Bill Moyers Journal (2007-2010); 1147; Kathleen Hall Jamieson; Nell Irvin Painter

Without you... This week on Bill Moire's journey. $88,000 campaign ads. What's the story there's been? A true conservative, ready to be commended and an old idea finds a new voice. People control the government, and people should have the benefit of the power of government. Stay tuned. Funding for Bill Moyer's Journal is provided by the Partridge Foundation, a John and Paulie Gunn Charitable Fund. Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues.

The Colbert Foundation, the Herb Alpert Foundation, Marilyn and Bob Clemens and the Clemens Foundation, Bernard and Audrey Rappaport and the Bernard and Audrey Rappaport Foundation, the Petser Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Orphala Family Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, and by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, providing retirement plan products and services to employers and individuals since 1945. Mutual of America, your retirement company. From our studios in New York, Bill Moyer's. Welcome to the journal. Tis the season for images, and I'm not talking Oscars. Presidential campaign ads are saturating the airways. I'm Barack Obama. I'm Hillary Clinton, and I'm job businessman. I approve this message. Tentings in Espanol. It's a beautiful suit of freedom. It's that one's called Diego.

McCain's POW ads. Torture, mistreat, malnourished. And Obama's rock star video. We're tired of fear. We're tired of division. We want something new. Each tells a story that there's always more than meets the eye. What are they trying to convey? And do they really move people the way their creators hope? Tonight we'll take apart, we'll deconstruct some of the images, whose messages you may be receiving without knowing it. Here to help us is our expert discerner, our resident scholar of spin, Kathleen Hall-Jamison, director of the Annanburg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Are you ready? I'm ready. I'm seeing spots before my eyes. I mean, Obama has spent $7 million on cable and TV ads in Texas and Ohio. Hillary Clinton has spent $4 million, according to the Washington Post this week. Obama has run $57,000, $30,000 cable and TV spots. And Hillary Clinton has run $31,000 cable and TV spots. Why so many ads when the object excuses to get out the vote,

they seem still to be trying to get out their message? Well, they're trying to do both. And part of what's interesting about those numbers is they obscure something that's very important that's happening. Those numbers are talking about the old way in which we looked at politics. When we look at the National Annanburg Elections Survey, which is the survey we ran at the University of Pennsylvania, and we ask, in the last week, have you gone to YouTube to find political content? More than 10% of a national sample says they have YouTube. The internet has become a major means of communicating about candidates in addition to the mass media channels. And part of what they're doing in this channel is different candidate to candidate. So when you look at the ads for Barack Obama across the recent primaries and caucuses, in some of those ads, you see an instruction that I bet went past you when you saw all those spots. And certainly went past me until I asked one of the students what it was doing there. It says, text, hope. And then it gives you a number.

With text, H-O-P-E? H-O-P-E, the theme of the Barack Obama campaign. And then, a number. That's a communication to say if you have text messaging on your cell phone, text in, hope, and that number. And the Obama campaign begins to communicate directly to you. You put in your zip code, and it tells you where the nearest rally is when you're supposed to be voting, when the caucus is being held. And so the channels of communication this year are highly diverse, and then there is one more. I'm in Pennsylvania. We've been watching the internet communication that candidates deliver through email. Now, why would they want a text message rather than email? Remember, Pennsylvania primary, 22nd of April, have been instructions about how to get together in order to be trained to participate in the volunteer pool to get people to the polls. That's a form of advertising, text messaging, advertising, internet advertising, and then an unprecedented amount of money on the air. This is a year in which there's been more communication than ever in the history of primaries

to more people about candidates. Are these text messages going to kids who aren't old enough to vote? They may be, but they're not going to people who aren't old enough to volunteer. There's no age barrier to volunteering. And what's important also in the advertising stream this year is that there is advertising to the young about issues of concern to the young. The Obama campaign has pioneered this. There's one Hispanic language at, for Senator Obama, in which a young person basically explains what's important to get your parents involved for Obama. We know there's a generational divide. Older voters, more likely, particularly older women to be with Senator Clinton, younger with Senator Obama. This is a trickle-up theory. Get the young to influence their parents. I would online to listen to some of the ads in Texas, and there's one in Spanish for Obama that's remarkable. A lot of young people in it, and you hear this singer saying, como se digi, como se llama, Obama, Obama, which means who is this, what's his name, Obama, Obama? It's very effective.

