Broadcasting Legend Bill Moyers on the 2008 Elections, the Rev. Wright Controversy, the Media, Vietnam and More

Legendary broadcaster Bill Moyers helped organize the Peace Corps and served under President Johnson before going on to a distinguished career in journalism that continues today with the PBS series Bill Moyers Journal. His latest book, just published, is Moyers on Democracy. Moyers joins us to talk about the 2008 elections, the media and war. He addresses the controversy over Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It was nearly two weeks ago on Bill Moyers Journal where Wright first spoke out since his criticism of US government policies became a major issue in the 2008 Democratic presidential race.

AMY GOODMAN: Legendary journalist Bill Moyers joins us now for the hour in our firehouse studio, the host of the weekly PBS program Bill Moyers Journal. He was one of the founding organizers of the Peace Corps. He was a spokesperson for President Lyndon Johnson, his press secretary, a publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS News and a producer of many groundbreaking series on public television. He won more than thirty Emmy Awards. He’s the author of four bestselling books. His latest, just published, is called Moyers on Democracy.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!

BILL MOYERS: Thank you very much. I almost called the book “Moyers on Democracy Now.”

AMY GOODMAN: Well, what do you think about what happened last night, this morning, the latest in the contest?

BILL MOYERS: I think that Barack Obama is like the long-distance runner who stumbles in the eighth—seventh and eight laps but regains his stride. That’s what I saw last night. That was a strong and moving speech he made in North Carolina, quite unlike his recent appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows. So I think he has regained the momentum. He showed he has real strength in his core constituency: African Americans, young people and liberals. And it seems impossible now, to me, for Hillary Clinton to even stay in the race without doing such damage to Obama that he’s hurt in the fall and she is hurt in her reputation.

AMY GOODMAN: What about Hillary Clinton now staying in the race?

BILL MOYERS: She’s a—you know, I admire Hillary Clinton. I know what it’s—I’ve seen over the years how hard it is for a woman, a married woman, to gain her independence in our society, whatever her profession, and I admire the way she’s tried to negotiate her own persona, her own position, her own place in our politics. But if she stays in this race, it can only be at the expense, as I said, of her reputation and of Obama, because she can only move forward by attacking him, by continuing to say he can’t win in November, which is not true.

I don’t have a horse in this race. I enjoy watching it, and I actually have admiration for all three of these candidates within the political system. But she’s got—she just cannot win, except—remember Marlene Dietrich in that great movie where Marlene Dietrich, the actress, says, “See what the boys in the back room will have and tell them I’ll have the same”? She can only win in the metaphorical back room, in the superdelegates.

And the key date is not these upcoming primaries. She’ll do alright in West Virginia. She’ll do alright in San Juan in Puerto Rico. He will do well in Montana, South Dakota, and probably in basically white but liberal Oregon. But this—on May 31st, the Democratic Rules Committee meets to assess how to deal with the Michigan and Florida delegates. Thirteen of the members of that thirty-person committee are Clinton supporters, eight are Obama supporters, the others are undecided. If she were to muscle her way to a decisive moment in that Rules Committee where they decide to change the rules here in the last inning, she will really be hurt.

But that’s the only way, barring lightning striking him. You know, that’s what she keeps hoping for every day, is that lightning will strike him, and she’ll have a—some October surprise in May will happen. That’s not going to happen. She can only win in a way that would leave the Democratic Party in shambles.

AMY GOODMAN: Last night, as I watched the returns come in, the very, very end, Gary, Indiana, it was puzzling why—as in other places, you say one percent of the vote in, 20 percent of the vote in, 50 percent, and they give you the counts—they wouldn’t release the counts until, what, seven hours—early closing of the polls in Indiana at 6:00 p.m.—and yet, it was 1:00 before—I think it was just a few hours before or one hour before they even said something like 25 percent of the votes in. This really historic city, Gary, Indiana, named for the chair of US Steel, Elbert Gary, in 1972 had this groundbreaking national black political convention in which thousands of African Americans gathered from around the country to establish an agenda, but Gary really key here to closing the gap between Clinton and Obama.

BILL MOYERS: I don’t understand why they held the votes and then delivered them in a bundle. Back when I started in politics fifty years ago, Daley in Chicago and Boss Parr in Duval County, Texas, they held back the votes out until they saw how many their candidates needed, and then they would deliver them. You know, last night, the Mayor of Gary was talking to reporters with a penciled list of returns. A penciled list of returns? I mean, look, the American people are very suspicious of our voting process as it is. I don’t understand that. I want to find out, as a journalist, in the next forty-eight hours why they held up those votes.

But Gary is an interesting phenomenon. I was there in 1970, when I did my first book called Listening to America. It was then in that transition from a predominantly white working class city into a mixed city with a lot of blacks, many of whom had come up from the South and moved down from Chicago, and it was beginning to change then. You had a real machine in the city at that time. You have a machine there now. And the missing piece of the puzzle for me is how that machine functioned in this election. Obviously, the African Americans voted en masse for Obama, as they did ninety-to-ten in North Carolina. But I was—I’m troubled by the fact that those votes were delivered in a package and not announced the moment they were available.

