Hedrick Smith, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and director of the upcoming PBS documentary Democracy Rebellion, talks about grassroots efforts in Texas to combat big money politics, gerrymandering and voter suppression.
Guests
Hedrick SmithPulitzer Prize-Winning Reporter
Hosts
Angela EvansDean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin
This is policy on purpose. A podcast produced by the LBJ School of Public
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Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. We take you behind the scenes of policy
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with the people who help shape it. For more, visit LBJ Texas Study.
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Hello, everyone. This is Angela Evans, the dean of the LBJ School. And here’s another one of our
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great podcasts called Policy on Purpose. And I’m very excited today to have someone
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I’m trying to describe him to. His is like a Renaissance man. I don’t know what else he hasn’t
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done. And it’s Hedrick Smith. And Hedrick is coming to us because he’s completed
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a documentary in it’s called The Democracy Rebellion. And this documentary
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is upcoming. It’s going to be it’s going to air on PBS. But we were fortunate enough to be able to
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see this documentary before it’s actually going on PBS. It got a sneak preview. We got a sneak
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preview of this documentary and what I loved about the documentary. It’s taking
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normal people in in several states and in different aspects of
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the the whole experience of voting and being a citizen. Normal people who just said,
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you know, I need to do something about it and shows their stories and the impact of their stories.
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So before fixing the democracy, which is amazing. So here you go. Oh, you heard it here first
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on this podcast. We’ve got a way to fix the democracy. Right. But before I do that, I need to really
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tell you about this gentleman. He’s a Pulitzer Prize winning former New York
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Times reporter and editor, and he’s one Emmy Awards as well. So he’s Pulitzer Prize, Emmy Award.
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He has worked for years on this documentary, going all around the country,
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sleuthing out stories, looking at stories that were on Natalee in
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the nascence, but things that had actually taken place so that you could see the success or failure of these stories
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and how they’ve lived out after the initial energy of that startup
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weighing down. He’s an author. He’s written several books.
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One of the books of Russians was based on his years in New York Times when he was in the bureau chief
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of The New York Times from 71 to 74. It was a number one bestseller, some sitting
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across my number one bestseller on the Russians. He has the power game, How Washington Works.
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He has done 26 primetime specials and he’s worked on anything,
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everything from like Enron to Duke Ellington. So, I mean, it’s
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a whole range. What I love about it is just shows this inquisitive mind and this
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mind that wants to probe and talk about things. So when you take that mind and you apply it to our
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world, which is a policy world. I’m so pleased we have him here today. So let’s
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just get on with with some of the questions. One of the things I really
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want to know is. You’ve been in this business a long time.
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So what kinds of shifts have you seen in the way that journalism.
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His he had to adjust to this new world of information, this deep transformative
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tech type of technologies as social media. You know, the Internet and the
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Instagram people going to authoritative sources, which, you know, journalists well,
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the trends have been good in mainstream legacy journalism in the first place.
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Money is just dried up for an awful lot of newspapers and television
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stations to the point where they’ve had to drastically cut their staffs so they don’t have
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the kind of resources that they used to have to take time to dig into stories. So
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what that’s done is it made a lot of news coverage, much more shallow than it used to be, the 24/7
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cycle, the need to try to get a story out there even before you finished reporting
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it. And I’ve talked to reporters, people I know, who feel as though they didn’t get to
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finish their reporting before they had to put it on the air. So you get a lot of Half-Baked stuff. So that’s
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not very good. And what you wind up by getting is what I call the equivalent of
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fire engine coverage. Easiest thing to do if you have a local television station
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is to get a police radio and listen to when there’s a fire and chase the fire engine, get dramatic pictures
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of flames. You go on the ten o’clock, eleven o’clock news. People say, oh, my God, they’re really covering the news. No,
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in fact, you’re not learning very much at all. But it looks good and it’s easy to do. But
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it’s got no depth. And we have the same thing happening in our economic coverage, particularly in our political
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coverage covering every once in a while, President Trump tweets something really important,
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but most of the time he tweets something that gets negated by another tweet within a few hours.