There's another that basically runs to every identifier you could possibly have if you're Latino. So it basically says, if you're from Brazil, if you're from a middichless one country of origin after another, and what do we have in common in this Spanish language radio at? We're all supporting Obama. The level of communication to this Hispanic community this year is going to be higher than it's ever been in history as well, in part, because that's a voting block that is not only contested strongly on the Democratic side with an early advantage to Senator Clinton and Senator Obama would like to take that away. But also, that's a voting block that is open for realignment. It could come to one party or the other this year over the immigration debate. What can ads do that speeches and debates and news stories can't do? Because advertising lets you speak in someone else's voice and speak with visuals and with audio materials and with music, ads are able to attach emotion to a story.

The tells voters who you are without making it look as if you're self-aggrandizing. A biography. A biography. And back to the earliest days of politics, biographies literally print biographies were written and distributed to tell people who the candidate is, who is contesting for the presidency. The biographical ad is a staple in political campaigns. And it's important for a number of reasons. First, we elect a person not a set of issues. And we elect a person who'll act in unanticipated moments. And you want to know as a result of the voter, who is it? Can I trust you? And on the attributes that are most salient in an election, does this person have them? And some attributes are constant. Leadership is one of them. Some are actually featured in some elections and less so in others. Before 1976, candidates weren't claiming that they were honest. They were presupposing that they were honest. After Watergate, Jimmy Carter built a campaign on it as did then incumbent President Gerald Ford.

Yeah, that's B.C. before Carter, right? Yes. And so what a biography is able to do is to say, this is where I come from. This is what motivates my candidacy. This is who I am. It also provides the rationale that links the person to the issue positions and the person to the claim I will keep my promises. So for example, in the historic past, what you've seen is candidates who have tried to translate a moment in biography into a claim that that moment credentials them to be president for Dwight Eisenhower. It was the hero of World War II. And then the biography tells you something you didn't know. It fills in to create a rebuttal against something that might be a vulnerability. He's the man from Abelene. The man from Abelene. Out of the hot land of America, out of this small frame house in Abelene, Kansas, came a man Dwight D. Eisenhower. Through the crucial hour of historic D. Day,

he brought us to the triumphant piece of D. Day. Now another crucial hour in our history. The big question. General, if war comes, is this country really ready? It is not. The administration has spent many billions of dollars for national defense. Yet today, we haven't enough change for the fighting in Korea. It is time for a change. So you don't have to be afraid that the general exercise military power without respect for civilian roots, the man from Abelene. And so the ads that launched that candidacy took away the fear that a general might be too military, might be too high brass for the country. He was the civilian. As you speak, I'm reminded of an ad I saw of Obama's this week. And there's a one line in it that struck me as eccentric. It's a line of an ad where he says, and my father left me when I was two years old. And I thought, why does he want us to know that? No other reference to it. But it's right there prominent in the ad.

My parents weren't rich. My father left me when I was very young. The one thing I was able to get was a great education. We should give every child the same chances that I had. By investing in early childhood education and recruiting a whole new generation of teachers. Why do you think he's saying that? We want to know where a president comes from. And there are two very different stories in biographies of presidents. There's the president who overcame all odds to be in front of us as a prospective nominee. That's Bill Clinton. That's Jimmy Carter. That's Barack Obama. The boy against the odds. The boy against the odds. And what is a greater odd than a child raised with only one parent? And what does it say when Barack Obama features the fact that he was raised by his mother, the heroism of the woman, and by his grandparents? In his speech, he basically reinforces that raised by his mother and by his grandparents. But what did he have in both of these stories? What he tells in the speech and in the ad?

He had access to education. Now here the ad certifies the prospective presidency and ties to issues. And like Clinton goes off to Yale, Obama goes off to Harvard. He goes off to Harvard. He then comes back to serve his community. Both Clinton and Obama in their life story made a choice, not to go on to become wealthy with their Ivy League law degrees instead to go back and serve their community. But the Obama ad does something else. His ad tells you and his speeches tell you that education is what made his life possible. And what does he want to do as a result? He wants to guarantee quality education. He wants to have high quality teachers. Now a theme of the campaign, a promise in the presidency, is pulled out of biography, and it's given credibility for that. It's motivated by the life story. That's affected biography. Interesting. There's one of Obama's ads that I call the Woodstock ad. Let's take a look at it. I'm Barack Obama, and I approve this message. We want an end to this war. And we want diplomacy and peace.

