Keynote Speech by David Sirota, Edward M. Kennedy Dinner, November 7, 2009

My life in and around politics began as a summer intern in Washington, D.C. in 1996, two years after Newt Gingrich’s conservative revolution. It was there that I first met the namesake of this dinner tonight, the late Ted Kennedy.

It was the end of a endless and depressing summer. 1996 was the year the Congress was happily slashing welfare, fresh off of crushing health care reform. And for a young idealist, I can tell you there’s nothing more jarring than watching Republican and Democratic politicians waltz around in expensive suits and lavish taxpayer-funded offices insisting that the real problem in the economy is that government is too generous to working-class single moms.

As a wide-eyed intern working long hours in the bowels of the Senate, I did the mind-numbing HTML work of building some of the first congressional websites. My thrills - if you could call them that - was getting novelty pictures taken with some of the Senate’s most cartoonish - and cartoonishly bad - senators - people like Strom Thurmond, Bob Dole and Fred Thompson (the latter whom I didn’t even know was a Senator - I just thought he was that guy from Die Hard II).

But when I had the chance to meet Senator Kennedy, it was no novelty. I remember for the first time in my life feeling like I was encountering a personification of history itself.

What’s funny is that while I cherished the polaroid I got with him, for a time, I didn’t exactly know why. That is, I knew Kennedy was famous, and I knew I liked him because he was a leader of the political party I had aligned myself with, but I didn’t genuinely appreciate why he was so revered, other than for being the brother of John and Robert. 

By the time I was back on Capitol Hill four years later, I was better informed. I ended up working for Vermont’s then Congressman Bernie Sanders - now a senator - and Wisconsin’s David Obey, and I quickly learned what the term “conservative revolution” really meant. At the end of the Clinton administration, both Republicans and most Democrats in Washington were in the process of turning the idea of universal health care, trade policy reform, living wage laws, and financial regulation into punchlines of depressing jokes that only Beltway lobbyists could find funny. Predictably, this era of collusion - collusion between both parties and the moneyed interests in Washington - birthed the ultimate bastard child of a politics of cynicism: George W. Bush.

I spent 5 years on Capitol Hill during a time that will likely be looked back on as one of the single darkest moments in American history - an era that saw both parties create the regulatory and economic conditions for the Depression we now face, an era that saw both parties drive us into foreign policy disasters that threaten our - and the world’s - future.

In that time, of course, I was lucky enough to work for two of the Congress’s unsung progressive champions, and we did our best to wage a kind of guerilla war against the conservative revolution. From the minority in the House, it wasn’t easy. Tricking, cajoling, and embarrassing House Republicans and corporate Democrats into doing anything for working people is no easy task - and then getting the Senate to go along was an even more difficult challenge. While the lower chamber of Congress is still somewhat susceptible to popular pressure as "the people’s house,” the Senate has become a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America - and it largely remains that way today. When we looked across to the Senate on, say, a measure to raise the minimum wage, we would list the Democratic senators we might be able to work with - and the conversation inevitably went something like this: Let’s see, Bayh? Probably not. Baucus? No way. Lieberman? What are you kidding? And on and on and on...until we got to Paul Wellstone and, of course, Ted Kennedy. They were the only ones who you could almost always count on to carry the torch for any and all causes for We the People.

When I met Senator Kennedy again, it was ten years after I had first had my photo snapped with him as an intern. I was at a press conference with him and an organization of state legislators I had started - we were releasing a petition signed by state legislators demanding an end to the Iraq War. Once again, when we went down the list of senators who might be able to help us promote this cause, the one we knew we could count on was Kennedy.

After the event, I had a chance to talk with the senator. His back was ailing him then, and he looked more frail than usual. He asked me about my work, and I told him all of what I’ve told you here - that I had first worked on the Hill as an intern and met him, and in the interim, had come to appreciate him as one of the only people in our government who was willing to take tough, controversial stands - one of the few people who seemed to know the difference between right and wrong, and that politics should be about that difference. Ever the optimist, he said that wasn’t true - that there were people who were going to make a difference in the future, well after he’s gone.

Ted Kennedy is gone now - and what a tragedy it is that he was taken at just this moment of national peril. I think of what he told me, and I’d sincerely like to believe he was right about future torchbearers and leaders - but I’m here tonight to tell you I’m not so sure.

I’m not so sure because when you look honestly at what’s going on in our government right now, it’s not clear that the idea of “change” was anything more than a cynical campaign slogan and a colorful t-shirt.

When you look at a Wall Street “reform” bill in the House being gutted by lobbyists - and hear that some Democratic lawmakers you came to trust are helping them gut it - you start to wonder.

When you look at a Senate that votes to simultaneously preserve the right of millionaires to declare bankruptcy and protect their mansions while barring middle-class folks from declaring bankruptcy and protecting their bungalows, you start to wonder.