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And yet every tweet is treated as though it’s equally important. And that’s shallow
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judgment. I’m not making a judgment about the president. I’m talking about the coverage of the news.
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So I think what’s happened is that the news has gotten more shell. On the other hand,
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you are seeing really excellent work. I mean, I work for The New York Times. Yes. I was going to ask you about
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this investigative reporting. Yeah, well, if you see look at the quality of investigative reporting now at The
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New York Times or The Washington Post or sometimes at the Los Angeles Times or The Economist, I mean, really
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quality outlets, then I think you’re seeing even better reporting. I mean, I
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can say that political reporting is better now at The New York Times than it was when I was there.
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I don’t think the national security reporting is as good, but we were in the Cold War with the Russians when
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I was there. And arms control and those issues were really important and we really invested enormous
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resources. We don’t do so much of that now because the story has shifted to being a
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domestic political story. So you see two things happening. You see you see the quality publications
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and the quality journalistic organizations, and they may be going online
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and they may be maybe using social media. It isn’t the vehicle that matters so much.
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It’s the collecting and gathering and sifting organization that really matters.
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Whatever its medium is, those quality organizations are getting better and stronger
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and they’re financially strong because there are there is an elite audience that wants
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real quality news. But for the rest of the folks they’re getting, they
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were getting a mile wide and a millimeter deep. I mean, we thought if we got
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80 cable channels and Christ, now, what do we have? Hundreds. I mean, my wife says, let’s tune into
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whatever HBO and it’s Channel 400 or Channel 500 a zillion channels,
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but you don’t get the depth there. They’re often very repetitive. I
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mean, I watch MSNBC occasionally. I don’t watch it very much. But one
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newscast after another is covering the same story. It goes on for four or five hours now.
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They get a slightly different snippet or a slightly different. But you’re not getting the depth.
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You’re not getting the added value that you want to get. If you’re listening to that much news.
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So frankly, I don’t watch it very much. Well, one of the things that I have found when we’re talking about
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preparing students who are going to go in this, you know, it’s a steady flow of expertize that comes
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out of our universities who teach public policy, public administration, civic engagement
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is that we’re trying to have the steady flow of expertize they can they can fill these different gaps
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is that I often think about investigative journalism, doing some of the best kind of research
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and looking at, you know, The New York Times just had a big article on airstrikes
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in Syria and looking, and it was an enormous amount of work. And that’s it’s coming closer
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and closer to what we’re trying to do in the analytic sphere, in policy. So I see
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I see our two disciplines really melding and getting married more and more together
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in terms of trying to find the right problem and trying to get authoritative information around
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that problem and then trying to presented in an. Narrative that people everyone can understand. So we’re just not
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talking to an audience that’s too sophisticated and also getting in a timely fashion. Yes. So
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your audience feels as though you’re connected. I mean, the whole whole problem with the Boeing
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max aircraft. Well, I mean, the investigative journalism that’s gone on there has
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run actually ahead of Congress and certainly ahead of what Boeing wants to reveal. So it’s still performing
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a very important function. And that’s why the quality outlets are so important.
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But but still, I would argue, as a former foreign correspondent,
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that we have news in America that’s way too Washington based. One of the things I learned
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in being the bureau chief in Moscow or in Cairo or in
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Saigon or I was also a reporter in Paris for a while, too.
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You cannot cover a country by sitting in the Capitol if you want to find out what’s going on in Russia.
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You got to get out. You have to get at least to St. Petersburg. But you have to get to their auto industry.
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You have to get to their aircraft and you have to get to their space center, have to go see what family life is like
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and what’s it like in Siberia. What about minority populations? You can’t sit in Washington.
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Well, when I came home to America, I brought those habits with me. And so, I mean,
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this documentary have made the democracy rebellion. It reflects reporting that is in North Dakota,
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South Dakota, North Carolina, Florida, California, all over the country, New Mexico
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or wherever. I’m here in Texas. I’ve been on the phone reporting while I’ve been in Texas.