Not only can we save the environment, we can create jobs and opportunity. This is a momentum ad. Look at all of those people supporting me, and the music is underscoring that. But why would you call it a Woodstock ad? And do you think that makes any sense to anybody who's under 50? Nobody. It makes a sense in the cultural wars, because the conservatives will want to come after Obama, the same way they came after Bill Clinton, because he represents the divide, the leftist divide, on the other side of the castle of the 1960s. What do you see in that ad that you hear of us as leftist divide? Well, stop the war, save the planet, the music, the masked, the thronged crowd. So what you're doing is saying, I hear this message as a message like the message of the 1960s. Yeah, and I identify that with Woodstock. Well, I see it in terms of the conservative attack in the 80s and the 90s on the Clinton's. I hear that ad as the expression of all of the ideals of the young

for a future that is different in which we don't assume that we can't accomplish these large objectives, and we can envision a different kind of world. I see that as a mobilizing ad that is trying to communicate with its visuals that there is an army of the young ready to embrace this kind of change and help to work to make it possible. But what that illustrates is people create meaning out of messages based on their own repertoire of experiences. And some people will see an ad one way and some people will see it in a very different way. But what I'm saying is that Woodstock, for conservatives, has a very negative connotation that they use against liberal Democrats of a certain age. Well, Woodstock, in that context means that sex drugs rock and roll, sex drugs and alternative music challenge to the establishment, kinds of behaviors that would make the middle of America, some people middle America being it, Woodstock, nonetheless,

but would make them cringe. So that's the symbolism wrapped up in Woodstock. And it's referenced in the Republican side when John McCain says that he wasn't at Woodstock. He was tied up at that point. McCain spent five years in a box baking in the heat. Broken bones, torture, mistreat, malnourished. I took one look at it and we weighed about 95 pounds. And I said, these people dumped this guy on me so they could claim that we let him die. That's a web ad. And it was put in place not to be aired nationally, but rather because in the South Carolina primary and individual was making allegations about Senator McCain's POW service. The K&K campaign edited this together as a rebuttal. Reporters were encouraged to go and take a look at it. Senator McCain never then had to put in place any of that in public. He didn't have to answer it.

He didn't have to answer it. And spoke for it. And the most powerful thing that can happen with any communication is that something emerges on your radar screen and the audience draws in the rebuttal on its own. You never want to say, I am the hero. You never want to say, I underwent all of this. It sounds self-aggrandizing. You want someone else to say it. And you want the audience to fill it in on its own when the charge is raised. So someone else has to do this. In the case of that web ad, they have Tim Russert doing it, along with POWs who were there with him in the Hanoi Hilton. That's a very effective use of the web. And it wouldn't have been effective, had it been a mass mediated ad. If Obama's biography in the ads you've been watching is the boy against the odds, what's the biography you see in McCain's ads? McCain falls into the other tradition, a person who came into a family with a long military tradition and very distinguished military tradition. And has to make the decision about whether he's going to be part of that tradition.

He enters the military. He is shot down. And he has a chance to make the decision about whether or not he's going to be released because his Vietnamese captors find out who his father is. And there'd be propaganda value to them. It really is. His father's an admiral. His father actually has to make the decision about whether or not the site that the son is at is going to be bombed. And his father makes the decision that it's going to be. Now you have the stuff of movies. This is a lot like PT-109. For John Kennedy, the natural narrative under this is almost filmic. The father makes the decision. The son hears the planes dispatched by the father. He might actually be killed in that bombing. In that context, this is the story of the young man born to privilege who decides to serve and becomes a hero. Because he suffers torture because he does not take the release that is offered. And then chooses to come back and represent his country. The natural extension of that is he continues to serve

and he becomes president. And so his story is one of the transformation that occurred in the Hanoi Hilton, motivating a life of service that culminates in the presidency. There's a subpot to McCain in the ads I've been seeing. And it is this idea of the old soldier call back to serve his country again. Do you see that in these ads? The rebuttal for Senator McCain to the challenge that he is too old to be president. And interestingly, a Pew poll shows that when people are asked for open-ended responses to Senator McCain, old is coming up as one of those responses. Age is a month, creeps in. And or age as an issue comes in. The question then becomes can your biography rebut that charge? The way Senator McCain tries to do that is by saying 35 years of service, starting with the time I raised my hand to enter the military. And I've been there in every major foreign policy moment in between. The underlying question then becomes, do you want all of that experience?

