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Carol Moseley Braun

Carol Moseley Braun, a Democrat, was a U.S. senator from Illinois from 1993 to 1999 — the first African-American woman to hold that title. She was President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa from 1999 to 2001 and was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. Moseley Braun is now the president of Good Food Organics, Inc., a Chicago-based organic foods company.

Sara Fritz interviewed Moseley Braun on August 17, 2007.

I want to start out by asking you why you decided to run for president.

In 25 words or less?

No. You can talk as long as you want.

To begin, I hadn’t planned to do so. Let’s start with that. It wasn’t like it was something I was looking to do. In fact, I was in the process of transitioning to the private sector. During a family conversation kind of around the dinner table about the upcoming presidential campaign, my little niece, who at the time was 10, called out and said, “Auntie Carol, Auntie Carol, come quick,” and I thought it was an emergency. I went into her room. And again, the scene is indelibly burned on my brain. She was sitting at her desk. Her little feet were not even touching the ground. And she had her social studies book open to the middle page and had pictures of all of the presidents.

She looked at me and she said, “But Auntie Carol,” because she had obviously been listening to the grownups. “But Auntie Carol, all of the presidents are boys.” I stood there. And it was like she had just hit me in the stomach with a 50-pound weight. And I said, “Oh sweetie, girls can be presidents, too.” And I proceeded to give the party line about how she could be whatever she wanted to be and knowing full darn well that no women, up until that point, had ever been able to be taken seriously — not even Elizabeth Dole, who had pulled out before it was even a game.

And I said there is no woman stepping up to the plate. George [W.] Bush is — don’t get me started on that, because at the time, as you recall, there was the saber-rattling going on. And the whole country was still traumatized about September 11. And so I said, “I can hold off doing what I was planning to do long enough to mount a campaign, and hopefully, I can make the point about the issues I care about, which were universal health and not going to war in Iraq.” And I wanted to do a war on terror, but I just thought Iraq was idiocy, as frankly, times have proved me to be correct on that one.

But I mean there was just so many things, policy-wise, that I was passionate about. And my little niece saying, “Auntie Carol, but all of the presidents are boys,” really just sealed the deal, just pushed me over the edge.

Do you think you accomplished what you wanted to achieve?

Yes and no. I think that, on the one hand, the campaign was doomed from the start in that nobody was prepared to put money behind the effort. And so I never had even remotely the amount of money required to be competitive. And, as you well know, the first primary is the money primary.

And when you are talking about friends and family, the people I know don’t have money. And the people who had money didn’t have any confidence in my ability to mount that kind of campaign. The political class, of course, derided the effort from the very beginning. And so I took some comfort that I wasn’t as marginalized as Victoria Woodhull [the first woman to run for U.S. president, in 1872].

So it was a quixotic effort from the beginning in that regard. I knew that. But I knew that going in. That didn’t come as a surprise. In that regard, yes, it was as I expected. But if anything, I think that the point was made on so many different fronts that it could make a difference, as it did make a difference, that I was really proud of having mounted the effort.

And do you recall any particular time when you went to somebody and said, “I think you could help me.” And they said, “Come on, give me a break, you are not . . .”

Oh, are you kidding? I mean The New York Times wouldn’t even give me an interview.

I was thinking more of a contributor, though, a donor.

Oh, yeah. [With] the donors, that routinely happened. I couldn’t get phone calls returned, or the people who I would have expected, people whom I had helped, even, as senator and in my previous career. Because remember, I had spent 10 years in the [Illinois] state legislature, and part of that I was in the leadership. And so between the folks who I knew from my state legislative days to the people I knew from my senatorial days, many — most — did not step up to the plate to be helpful.

If you had it to do over again, what do you think would have made a difference? Maybe preparing more in advance?

No, I don’t think. And again, I generally don’t do — what is it? — Monday-morning quarterbacking on my life. But I just don’t think there is anything I could have done to make it different. I don’t think the times were right for it. You have to be in sync with what’s going on at the time. And at that time, the country was wrapped up in the whole war on terror.

Even Hillary Clinton — who could have, theoretically, run in that cycle — had the wisdom to see that it was truly an uphill time for any woman candidate. Anytime you are talking about war and sabers, the guys still can’t envision a woman as commander in chief in a situation like that.

So the timing was just unfortunate; it was not yet the time. Except that, again, it, I think, helped to plow the ground for both Senator Clinton and Senator [Barack] Obama. Because if anything, I would go to New Hampshire and Iowa and places like that, where there are no black people or close to no black people, and get very warm receptions from the voters. They were prepared to give me a listen. And I remember, at the time even, saying that to somebody. And they looked at me like I was making it up. But I wasn’t making it up. And I think that Barack Obama’s campaign is revealing what I experienced in that campaign.

Why do you think that is? What’s going on there?

Well, I think the same thing is going on with regard to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign in that attitudes have shifted in terms of the expectation of equality for both women and for blacks. Whether or not an individual will vote for a black person or vote for a woman, the expectation is there that a woman has a right to be president, just like a man. And a black has a right to be president, just like a white. That’s a sea change in the social order that I think our generation can be proud of.

Did you sense that the people in these states generally wanted to hear if you had a different point of view?