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I came here to give a talk about this and to do so and do this interview with you. But
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this morning, I was on the phone yesterday. I was on the phone with sources in Texas because I want to catch up on Texas politics.
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So it’s that attitude of being curious and reaching out to find out what is happening
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wherever you’re going, and that the world is your beat. There is no limited geographical
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beat. There is no limited. I got to cover just Trump’s tweets beat or
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and I think that’s a very important attitude. And I think the American media hasn’t kept
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that attitude. And I think some are starting to something like your film actually shows us.
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There seems to be this swell both in terms of the populous, but also people covered
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this populous that something’s got to change. Something’s changing somewhere. It works. We’re in the middle
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or that we’re verging on to something a little bit different. I wanted to ask you something that I thought
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was very interesting. You really moved from print journalism to
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really the film, you know, and when we start thinking about film, our film is sometimes an
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easier medium to get messages across because people are watching. They’re not being entertained.
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But, you know, they’re not spending a lot of time reading. You’re showing them then. Did you say, see, you see this as a more powerful
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tool in terms of telling a story or getting down into some real basics
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of a news story to do it by film? What’s your opinion on what you’re trying to do if you’re trying to reach a mass
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audience? Yes, the answer is clearly yes. What’s interesting is sometimes the writing is harder.
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If it’s really well, if it’s really good writing, because it’s gonna be more compact. Your thinking has
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to be more precise. It has to be sharper. If I’m writing for a documentary film, doing a script, I’ve
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got to write it to pictures. And often I’ve only got 15, 18, 20 words
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to get from one thought to the next thought. And I’ve got to do it accurately and I’ve got to do
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it quickly, concisely. And I’ve got to be really true.
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To what? To both the facts, but also the story I’m trying to unfold.
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A documentary is a series of unfolding discoveries. It’s the architecture
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of a documentary is much more complicated than the people who are watching it are aware of. It’s
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much more like writing a novels, much more like writing a book. So you have to have that that
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storytellers ability and you have to have the facility of working with
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the video. If you’re writing a book, you writing a lot more words, you’re taking
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time to go into a subject. People can go back and reread it if they didn’t get a paragraph
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or they want to get or they put the book down and they have to be setting or you’re doing
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something logical and somebody puts the book down, they get interrupted, they come back, they can pick it up. So you take
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more time, you go into more depth there. You got to get that depth much faster
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in writing for a documentary. I find it really challenging. I find it really interesting. And I found my own
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sensibilities changing. As a reporter, I, I was much more visual. I happened
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to have my mother was an artist. My wife was an artist. I happen to have some visual ability
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myself, it turns out, being related to those folks. And I found that
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I wasn’t using that as much when I was a print reporter as when I became a video
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reporter and producer, because I not only go do the interviews, but I sit down with the editor
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in the edit room and when I see how the editors eddying and I work with him. And
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when I go out and do the reporting, I do the reporting differently because I know what’s actually going to be useful
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when you’re in the editing room. What what kind of and you you learn you learn
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to use pauses. You learn to use silences. You learn to let questions hang.
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If somebody doesn’t want to answer a question, that’s awkward. Whereas in print this is tendency to step in
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or in print, you can say, well, you know, Senator, if you really weren’t supposed to be
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signing that agreement and getting involved, then why were you there? And I understand people
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saw you. And the guy says, well, maybe you can
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write it up. The guy sort of, yeah, I was there. You can write it out that he conceded
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it. When you see it, act it out. It’s much more dramatic. I mean, I’m sure I’ve literally
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had people get up in the middle of interviews and leave often, but every once in a while I’ve had
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it happen. And that is itself enormously important to the viewer, because the viewer can
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see a this guy doesn’t want to answer that question. So I know what the answer is, even though
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he didn’t say a word. You can’t do that in print. Somebody says, I’m not going to talk to you about that in print.