That's the pivot. Or do you want the comparative inexperience of my opponents? Age translated into inexperience. But the vulnerability for Senator McCain is not simply the question of age, which he tries to transform with that rebuttal from the biography. But rather, that people feature Keating Five. The Keating Five, that's the savings and loans scandal in the 1980s in which McCain was implicated with one of his big contributors, right? And notice how, when I said Keating Five, you filled in a story. Now the story that you filled in is a story that doesn't help Senator McCain. And then if you piece into that story, his rebuttal to the New York Times allegations had him not meeting with someone he may in fact have met with. Now you've begun to take a story into this narrative of heroism and principal determination. That undermines it. That undermines it. It's a way at it. So Obama's ads and McCain's ads are telling us the life story in short bursts that Obama and McCain

want us to know about. A biography that's being written in front of our eyes. Are you getting a biography from Hillary Clinton's ad? No. And very early in the campaign, Hillary Clinton said in her speeches that she was the most famous person, you didn't know. That would have been an invitation to create the ad that gave you the biography that wasn't part of your public experience of the Clinton presidency. Middle class girl from middle class family in Chicago. Father was a veteran. So what she needed to do at the very beginning of the campaign in an ad was tell the biographical story that answered the question, who were you before you married Bill Clinton? Who were you in the White House? Were you a co-president or were you something else? What did you agree with? What didn't you agree with? What we know about Hillary Clinton is what other people have told us. What we know about Hillary Clinton is what we lived through in the Clinton administration. What we've read in the press. And it's a very strong narrative that

doesn't create the coherent biography that she could be using right now to answer some of the charges to which she's vulnerable. Hillary Clinton has what I think is an effective ad in which she presents herself as she's not talking. She's listening. For every soldier who serves so bravely over there, but is ignored over here, she hears you. For every national guard and reservist who leaves their family behind, she hears you. That's why Hillary Clinton reached across the aisle to expand access to health care for the national guard and is pushing to protect the bonuses of wounded soldiers. There's a story under that sense of who Hillary Clinton is because that was the basic argument she made when she ran for Senate. Let me read you a line from the New York Times from March 6, 2007 that tells you what one construction of Hillary Clinton is as opposed to another. New York Times March 6, 2007, as a Senate candidate in 2000, Mrs. Clinton embraced the role of an attentive listener as opposed to the power hungry climber

many had suspected. In Hillary Clinton's biographical past is the health care reform efforts of 1993 and 94, in which she is accused of conducting a process that was closed door that didn't bring the friends that might have been there to help her into the room to help work it out. Hillary Clinton, who is accused with Bill Clinton of not working through the compromises with those who had legislation pending that might have worked with the Clinton proposal to ultimately produce health care reform in spring of 1994. So closed, secretive meetings, climb or aggressive calculating Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton, the listener. That campaign was built on it. There's an ad in this election that represses that theme. And if you're gonna say you're a listener, what does the ad have to do? How's the show you're listening? It also reveals an empathetic person, a woman with a nurturing quality, right? And if you have to do two things

as a woman seeking the presidency, certify that you're tough enough to be commander in chief and at the same time carrying enough to be an authentic Democrat and also to be an authentic woman. It's important for Hillary Clinton to not lose track of that second message. The attacks against her all go to that facet of her biography. They suggest that yes, she's tough, but tough equals calculating, tough equals secretive, tough equals and then fill in all of the stereotypic blanks and also all the pieces of the biographical pass that include closed door meetings on the healthcare reform initiative. There was an interesting appearance by her in Youngstown, Ohio when she was given a pair of boxing gloves and she's turned that into a symbol, right? The problem with boxing gloves is it's the wrong kind of fighting. First, a woman is naturally disadvantaged, the middle, you go to a boxing metaphor, but more importantly, that moves into a game-referent point, not to the point that she highlights in one of her ads in which she features the fighter theme, but she shows

her identification with people who came back from the National Guard, and it identifies her with her issue position, fighting to get them benefits. There was a Hillary Clinton ad this morning, Friday morning, on this day show. It's 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep, but there's a phone in the White House and it's ringing. Something's happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call, whether it's someone who already knows the world's leaders, knows the military, someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world. It's 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone? I'm Hillary Clinton and I approve this message. How do we measure the effectiveness of an ad? You measure the effectiveness of an ad, but whether after seeing the ad repeatedly aired, people are more likely to see as important the issue that is featured in the ad. Whether the attributes of the candidate

