August 11, 2008 12:12 PM
M.E. Sprengelmeyer on the Unconventional Wisdom series
Mark_Wolf What's the genesis of your Unconventional Wisdom series?
M.E._Sprengelmeyer Well, it's a continuation of the midlife crisis I started last year.
Before my 40th birthday, I fulfilled a longtime goal and moved to, yes, Iowa, to get an up-close, early glimpse of this wacky system of electing a president.
Afterwards, I chased the candidates around the country through Super-Duper Tuesday, but as the Democratic contest settled into a back-and-forth, head-to-head fight between Clinton and Obama, I shifted to getting ready for the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
It seemed to me that Democrats, and to some extent Republicans, were mirroring some events of the past, and I got the idea to help some historic figures from past Democratic National Conventions give us their advice, cautionary tales and other stories about how conventions like the one in Denver can go very right or very wrong. It was a blast.
Mark_Wolf Why start with Tom Haden?
M.E._Sprengelmeyer The 1968 election -- and that convention in Chicago -- were such watersheds in American political history. Meanwhile, the 40-year span covered my entire lifespan, too. (I was age one in 1968, but I heard so many vague stories over the years that I wanted to dig deeper on those.)
In hindsight, I wished that I had started in 1964 with the story of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Without the reforms to integrate the Democratic National Convention's delegations in 1964, Sen. Barack Obama's rise might look differently today. But I had made a choice to start in 1968 and we spoke about 1964 in some of the other chapters you'll see.
Mark_Wolf What struck you about Hayden? Had you met him before?
M.E._Sprengelmeyer I had never met Hayden before. But I was quite familiar with his voluminous writings, including his role in the original drafts of the Port Huron Statement. Many of the members of the Chicago 8 have passed away. Others have moved into very different types of lives. But Hayden was an activist then working on a mimeograph machine and he's an activist today, working on the Internet, in books, etc., and that seemed to make him a perfect subject as we tried to see if there was any connection between the movements of 1968 and the movements of today.
Mark_Wolf Hayden said, "If it wasn't for the FBI advisers, Chicago '68 would not have happened - repeat, would not have happened." What was he referencing?
M.E._Sprengelmeyer His belief and assertion is that in 1968, federal authorities took the more outlandish rhetoric of certain activists, exaggerated the threats of protesters, mounted an army against them and then set the stage for confrontations. His claim is that if the protesters simply had been granted permits to march here and there, camp here and there, the numbers from the first few rallies -- just over 1,000 -- would have stayed small and there wouldn't have been any big clashes. Instead, he says that the crackdown drew thousands more sympathizers to the rallies and created unnecessary confrontations that didn't end well for anyone.
He sees parallels anytime security planners appear to be relying too much on worst-case scenarios that don't have a more solid basis in probability. But he also points out that the events leading up to the 1968 convention -- the Vietnam War, the draft, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, the burning of major U.S. cities that summer -- is hardly a good comparison for 2008. So nobody, not even Hayden, thinks a repeat of 1968 is likely in either Denver or St. Paul this year.
Mark_Wolf What does the grizzled old veteran think of today's peace movement?
M.E._Sprengelmeyer I was surprised. Sometimes, when you ask grizzled old veterans to compare their younger selves to their modern-day counterparts, you expect them to say how "in my day" things were so much better. But Hayden sees the anti-Iraq war movement as far more powerful than the anti-Vietnam War movement in its earlier stages, since, one way or another, the majority of the country came to oppose the Iraq war much earlier. That surprised me somewhat.
He also is a huge fan of the Internet-fueled Obama campaign, which he compares to other social movements.
Mark_Wolf Tuesday's installment is focused on George McGovern. He must have some interesting things to say about picking a vice president.
M.E._Sprengelmeyer We made many trips during this series, but my favorite one was the long drive to Mitchell, South Dakota. Sen. McGovern, who is in his mid-80s, gave us all the time in the world, and he didn't just talk about the botched vice presidential pick, but the entire domino effect of blunders that led up to it.
We arrived at his office -- in the McGovern library across the street from his little ranch house -- just a couple days after he had made a very tough phone call to former President Bill Clinton (who led his Texas campaign in 1972) to tell him that he was switching his endorsement from Hillary Rodham Clinton to Barack Obama.
For that installment, the story I wrote is one of my favorites in the series. But the complete interview transcript is even better, featuring his riffs on meeting a sleepy Eleanor Roosevelt, etc.
If you read the transcript, you'll even see me apologizing to him because when I was five years old, my grandmother pressured me into joining her and supporting Richard Nixon in '72. He got a chuckle out of that and said I was forgiven because a boy can't go against his grandmother.
Mark_Wolf Any themes that were repeated throughout your reporting that resonate with this year's convention/presidential race?