When you look at a Colorado state government hamstrung by atrocities like TABOR, and then you look at some Colorado Democratic and progressive leaders who have been too afraid to take real risks to fix the situation through the ballot or through bold legislation, you start to wonder.

When you look at a health care “reform” bill that may end up preserving the same flawed system and further enriching the health insurance industry, you start to wonder.

When you look at two wars costing hundreds of billions of dollars, and you hear that we may escalate one of them further, you start to wonder.

When you hear a president say that we cannot afford $80 billion a year in deficit spending to make sure every American has health care while simultaneously pushing for another $1 trillion bank bailout and $580 billion in deficit spending for the largest Pentagon budget since World War II, you start to wonder - and to get angry.

Yes, anger - that may be the best word to describe the feeling in this country right now. I got my first taste of how powerful it is when I was reporting my book, The Uprising, in 2007 - and it’s only gotten more intense in subsequent years. The results of the 2009 elections prove that.

And let’s just be honest: people are right to be angry. While we have certainly seen some encouraging progressive policy successes both here in Colorado and nationally, the average person is nonetheless looking at an economy with, according to today’s New York Times, a real unemployment rate of 17% - the highest since the Great Depression. At the same time, this average person sees taxpayer-subsidized Wall Street banks now doubling their executive bonuses, a state infrastructure falling apart, and Colorado’s child poverty rates skyrocketing. And if they hear news of politicians at all, they either see them taking 15 different positions on the most simple issues, or raising boatloads of cash from the same corporate fat cats who got the country into this mess.

I didn’t know Ted Kennedy personally, so I can’t purport to speak for him. But having worked near him and around him, I can say his legislative crusades epitomized the one thing that so many of his colleagues in professional politics forget - the one thing that everyone needs to know right now: This is no longer a game.

The crises we face right now threaten the future of this city, this state and this country. In the past, we’ve had the luxury of letting our politics be a little less than serious - we’ve had the luxury of letting jokes about George W. Bush’s speaking inflection, John Kerry’s parasailing hobby and Larry Craig’s bathroom habits consume our time. We’ve had the luxury of letting millionaires treat local and state politics as their frivolous part-time hobby - as long as local and state politics don’t threaten millionaire economic interests. We’ve had the luxury of letting politicians and operatives who see their work as nothing but a country-club sport run our country. But we don’t have that luxury anymore because it’s no longer a game.

It’s no longer a game when 45,000 Americans are dying every year without health care, and thousands more are losing their health insurance and their houses.

It’s no longer a game when you can walk outside your home and see scores of your neighbors being foreclosed on.

It’s no longer a game when casualties are mounting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and when soldier suicide rates are skyrocketing inside a military under severe combat stress.

And it’s no longer a game when a right-wing political movement is seeking to use old-time backlash politics to wage a jihad against people of color and immigrants.

Of course, coming to Ted Kennedy’s simple realization about the seriousness of politics means an entire change of attitude for all of us. It means understanding that parties and politicians are means to an end - not an end unto themselves.

For a lot of Democratic partisans, the 2008 election felt like yet another summer camp color war - we put on Barack Obama t-shirts, felt really excited, went to rallies, and then went home filled with “hope” thinking we had made “change” simply because Barack Obama became president. And some of those partisans continue to insist that any effort to pressure President Obama and congressional Democrats is supposedly disloyal or traitorous - as if the entire objective in American democracy is to preserve the power of one or another party, regardless of what that party is doing.

That, of course, isn’t the goal - the goal, as Barack Obama’s fellow community organizers well know, is turning people’s “hope” into real “change” regardless of which political party is in power.

If passing a serious Wall Street reform bill means embarrassing every one of our Colorado congresspeople to the point where their approval ratings are in the toilet, then that’s what we have to do. If passing a universal health care bill means humiliating our senators into consistently strong stands, then that’s what we have to do. If passing the kinds of tax and spending policies that can get us out of the recession means constantly pressuring Barack Obama, then that’s what we have to do. And the good news is, that the more all of these political leaders listen to this grassroots pressure, the better they will fare at the polls come election time.

This is an important point particularly here in Colorado as we move into the 2010 election cycle - and particularly into the race for U.S. Senate. We are going to have a Democratic primary between two formidable Democratic candidates, Michael Bennet and Andrew Romanoff. Some say this is a terrible tragedy that will weaken the Democratic Party for the general election. As proof, they claim that primaries weaken Democrats. That’s untrue on many levels.