that are being offered are more important to the voter than they were before. Whether the voter is able to feel the impulse to go into the voting booth and actually cast the vote, because there's an element of emotion in all of this. And if an ad is successful, you come away confident that that's the person you want in the unanticipated moment in the Oval Office, making the consequential decision. Good ads actually manage to increase the likelihood that you have that feeling. Ads that don't do that have largely failed to do what advertising is capable of doing if advertising has a candidate with a strong biography and a strong record. Kathleen Hodgameson, thanks for being with us. You're welcome. I will be back in a moment. But first, remember that this is the time we need you to be the public in public broadcasting. Your station, this station, needs your support. It's time, once again, to take a look at some of the comments you've been sending to us at the journal. You've been writing, and we've been reading.

When Dennis Cassinage and Ron Paul were excluded from participating in their party's presidential debates, we brought them on our show to give them a chance to speak their mind. A lot of people would like to exclude me from the Republican Party, but they're probably not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. A lot of people would like to exclude me from the Republican Party, but their party is awful small. Why would they want to exclude us if we want to work within the Republican Party? This is about the right of the American people. They hear a real discussion on the issues that affect their lives and to see if there's anybody out there who relates to their practical aspirations. Many of you chimed in with your own thoughts. It's so refreshing to listen to candidates who are obviously intelligent and base their policy recommendations on a consistent moral vision. Even though they have opposite views of what role the federal government should play, they're both straight talkers who understand and speak for ordinary Americans. John Ralston. It's disingenuous to discuss candidates that are ignored in our corporate duopoly election system

without mentioning or actually interviewing green party candidates. For all the indifference shown to the green party by the corporate press and derision by the so-called progressive press, the fact is the greens have 234 elected officials in 28 states. The greens are growing, whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. Carl Lundgren. As long as we allow corporate media to decide our leaders, we will have a corporate president. Just follow the money and you will have a president whose only interest is maintaining the status quo of big business and Wall Street enjoying great wealth while the rest of America is facing a deep recession and the middle class is dying. Varta Burns. Noted scholar and author Shelby Steele gave us a bracing look into how Barack Obama's candidacy is shaking up the rhetoric of race and politics in America. In a part of the infatuation with Obama, it's because he's something of an invisible man. He's a kind of a projection screen and you sort of see more,

you're the better side of yourself when you look at Obama than you see actually Barack Obama. Mr. Steele is obviously a brilliant man. While this country's shame is its treatment of African Americans, perhaps the greatest tragedy is this good man's completely jaded view. Jerry Day. Shelby Steele dares to critically examine the Obama candidacy. The notion of an invisible candidate resonates as does the reference to a hollow rhetoric of hope and change. This Obama love fist is something more appropriate for a rock star than a serious contender for the presidency. It makes both the electorate and the media look foolish. Now will the real Obama please stand up? Tessa Gordon. In my view, Shelby Steele is unable to trust the fact that Obama has a view of American society that is not crippled by America's segregated past. I do not know whether Obama will be president, but I am grateful to see him and the many others of his age of all races and genders compete with such confidence. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream is coming to fruition.

Bert Isaacs. In a recent essay, I explored what the investigation of steroid abuse in Major League Baseball reveals about America as a whole. Suppose our national pastime has become our national pathology. Hours is a society on steroids and we're as blind as baseball's owners were a decade ago. As someone who's never given a hoot about baseball or any team sport, it's always been immaterial to me whether athletes take drugs or not. By contrast, we're all embroiled in the larger political, economic, ethical issues you raise. And I'm not sure it's fair to compare a rigged system that victimizes almost everyone with narrow areas of endeavor that needn't occupy our attention unless by choice. The other Catherine Harris. Baseball is indeed a barometer for things American. And this essay confirms how dire the deviations of the sport have been. Do we watch the sport or are we watching the juice? The sense that the game