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The silence doesn’t communicate. The smell is powerful to is. We actually see the individuals
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use. You have a physical picture of the individuals. You have a tick. There’s a picture of the setting,
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which I thought was very powerful in this film. And I want to get to the film because I want people
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who are listening to us to understand this film is about a lot
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of grassroots efforts around palazzos, its heroes. It’s not just efforts, it’s people.
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OK. Yes. And this is the individuals who, you know, at the beginning of this podcast, they said they
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they saw something wrong. They said, I’m in and I’m in 100 percent right.
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And they were looking at things that had been troubling, you know, dark money,
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political, you know, finance part, you know, campaign finance reform. I’m looking at gerrymandering,
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looking at how to get out the vote. These are all things that are swirl around
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arrack, are really challenged now to keep our republic alive and well
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and making sure people are engaged in in in what happens when you were
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doing this film. What surprised you the most? Now, I know you wrote a book
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and you were writing something so that this film is based on, you know, a lot of thinking and and framing
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this prompts. But when you went out and you looked at the whole film, you sat back and you said, wow,
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this is what I learned by making this. What is it? Well put. Some of it is
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sort of obvious, but it’s different when you see it face to face. I
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think I think one of the most amazing things to me was the quality of these grassroots heroes.
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I use the word heroes. I mean, you meet a woman like Cindy Black in Washington State and and
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she’s she’s been an aircraft mechanic. She’s been. She goes to college. She’s becomes a family
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counselor. She then becomes a small business person and she gets exercised
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about all the money flooding into to political campaigns, basically from corporations.
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And she said, I don’t believe corporations are the same as people. I don’t believe money is the same as
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free speech. I don’t think the Supreme Court was right when they made the Citizens United decision. I’m
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going to run a movement to get out against it. And it’s utterly amazing to see who this woman is, like 57
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years old. She’s a young grandmother. And you look at her and she looks like a nice, sweet woman that you might meet
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in the grocery store with her. And this is a woman with tensile strength and passion and
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commitment and will and an ability, amazing ability to organize people. Or you
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meet a woman like Ellen Freedon in Florida, a very smart, savvy attorney
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with campaign experience. But she then has to negotiate this whole business of pulling
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together a coalition of blacks and Latinos and whites and Democrats and Republicans
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and independents to mount this gerrymander reform. And they win a ballot sixty
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two point nine percent of the vote. Unbelievable. Majorities says we want to stop
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politicians from rigging elections by drawing district lines so they can get reelected and stay
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in power. So, I mean, you meet people like that. I meet these guys out in South Dakota. Take it
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back, dawg. And one guy runs a restaurant. The other guy’s been a congressional staffer for 28
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years in Washington. So I gave up on Washington. I said, why are you back in South Dakota pushing for
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reform for an anti corruption reform in South Dakota? South Dakota, of all places.
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I don’t necessarily think of that being a terribly corrupt place. I’m proud that our Boston,
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New Orleans, San Francisco, what have you. Careful. You’re right. And getting in trouble with these saying maybe
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taxes as well. Know it’s all over the place a little less like Ballards. But what’s amazing
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is these people. All of them, they said, hey, the politicians aren’t fixing
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this. The lawyers aren’t fixing this. The courts are fixing this. We have to do it ourselves.
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And so I was astonished, first of all, by just beating the people
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and watching them and listening to their stories. The second thing I would say is I
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was really amazed that people power still works in this country to the degree
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that it does. I mean, in Connecticut, they adopted a system of public funding of campaigns.
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And you will I mean, I couldn’t believe it. I know you and I thought about it before. That’s a smart
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idea. You don’t have big money dominating the campaigns. But what what real difference does it make?