M.E._Sprengelmeyer There are too many recurring themes to mention. I'll list a few.
Every story offers something to think about going into this year's convention -- and that was the point of the entire series.
1968 -- how to balance free speech with the need for security.
1972 -- the need to resolve conflicts BEFORE a convention -- OR ELSE. We thought Democrats did that when resolving the Michigan and Florida delegation situations. But what's going to happen with the disappointed Clinton delegates in Denver? We don't know.
1976 -- how, according to a delightful 88-year-old who was mentor to the late Barbara Jordan, a party needs to recognize talent whereever it presents itself.
1980 -- when Kennedy forces fought Carter forces all the way to the floor of the convention, it's a reminder that a party somehow needs to present a semblance of unity. Or else... (That's a recurring theme in many stories -- "or else...")
Folks think this is going to be a happy, upbeat convention, because that's the way they script things these days. But Democrats and Republicans both have had those scripts before, every year, and sometimes it ends happy and sometimes it doesn't.
1984 - Walter Mondale could tell Obama how to avoid a "root canal" speech.
1988 -- Michael Dukakis will remind folks about the most important part of a convention: the morning after.
1992 -- I'll let you imagine what happens when we "Let Jerry Speak!"
M.E._Sprengelmeyer I hope everyone gets something out of each installment. I won't give away the ending.
Mark_Wolf Who is Thomas Freeman and what is his role in the series?
M.E._Sprengelmeyer Dr. Thomas Freeman is the legendary debate coach at Texas Southern University (a once all-black institution created for a single black student back in the day so the state wouldn't have to integrate the rest of its university system). Dr. Freeman, whose office is crammed with thousands, literally thousands, of trophies for the debate teams he has led, was a mentor to 1976 keynote speaker, the late Rep. Barbara Jordan. We asked him what Jordan might think in 2008, watching an African-American candidate and a woman candidate go down to the wire for the presidential nomination. And we uncovered some forgotten writings of Jordan -- letters she wrote to well-wishers after the 1976 appearance -- in which she was less than convinced that America was ready to elect a black person or a woman to the highest office in the land. (At least not in 1976.) Researching this story fascinated me.
Freeman is such a legend, Denzel Washington trained with him before a movie about the Great Debaters.
Mark_Wolf You spent a lot of time with John and Elizabeth Edwards during the primary/caucus season. What did you make of last week's acknowledgment by John Edwards that he'd had an affair with a campaign staffer?
M.E._Sprengelmeyer I got to know both of them on the campaign trail, and Elizabeth Edwards and I kept bumping into each other all over the place. When the news broke last week, I thought back to a morning last October, when I had been invited to meet with her at breakfast in Marshalltown, Iowa -- about an hour from my home office in Des Moines. When I got there, an apologetic staffer said that due to medical reasons, ostensibly a need for "an emergency checkup" -- she had cancelled her trip to Marshalltown. Well, guess what else happened that morning. The initial National Enquirer report broke. Sad, very sad.
Mark_Wolf Former Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson says Edwards' lies cost Hillary Clinton the nomination. Think there's any turth to that?
M.E._Sprengelmeyer There are a lot of "what-if" scenarios you could spin. If Edwards had not been in the race, would Bill Richardson or Joe Biden or Chris Dodd have emerged as a stronger "third wheel" in the race? An alternative to the first African-American top contender or the first female top contender? Who knows. No speculative scenario is a given. I will say that in Iowa, I often met people who said they were trying to decide between Obama or Edwards, and met very few who said they were trying to decide between Edwards and Clinton. Howard might be right. And he might be wrong.
Mark_Wolf How did Ralph Nader strike you?
M.E._Sprengelmeyer He didn't strike me. He struck Obama -- and hard. When he made his inflamatory comments about Sen. Obama, claiming that he "talks white" and doesn't pay enough attention to the needs of the inner cities, it was something we couldn't hold for this chapter of the series.
He was quite defensive about the 2000 race, talking about all the people who blame him (he says falsely) for the election of President Bush and everything that came after it, including the war. While we spoke some about that and his current campaign, which doesn't seem to be going anywhere, our main purpose was keeping focused on the original mission of our series. And for the penultimate chapter in our series, I think people will be interested in his answers when we asked him to give Democrats advice on how to make dissidents like him less relevant.
Mark_Wolf How does the series end?
M.E._Sprengelmeyer It ends with a total nobody. Someone whose name nobody even knows how to pronounce. It's the perfect ending -- and you'll learn some things about the current presidential nominee that you might not have known before.
M.E._Sprengelmeyer The whole series was a blast. My only regret: that I didn't have the courage to call Rob Lowe for the 1988 chapter.
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