must be played fair is a casualty of the struggle to win at all costs. And this ethical erosion rots the roots of America. L. White. Keep telling us what you think of the broadcast. By mail, email, or on the blog at pbs.org. We now return to Bill Moyers in the studio. Yesterday, Hillary Clinton stopped off at a chain restaurant in Ohio and posed with waitresses in a gesture of working-class audacity. Earlier this month, Barack Obama was down on the floor of a titanium factory, meeting with workers and hardhats as the cameras roll. This kind of campaigning has the money class reaching for a word that's track dread in the hearts of Wall Street and K Street. The word is populist. Here's the headline the New York Times used. Quote. Before votes, Democrats deliver populist appeals. Welcome to the journal editorial report. I'm Paul Gigo. Well, And here's the editorial page editor of the Wall Street

journal, where a bubonic plague would be more welcome than populist sentiments. In Ohio and Pennsylvania, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have taken on a markedly populist tone. Populism grew up in America doing the first guild at age back at the turn of the 20th century. Huge discrepancies and income and power separated a minority of very rich people who ran the country and everyone else. Then, the disparities led to strikes, riots, labor unions, and government regulation of big business. And today, well, that's what I want to put to Professor Nail Painter, one of our country's distinguished historians. Her grassroots history of the populist and progressive era in American life, standing at Armageddon, will soon be out in a second edition. It's a sweeping account of America's shift from a rural and agrarian society to an urban and industrial one. When regular people had to fight for their place in the new order. Nail Painter has retired from Princeton University where she was long one of the most

popular teachers. But she's still active on many fronts and serves as president of the organization of American historians. Welcome to the journal. Thank you. Everybody's throwing around the word populism. Do you think they know what they're talking about? It sounds as if people who were throwing it around are throwing it around as a dirty word. And if it is a dirty word, they don't know what they're talking about. Why do they think it's a dirty word? I think they think it's a dirty word because it pits Americans against each other as if we would all be hand in hand if it weren't for populist agitators. What are Hillary Clinton and Obama saying that makes people invoke the word populism? They're probably talking in very veiled terms about class issues. Class is the dirty little secret in the United States. We're so much happier talking about race. Black people are this and white people are that. The unspoken is that white people are middle class and black people are poor. So black people are

kind of the proxy for poor people in much of our dialogue. So when politicians get past that, and they talk about what's interesting or needed for working people or heaven forbid, poor people even. Remember, working people and poor people are probably about three-quarters of our population, at least. But when you talk about that group of Americans as having interests that are different from the people who have a lot of money, then for many who are critics of populism, that's a bad thing to point out. As you know, when John Edward was still in the race, he was using talk that also caused the money class, the financial interest to describe him as a populist and his message as populism. Yes. Well, they said he was so angry. Yeah. How do you explain that? I thought that his line was right on target. However, I keep thinking back to the late 19th century when, in slightly different terms, the political rhetoric

pitted identity of interest in which all Americans found their place in an order, and smart people, which people decided what to do and the rest of people went along with it, the workers, and so forth. That was one way of talking about the American polity, the American citizenry, but another way, which came out of the People's Party, out of the Farmers Alliance's and the Grange and the Greenbackers, all of these groups were saying our interests are not the same. And the money power, money power, or later in the early 20th century, the plutocracy, that those people were acting in their own interest not in ours. And you see it, even in what topics are considered interesting and important. So, on one side, at the current moment, we have discussions of war and terrorism and security. That is Americans

place in the world. And on the other side, you have discussions of hard times, of expenses, of getting from day to day, of putting food in the table and so forth. Those are much more domestic issues. And in a very general way, those ideas, those strands, those issues, go back a hundred years and more. You quote in the forward of the new edition of your book from William Jennings Bryan, who said, I mean, I get it exactly right. He said, in 1899, America can be a democracy or an empire. Yes. And he didn't quite answer that. How would you answer it today? Well, we have become an empire. That came in the 20th century. What's between us and the populist is the 20th century. The Spanish-American War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Vietnam War, and the two Iraq Wars, to name a few.