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Well, it makes an enormous difference. Suddenly, you’ve got a whole bunch of middle class people and maybe lower
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middle class people who can run. For elections, because there’s a subsidy now, they have to prove themselves,
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they have to go get 300 of their neighbors to give them some kind of small donations to show
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that they’re not just a guy or gal who would like to run for office. They’ve actually got public support,
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but then they get elected and they go. This is one woman I met up in in
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Connecticut, where Ellen Morse is a state senator. She comes from Bridgeport, poor part of
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Bridgeport. She says to me, I was a I had a I was a young mother. I had kids
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too young. I was on food stamps. Today, she runs a statewide organization,
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a nonprofit for African-American women who have breast cancer. This is what she does.
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She said, I never could have thought of running for office without this public funding.
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And then she gets elected. She’s now in her fourth term. She is chairman of the Legislative Committee
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on Health Policy. And so and so, I mean, think about what that means. It
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isn’t just it isn’t mostly about switching votes on Democrats or Republicans.
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That really the party thing is some affect. Republicans in Connecticut have actually gained strength thanks
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to public funding because it used to be the Democrats who dominated the private funding of politics in
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Connecticut, opposite of Texas, where Republicans dominate the money. But it’s different in different
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states. But the thing is happen is different people are there. There are twice as many women
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in the Connecticut legislature today as there were a decade ago when this system started. There are three times
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as many people who are minority in Asian-Americans or Hispanics or blacks. Well,
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it changes the whole agenda. The power of lobbyists is reduced because when when
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politicians agree voluntarily, they have to make the choice. And 80 percent of the people running
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for the Connecticut legislature. An amazing statistic, 80 percent voluntarily
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choose to take public funding rather than private funding. And one of the reasons is by now it’s
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ingrained in Connecticut. If you don’t take it, people say, how come you’re not taking public funding? Who’s
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buying you? Who’s own you? Who is that? Who’s the power? It’s only a matter of a few years. That wasn’t a matter
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of generation. It happened very quickly in the in the political time clock. So I would say
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I was blown away by seeing the political landscape, not in terms of parties,
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but in terms of of social engagement of people and the social
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transformation of policy that occurred in Connecticut because of this reform.
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I was interested in seeing you. You made the point earlier. But it’s worth underlining that
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I wanted to look at reforms that both reforms that were being happened, that is in
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campaigns and seeing the campaigns happen and then looking at other reforms that have been in place for three
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or four or five election cycles to see what difference does it make? Does it make a difference?
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You know, you see the reform in California to bring out dark money. The reform got
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passed in the 1970s. But the case you see that we unfold is in 2012,
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2013, 2014, 2015. And you see you see that Coke financial
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network and how it works, how people hide money and pass money from one nonprofit to
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another. And so in the end, you don’t know who is behind the candidate or behind the ballot
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initiative. But in this case, they tracked it back and they found out why. And one of the things
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that was really interesting to me when watching the film was how people pivoted
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with opposition. How the opposition you know, there’s there’s a lot of opposition, you know, get you
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you actually get to experience some of the opposition of these of these heroes in how they stood up
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to that opposition. But how that opposition actually turned around helped them in some of these situations,
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like when you’re talking about the Connecticut, that’s one of those experiences where all of a
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sudden I was like, oh, no, no, no, no. You know, we’re not going to vote this down. We you know, you’re not going to take the money away
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from this because there was a budget and, you know, attack on us. Oh, no, no, Republicans.
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Democrats don’t. In Florida, same thing. It’s like this, you know, the woman standing there and is sitting there
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at and testimony, she’s just getting beaten up on this. And there turned around because people
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saw this as, wait a minute, that’s not how you behave. And she had the facts. So some of what the film shows
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is the heroes not only had the passion, but they were able to endure the opposition
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and move the opposition to a place where you had a solution and they
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hung in there and they hung in there. It’s so important because sometimes you have people say,
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well, we tried to get reform and it didn’t work. So we gave it up. In Florida,
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the gerrymander reform was actually the sixth attempt in Florida. So, I
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mean, so they hung in there in Washington State. You didn’t see that segment last
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night. Going to see it today. So in Washington State,
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there’s a woman who collected 21000 signatures to help put a ballot initiative
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on the ballot, a reform against Citizens United and unlimited money on campaigns.
