Jim Hightower's Tips on 21st Century Populism, and Obama's Rare Opportunity

By Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash. Posted March 4, 2009.

The following is an interview with Jim Hightower, radio commentator and author of Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, just released in paperback.

 Mark Karlin: First off, as a native Texan, you must be celebrating George W. Bush's return to your home state. 

Jim Hightower: We're all so very excited.  He's in his little ghetto in Preston Hollow and we're totally sure that he'll not be bothering us here in Austin or any other part of Texas. 

Karlin: What happened to his Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford? 

Jim Hightower: He keeps insisting that he's going to go back and forth to it pretty much as he did during the Presidency. His ranchero, as I call it, is a curious ranch in the sense that it has no cattle on it.  That's kind of rare in Texas to have a ranch but no livestock whatsoever on it.  And in fact, of course, he built that in 1999 when Karl Rove was trying create an image for him as the cowboy president.  But Laura doesn't like the ranch, so I don't think he's going to be spending a lot of time there either. Maybe he'll spend time at the library, I guess, reading his book. 

Karlin: Isn't the Bush "library" going to really be a Disneyesque fantasy ride? What do you think of this whole enterprise to build a post-facto Bush legacy? It reminds me of what they did with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Silicon Valley. He was an actor, and the museum is somewhat of a Hollywood tribute to him. 

Jim Hightower: Yes. Well, this is exactly what you would expect from the corporate-financed monument to the sheer brilliance, incredible insight and balls of President Bush 43. And it is unique among libraries at the institutions at higher learning. It will be located at Southern Methodist University in Highland Park in Dallas, but the University has no control whatsoever over it. It's a totally private entity, essentially set up on campus, with the imprimatur of a university, but without the university exercising any influence, and no academic standards bearing on the exhibits or on the so-called scholarship, that they insist will be coming out of there. And Karl Rove is overseeing the Institute of Higher Bushism that will be generated from this edifice.   

Karlin: You've been an important part of the landscape of populism in the United States, and way beyond Texas, and a great friend of the late brilliant journalist Molly Ivins. What do you see in this election with Obama? It certainly was a grassroots movement. But in the governing side we've seen so far, would you call him in any way a populist or progressive?  What's the difference in your mind between populism and progressivism? 

Jim Hightower: No, I don't call him a populist -- not yet.  I think he has some populist instincts, including his upbringing and his experience as a community organizer in Chicago. But from what we've seen thus far, he has presented himself as a centrist Democrat who is showing way too much Bill Clintonism and Robert Rubenism and way too little of the populist positions and populist embrace that he exhibited in the campaign. 

I think it's still too early to say that he's not going to get to that point. But as, as I said when I endorsed him back in the Texas primary, the significant thing about the Obama phenomena is not Obama, it's the phenomenon that millions of people, particularly young folks and especially out of the Netroots segment, came forth to create this guy as their candidate. It's our candidate, because I did embrace him. And that was the significant theme -- that without big money, without professional organizing, without established progressive organizations, even -- they put this guy over the top. 

To me, the main thing about the Obama presidency, is not going to be him, but the grassroots forces that compel him to be better than he otherwise would be. And he's gone into a Washington that has 13,000 corporate lobbyists, that has a locked-in, recalcitrant Republican barrier, that has way too many weak-kneed corporate Democrats, and that has a White House with too many Larry Summerses and Timothy Geithners. So the only progressivism we can expect to get out of him is what we force out. 

To me, he opened the door to the White House, and I do believe he remains open to all of these progressive ideas, including a big blue-green program that can remake and revive the American economy. I think he's that open to a brand-new way of looking at the world. He's open to just about any progressive idea, I think.  But he has said pretty clearly in the old FDR manner, you have to make me do it.   

So to me, that's our role. We as progressives cannot just to settle back into the Lazy Boy and say, oh, Barack's in there now -- he'll take care of it. No, that's not how democracy has ever worked, and it's certainly not going to be the way it's going to work under Obama. We have to be more aggressive than ever. And I think that a lot of the progressive community has sat back somewhat dazed, wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt, yet befuddled by the shortage of full-blown populist, progressive forces on the inside. Many are still not pushing the way that we have to push.

Karlin: You cover this concept of ongoing progressivism in what is now the paperback version of your book with Susan DeMarco, Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow. You talk about empowerment not just being the election of officials, but the choices we make as populists and progressives. Can we talk a little bit about that?  For instance, the other day, I was reading an article that if Americans, and particularly progressives who are of this mind, really want to take back the Wall Street culture, they should start putting their money in community banks and in credit unions, and things that reinvest in communities, and close their checking accounts at Bank of America or Morgan Stanley. They should start supporting alternative systems of savings and financing. 

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Mark Karlin is the editor of BuzzFlash.

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