Those are all the wars that made us an empire in various different ways. But, along with that, we still had what people face day-to-day. And what people face day-to-day, except for when they have a child or a husband or a spouse or a mother or father, actually in the war zone. What they face day-to-day is a different set of issues that have to do with health care, that have to do with wages, that have to do with that kind of issue, just much closer to life. So what? What do you think we should know about the original populist, the movement that grew up, you know, in the 1890s, the 1880s and 1880s and 1880s. What should we know today that's relevant about them for us? How much time do you have? This is television. It's like a classroom, you know? You have a big time. One thing I would definitely like us to remember is that the ideas that the populists

put forward in the 1890s were considered hairbrane. Hairbrane? Hairbrane, crank ideas. But by the early 20th century, they were the ideas that came into even our U.S. Constitution because we had to have amendments to make it possible to have an income tax or the direct election of senators. The whole regulatory state of the mid-20th century grows out of roots in the 90s with populism. They wanted government to step in and balance the power of the industrial giants growing up. That's the very fundamental point that in a moment of what we call less a fair, that is to say that the government was not very involved and certainly was not involved with everyday people. That the populist were saying people control the government and people should have the benefit of the power of the government. All of those were populist ideas saying that the power of the people through the government

should serve the people not just the corporations or the very wealthy. What do you see happening to our near people today? People are waking up to what has happened to our country not just in the last eight years but probably almost since the end of the Cold War, maybe even before, that our interest as a security state and as an empire are not necessarily our interest as citizens. We have become what my colleague Elizabeth Cohen calls a consumer republic. The populist talked about a producer's republic and our interest as consumers and our interest as citizens may be different. So I live in New Jersey where the state of our infrastructure is very much in the forefront of our politics. Are we going to pay for infrastructure? Pay for bridges, pay for roads and for intellectual infrastructure,

pay for education, pay for colleges? These are not the kinds of things that Americans are going to go by as consumers. But we need them as citizens of a polity. So many of the people who make the decisions and finally, so many of us who vote those people in or out of office, so many of the people who are making the decisions don't need those services in the way many of us ordinary people need them. We need political leadership and we voters need to vote for people who will provide that leadership. What I'm saying is that we need the engagement of citizens, of voters, of ordinary people, to push back against the tremendous amount of money that goes into electing our representatives. It's not an accident that there's so much money in politics and that politics tends to serve the needs of those who can pay.

I brought a story with me hot off the press and it says, quote, the vast majority of African-American and Latino families who have entered the middle class are either borderline or at high risk of falling out of the middle class together. And it says about 95% of African-American and 87% of Latino middle class families don't have enough net assets to meet their essential living expenses for even three months if their source of income disappeared. Yes, it's called disparities of wealth, not just income. Wealth, what do you mean? Wealth, you mentioned the word assets. Wealth is family assets. It's your house, it's your car, it's your savings, it's your retirement, it's your life insurance, it's your cash. It's that very money that you can use in unusual times, whether a breadwinner loses a job, whether somebody falls ill, whether a child has to go to college,

or graduate school, to have the wealth to be able to get past month by month, that's crucial to stay in the middle class or to move up because families are so short of wealth. Right, and what's the effect of this? Does it mean to us? The first thing that means is that families are under tremendous pressure. And you see it in the breakdown of families, the brittleness of family relations. You see it in children left home by themselves because their parents are working two or three jobs at a time. You see it in people not being able to keep their families together because of the stresses, the psychological stresses of hard times. And you see the culture taking the place of parents. And our culture, as you know, is full of guns and violence and sex. And so we have lots of guns and violence and sex, moving in where parents might be

if they weren't under so much stress. Some time ago people asked me, actually it was Democratic Senators, they said, what can we do about the Black family? And I said, people need jobs. People need jobs. And if I were running the world, I would call back Franklin Roosevelt and people would have jobs. You would do that instead of giving us all $500, $800 to spend for whatever we wanted to. Because? Because well to go back to the populist to move us more toward the citizens' republic than the consumers' republic. As consumers, we are the prey of our own appetites. And as citizens, we think about ourselves in our larger community. You could call it the infrastructure way of thinking. What does it say to you, that income inequality, which was a big issue in the populist era, grew significantly in the last year for which we had data in 2005.

The top 1% of people, those with incomes of more than $348,000, received the largest share of national income since 1928, the year before the big- It's frightening, isn't it? It says, oh, we're going to have another dad depression. That's what it says to me. And then I remember that we have a lot of safeguards in place that were not in place in 1929. And are in place now because of the disaster of the Great Depression. But then again, many of those safeguards have been weakened, particularly over the last quarter century or so. So the regulatory state. I think that what we see in terms of the credit crunch has started with the subprime problem. But it's spread throughout the whole financial sector has to do with lack of regulation. So what are the questions, Dr. Payne? You think the populist would or are asking us today? Well, the populist. The ghost of the populist. The ghost of the populist or our own populist. Are asking us what is the role of the citizen in our economy?