AMY GOODMAN: This is a moment, on a night like this, that everyone is watching. They want to see, you know, who’s won. But for those many, many hours, it’s only about the horse race. I don’t think I heard the word “war” once. I don’t think I heard, as I flipped from channel to channel, the word “healthcare.” I didn’t hear the issues discussed. It was all about the percentage points. And it went on, not just for a thirty-second summary of, you know, who was ahead and who was behind, but for hour after hour.

BILL MOYERS: Well, no. The main reason I put this book out, Moyers on Democracy, is because we are facing—you know, democracy is always a story of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck, because we’ve always thought the present was better than the—generally thought the present was better than the past and the future will be better than the present. All bets are off now, because we are not—our politics can create problems our policies can then not solve. Start a war, can’t finish it. Spend $2 trillion on healthcare, but can’t fix it. Infrastructure crumbling, highways full of potholes, can’t do anything about it.

These fundamental structural issues of American democracy are not being addressed by this campaign, even in the best of times, when it’s not just a horse race, when they’re on the Sunday morning talk shows, when they’re making speeches. They are so appealing to the particular interest of people, of groups, that they cannot take on—they’re not taking on the large issue. Obama talks about change. Hillary Clinton talks about, you know, a populist message. But neither one of them seem to me—and nor does John McCain—none of these three seem to me to be grasping what’s fundamentally at stake in this country, which is a system that is now dysfunctional. And so many powerful interests have a stake in maintaining the dysfunction that it’s almost impossible to change it.

That is the moment—this is the moment in which if we don’t solve that structural issue of our politics, we are in real trouble. And I don’t like to say that, because I have five grandchildren, and the future is theirs, not mine. But this is what we’re not hearing. This is what the system is not going to deal with in November. And it’s a very troubling reality.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Bill Moyers, legendary figure in public broadcasting; before that, the press secretary for Lyndon Johnson. He has a new book. It’s called Moyers on Democracy. We’ll be back with him in a minute.

AMY GOODMAN: On the whole issue of Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, it was Bill Moyers’s interview nearly two weeks ago on his show, Bill Moyers Journal, where he first spoke out since his criticism of US government policies had become a major issue in the 2008 Democratic presidential race. He had come under heavy criticism from political pundits for linking the attacks of September 11 to US foreign policy in the Middle East and for saying the United States was founded on racism. This is some of what he had to say on Bill Moyers Journal.

       REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT: The persons who have heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly. A failure to communicate is when something is taken like a sound bite for a political purpose and put constantly over and over again, looped in the face of the public. That’s not a failure to communicate. Those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they want to do, which is to paint me as some sort of fanatic or, as the learned journalist from the New York Times called me, a “wackadoodle.” It’s to paint me as something—something’s wrong with me. “There’s nothing wrong with this country or its policies. We’re perfect. Our hands are free. Our hands have no blood on them.” That’s not a failure to communicate. The message that is being communicated by the sound bites is exactly what those pushing those sound bites want to communicate.


BILL MOYERS: What do you think they wanted to communicate?


REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT: I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. And, by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint? That’s what they wanted to communicate.


They know nothing about the church. They know nothing about our prison ministry. They know nothing about our food ministry. They know nothing about our senior citizens home. They know nothing about all we try to do as a church and have tried to do and still continue to do as a church that believes what Martin Marty said, that the two worlds have to be together and that the gospel of Jesus Christ has to speak to those worlds, not only in terms of the preached message on a Sunday morning but in terms of the lived-out ministry throughout the week.


BILL MOYERS: What did you think when you began to see those very brief sound bites circulating as they did?


REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT: I felt it was unfair. I felt it was unjust. I felt it was untrue. I felt those who were doing that were doing it for some very devious reasons.

AMY GOODMAN: After that interview on Bill Moyers Journal, Reverend Wright went on to speak before thousands at the NAACP. He also spoke at the National Press Club. Afterwards, Barack Obama sharply denounced his former pastor at a news conference in North Carolina.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: When he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the US government somehow being involved in AIDS, when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the twentieth and twenty-first century, when he equates the United States wartime efforts with terrorism, then there are no excuses. They offend me. They rightly offend all Americans. And they should be denounced. And that’s what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally here today.

AMY GOODMAN: Last week, Bill Moyers began Bill Moyers Journal with a scathing commentary of the media’s coverage of the Wright controversy.

       BILL MOYERS: Wright’s offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn’t fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone’s neck, call for insurrection or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettle some people and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship.


Politics often exposes us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this, this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner. Both men, no doubt, will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the nonstop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said, “Beware the terrible simplifiers.”