimistic that he will actually be able to stop the speaker as it is said.

BAUMAN: I think he really is going to be fantastic, he just, and all that Randy Bryce has to do in my opinion to win the race, which would be one of the great wins of American political history is be as much himself, Randy Bryce, as he can be in a public setting. That’s all he actually has to do to win, so I’m excited.

VALLAS: Well looking forward to watching it. Jon “Bowzer” Bauman of Sha Na Na, but also Social Security Works PAC, which I love dearly, thank you so much for joining the show.

BAUMAN: Thank you, and I still do some shows around the country so you can still come and see me besides coming to see me talking about endorsed candidates and talk about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and lowering drug prices. You can also come see me say, [SINGING], goodnight, and grease for peace!

VALLAS: And next time I’m making you sing with me and it’s going to be from “Grease” and that’s what we’re going to do.

BAUMAN: It’s a date.

VALLAS: Alright, can’t wait.

BAUMAN: Thank you’s.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week