First and foremost, recent history suggests its untrue that primaries weaken the electoral chances of general election Democratic candidates. The last hotly contested Democratic U.S. Senate primary in the Mountain West occurred in 2006 up in Montana. You’ll recall that the Democratic Party’s Big Money tried to force a guy named Jon Tester out of that primary race. Had Tester not run that race, Democrats would have coronated Tester’s opponent - a candidate with a serious skeleton in his closet - a candidate who therefore would have been crushed in the general election by the Republican incumbent, Sen. Conrad Burns. As Tester told the Senate Democratic Caucus when he arrived in Washington, primaries make candidates stronger - and that’s particularly true here in Colorado where neither potential Senate nominee has ever run for statewide office before.

But even more important than the candidate vetting value of primaries is the issue pressure that primaries create. Whereas Republican primaries tend to create competition between candidates seeking to show who is a more extremist conservative, Democratic primaries tend to create competition between candidates seeking to show who is more in touch with the concerns of most voters. In working to win the Democratic nomination, candidates have to show who is more committed to universal health care, Wall Street reform, environmental protection and ending adventurist wars - that is, to show who is more committed to issue positions that are wildly popular among both the Democratic primary and general electorate.

Whether Big Money donors, organized interest groups or cynical political power brokers, those who have sought to stop a primary from even happening in Colorado represent - in a way - the same status quo that drove this country into a ditch - a status quo that sees democracy as a threat rather than a cure. And yet had we had more democracy - had we had a Congress that responded to the longtime public demand for health care reform, an end to the Iraq War and more serious corporate regulation - we wouldn’t be in the trouble we’re now in.

Now I know what some of you are thinking after hearing all this - Sirota’s just a radical and we all just have to be a little more patient. It’s President Obama’s first year in office, Colorado has only been Democratic for a few years, and things take time. So let me close with one last principle Ted Kennedy seemed to live his life by: Patience is not a virtue - in fact, it’s the last refuge of the status quo and a rationale used by some of the most despicable forces in our past.

Any honest reading of history will show that the bulk of the New Deal was passed in the first two years of President Roosevelt’s first term, and any honest reading of history will show that most of Ronald Reagan’s transformative legislative agenda was enacted in his first year in office - and Reagan did this with his party controlling only one house of Congress. Today, Democrats have 60 Senate votes, a Democratic House and a Democratic president elected with a bigger majority than Reagan himself. Likewise, Colorado Democrats holding 4 out of 5 statewide constitutional offices, both houses of the legislature, both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats, five out of 7 of the state’s congressional seats. This is no time for patience. Good things DON’T come to those who wait. This is carpe diem time and if Democrats do not seize the moment, they better be prepared for voters to throw them out on their asses.

Those who look at the crises our state and country faces and look at the legislative opportunity Democrats hold and nonetheless argue for “patience” are making the very same “don’t go too fast” argument that was made against every step forward we’ve ever taken. They are the Father Coughlins arguing against the New Deal, the Goldwaterites opposing Medicare, the tea party protestors angrily snarling at minorities and the uninsured. If you watch the hit show Mad Men, they are Betty Draper in 1963 listening to a radio report about angry right-wing opposition to civil rights and telling her black housekeeper "I hate to say this, but this has really made me wonder about civil rights. Maybe it's not supposed to happen right now."

Betty was speaking not just from her latent racism but also from her fear. She saw the cantankerous uprising against civil rights - an uprising that looks eerily like today’s angry Tea Party ferment against health care. And when you watch that scene, you are supposed to be repulsed. You are supposed to ask, “Even with the angry opposition, how could anyone have told African Americans to wait for an end to Jim Crow?”

When, forty years from now, they make a Mad Men-style television show about this era we are living in, that’s the question people will ask if we wait in the name of patience or in the name of fear. Forty years from now when they make that television show, America won’t remember the vote counts on specific bills (does anyone remember the vote count on the vote to pass Medicare) and they won’t remember the name of the legislators or the senator or the governors in office (I know that pains some of you politicians out there). They will remember that we didn’t use this fleeting window of political opportunity to stop bailing out the fat cat Wall Streeters in Manhattan, and that we’re now tens of trillions of dollars in debt. Forty years from now, if we haven’t taken real steps to stop climate change, our planet won’t remember the debates about why, only that the planet is well on its way to environmental incineration. Forty years from now, if we haven’t reformed health care, nobody will care what political party was able to maximize that failure, they’ll remember that in the interim 1.8 million Americans will have died for lack of insurance.

They will remember, in short, not the party or the rhetoric - they’ll remember the results. And to get those results, we must know that this is not a game and patience is not a virtue. Keep saying it over and over again in your mind, when you are walking a precinct, making GOTV calls and staging protests against out-of-touch politicians. This is not a game and patience is not a virtue. Whether you are a grassroots activist, a party volunteer, a state legislator or a top-ticket politician, embracing those principles and making them the guiding light in your politics is the way to make sure Ted Kennedy’s “dream never dies” - and the way to rescue this country’s future.

Thank you.