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And I’m talking to her. And I said, well, what is it that motivates? She said, I feel like I’m
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a Paul Revere. I feel like I’m continuing the American Revolution and every
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signature I get is a vote for the Constitution and a vote for American democracy. I mean, it’s amazing.
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And she said democracy. You have to fight for it. You have to fight for it.
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Otherwise, it’ll slip through your fingers. Well, you know, who knows that when you go to the Seattle fish
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market, you’re going to run into somebody who has that kind of basic passion
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and not just passion, but she’s invested. I mean, think of hundreds of hours, you know, collect 21000
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signatures without going out there every weekend and every rainy Saturday when you’d rather
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be in shopping or relaxing or watching TV or playing with your grandkids or whatever.
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She’s out there doing it. And it’s one person after another. I think you asked me what I learned. What I learned
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is, first of all, people, power works. That’s really important to underline.
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People power works. There’s a guy named Ernie Cortez’s one of the best political organizers I ever
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met. And he said, you know, Rick, he said power corrupts.
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They say absolute power corrupts absolutely. But he said powerlessness also
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corrupts powerlessness, corrupts democracy at the core. If people
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feel they’re powerless, democracy vanishes. We have to re empower
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ourselves and exercise our power and believe in our power if we want
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democracy to work. Well, that was of course, that’s true. But they hear
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that articulate and then to see people living that that’s a great
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experience as a reporter. I mean, it’s a great story. But as a citizen, I moved
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by it. And as a reporter, I’m really impressed because I’ve seen all kinds of places in the world where
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people say nothing works. We’re not going to try the other side. Got too much power or this is a
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corrupt place. And I’m out of here. I’m going sailing. I’m going fishing. I’m going bowling.
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I’m going to opt out. And there are a lot of people doing that. But what’s amazing to me in America today,
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and it’s happened before in our history. Think about it. We had the progressive era when
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women got the right to vote. It was popular demonstrations from the bottom up that won women
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the right to vote. That got direct election of senators. You know, that Teddy
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Roosevelt was busting corporations and corporate money. Congress outlawed corporate money
25:45
and campaigns in 1987, 1987. I happened to be covering
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the civil rights movement, the 1960s. I know Martin Luther King. I covered the Birmingham demonstrations.
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I covered the march on Washington in 1963. And that’s the same thing. It was a bottom
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up. But there was a women’s movement then people forget it. There was an environmental movement that there was an anti-war
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movement. These were all from the bottom up and they had tremendous impact on policy.
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People power does work. And we sort of have forgotten it. We had it
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working there for a while. I was working. We’ve elected the right politics and we can sit back on our aura’s,
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sit back on our easy chairs, not worry about it. And they’ll do it on their own.
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The woman said, democracy, you’ve got to fight for it or it’ll slip right through your fingers. And so,
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yeah, I knew those things even before I started the reporting. But to hear them,
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to see them, to feel them, the bone, the muscle, the grit of real
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life people, it’s moving. And it’s important and it’s important for people to revive
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that spirit. Otherwise, our democracy is in real trouble. I don’t know how
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else to. This is a perfect summary of your film, of your
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life, of the movement. And I can’t thank you enough for sharing this.
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It’s I really urge everyone when it comes out and PBS to watch it, because everything
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that you just heard is what you’re going to feel. Well, you’re going to hear you feel inspired by these
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people. And when you see the people, they look like normal, everyday people
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that you pass by on the street or in church or in the supermarket. But they took the step.
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They stepped into the arena. And so I really thank you for spending time with me today.
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And I really hope you come back and I hope you keep doing this for many, many more years to come. We need
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you. Thank you so much. Thank you. I really enjoyed talking with you. Same here. Thank you.
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This is Policy on Purpose, a podcast produced by the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University
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of Texas at Austin. We take you behind the scenes of policy with the people who help shape
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it. To learn more, visit LBJ, you, Texas, study to you and follow
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us on Twitter or Facebook at the LBJ School. Thank you for
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listening.
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