What is the role of the populist? What is the role of the government in our economy? What is the role of the government for serving the needs of ordinary people? Who does the government serve? Who should it serve? And governments can work for people. I know that sounds very woolly headed these days when government should be off our backs. Maybe government has been too far off our backs so that it cannot serve our needs. You remind us in the forward to your new addition that this century that this period you were writing about a century or so ago. America was wrestling with this very question. What is, what should be the relation between the power of money and the power of the people? How do you see that playing out today? I think we're asking exactly the same question. I think that's at the heart of election reform legislation, public financing.

I think it's also at the heart of questions about regulation. Do you let the free market run amok because it's good for all of us? And people are seeing, no, it's not necessarily good for all of us because we get tainted toys. We get downer cows processed into hamburger. So the return of that kind of question, I think, is saying that Americans are seeing, they're hearing the resonance of the questions and perhaps even the answers of a hundred years ago. As you talk, I'm reminded that what we owe the progressives and the populists of that period you write about a hundred and so years ago, we owe them the progressive income tax. We owe them the direct election of the United States senators. We owe them the federal reserve system, the oversight by the government of unfettered capitalist power. So why did you call your classic book,

it's standing at Armageddon? Because so many people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries actually felt that their world was collapsing around them. So the idea of the end of the world, that was circulating. And over and over again, people were using that kind of language when they talked about the need for remedies. The term standing at Armageddon actually comes from Teddy Roosevelt and Roosevelt in 1912 when he ran as the progressive candidate for president was rallying his supporters. And he said, we stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord. He was talking about delegates, my dude. It's a great line. Something akin to what's going on right now, like a super delegate. It's interesting, isn't it, that Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin Roosevelt, both men of property, champion the cause of people against the big corporations? Because they realized that not standing up to gross economic power

risk ruining their country. Risk, incredible disorder. Risk, asking for Armageddon. In, after 1977, but certainly after the populist and after the great hard times of the 90s and the strikes and the riots and all the disorder of the great upheaval theater Roosevelt realized that he couldn't just let the bankers in the railroads call to you because they would run the country into the ground. Franklin Roosevelt looking at the Great Depression and the strikes and the riots and the marches realized once again that government would have to step in and put a hand on the side of ordinary people that the system simply cannot run by itself. Or a historian.

You're an historian and not a prophet. But are we standing at Armageddon today? I don't think we're ever standing at Armageddon in the United States because we do have lots and lots and lots of safeguards. And one of our safeguards is simply our huge size. Nobody can move us around very quickly. Everything takes a lot of time. I don't think we're going to have a revolution in the United States. So in that sense, we're not standing in Armageddon and we never will. However, we certainly are standing at a critical moment in which we decide whether or not to continue as in Brian's terms and empire or whether we want to return to our roots as a democracy. Thank you now, Pena, for being with us on the journal. Thank you. It may seem all eyes are on Texas and Ohio

and the ads running in those two critical states. But as a very sober public television viewer, you will be relieved to know that some perceptive and savvy newshounds are thinking ahead, looking at the fall elections where the results could be very surprising. It takes intrepid reporting to find out what's going to happen before it happens, and the onion news network is nothing if not intrepid and funny. Moving on, a minor software glitch at the Diebold Corporation today caused thousands of electronic voting machines to accidentally release the results of the 2008 presidential election months ahead of schedule. According to the group of military and corporate leaders that has chosen every American president since Eisenhower, Diebold's mistake marks the first time the nation's leader has been revealed prematurely. I don't even know if I can enjoy the sham election now that I know who's going to win.

If you can't trust your shadowy overlords to keep a secret, what is the purpose really of voting in the puppet democracy? I'm fine with it. I mean, he was going to get my meeting this vote anyway. Despite the leak, all of the presidential candidates have so far said they'll continue their campaigns. Hillary Clinton isn't about to give up just because she lost the election. She'll give up when she's supposed to on election day. And she'll act surprised. That's onion news network giving John Stewart a run for his money. The onion is one of my favorite sources of the truth behind the news. More than three million people join me each week to read the onion. Or to watch onion news network, it's around the clock video news service. You can go to the morious blog at pbs.org and we'll link you to the onion. Meanwhile, it's time to pledge. And I'm not kidding. See you next week. Online web exclusive on government secrecy.

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