It wasn’t patronizing. No, no. In fact, I even had a couple of people, after I dropped out, come up to me and say: “Why did you drop out? We were ready to caucus for you.” I had a lot of that. I mean again, it’s apocryphal, but at the same time I have had a number of: “Why did you drop out? We were prepared to caucus for you.” One of my Iowa friends who was on the ground in Iowa, a former law-school friend, very involved in Iowa politics, was downright — I mean I don’t want to say mad at me, but he was really upset that I just couldn’t hang in there through Iowa.

Now we are not going to have the focus on Iowa and New Hampshire that we had before. And if what you say is true, then something is going to be lost, isn’t it, would you think?

I wouldn’t go that far. No, because the focus was on Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina because of the lineup, the calculus. And that calculus changes from election cycle to election cycle.

But it can still happen in other places?

Right. It’s all about expectations. And this is the minefield for Hillary Clinton, frankly, because if she slips in any of the early states, they’ll eat her alive. And that’s, again, because of expectations.

Now as I recall, you got a lot of free media, as they call it.

Yes.

And to what do you owe that?

The fact that I was talking about issues. I mean, one of the moments that kind of stands out in my mind was up in New Hampshire. There was a debate. And the fellows were giving the kind of stock answers that their pollsters had come up with. And the question was whether or not women should be drafted: “Would you support that for women as well as men?” And all of the guys got up and said, “Yes, women should serve, women can and should serve in the armed forces on the same level as men.”

And when it got to me, I said: “I don’t think so. I don’t think I support a draft for women. Because as long as women are being violated and raped and assaulted and abused in our military academies and our military settings, like they are, women are not safe yet and risk their lives just by trying to serve their country.” Well, you can hear this audible gasp go up from the crowd. Because people knew at the time we were talking about what was going on at the military academies. And nobody had raised the issue of women being raped in the military academies.

So it focused a light on that in a way that really changed the dynamic of that whole issue, and I would like think made a difference in terms of what the brass did in response to the concerns of the women who were in training for military service.

So you think that’s one way in which your campaign had an impact?

I think so.

You had some help from EMILY’s List and some of the women’s organizations, did you not?

I didn’t get help from EMILY’s List. I did get help from the National Organization for Women and the Women’s Political Caucus. And frankly, they took heat for it. I mean, The New York Times editorialized that it was a stupid endorsement by them.

Did you try to get EMILY’s List?

Yes.

And they were doing what?

They just rejected my candidacy out of hand.

I bet you were disappointed.

No.

Now as you have referred to several times, you are in a good position to look at what Hillary and Obama are doing. First of all, you are a woman. You are a black person. And you come from Illinois. All of the same attributes of these two candidates.

And I have served as a senator.

Exactly. So from your experience — I mean, you have already said if Hillary were to slip in the early primaries, with the expectations games, she would lose. What are the other strengths and weaknesses of these two candidacies, in your view?

Well, I think Barack Obama inspires people. And his kind of natural charisma is exciting to them. Beyond the energy of celebrity, I don’t know what else he brings to bear on the race other than — well, no, I take that back. Other than the energy of celebrity, what he brings is, or at least up until recently, he brought an alternative on the whole war issue.

Until recently?

Yeah. Well, the Pakistan remark didn’t help him. And mind you, Dennis Kucinich has always been an antiwar voice. But for reasons that I don’t fully understand, I don’t know that Dennis has ever been seen as anything but a marginal candidate.

That’s true.

Without the charisma or the celebrity of a Barack Obama.

And Hillary?

I believe she brings — how can I put it? — the comfort of experience. People know that she knows her way around the world stage.

Are you supporting either of these candidates?

No. I call myself “a recovering politician.”

What are you doing these days?

I have an organic-food company.

So you are not even at all involved in politics.

Nope.

Anything else you want to say about Obama and Hillary in terms of their . . .

Well, I think it’s wonderful. I think it’s wonderful that the country is even debating whether a black or a woman [will be] president, the commander in chief, and the leader of the free world. Yesterday was my birthday. I was 60.

Happy birthday.

Thank you. So being 60, I have the benefit of eyes that have witnessed just remarkable transformational changes in this country. And I mean, as a person, I have seen signs that say, “No blacks allowed.” And I have seen situations where women had asked their husbands for permission to vote. I had an aunt, who if her husband didn’t let her vote, couldn’t. So to have witnessed that kind of change in a single lifetime is nothing short of an extraordinary blessing.

You talk about [how] you intrigued people. People came. And they were somewhat interested in [you]. And I suspect it’s, first of all, the issues you were talking about, but also because you were different. Do you think that these two candidates benefit from that same kind of enthusiasm for maybe something different?

Well, yes and no. I mean if anything, that’s dangerous ground you are raising right now. And the reason is that being different, while on the one hand can be attractive, on the other hand can be repulsive also.

Is that not precisely what Hillary and Obama are debating?

Well, see, Obama doesn’t suffer it as much. And that’s because the dynamics for race are different than the dynamics for gender.

Could you say a little bit more about that?

What I mean is that, to the extent that there remain prejudices in the kind of the social miasma in which these two candidates are operating, they are less likely to be expressed in regard to Barack Obama than they are to be expressed with regard to Hillary Clinton.

I didn’t know which way you were going on that one. So it’s the woman thing that is more difficult.

Well, I think it is. Gender is always a tougher nut to crack than race.

And what makes you think that?

Well, I am not the only one. Shirley Chisholm said the same thing when she ran [in 1972].

Yeah. But why?

I chewed on this one for a while. It took me a while to try to figure out why that was so. And it took a girlfriend of mine to explain that race has to do with “otherness,” that is to say, for the majority population, people outside of your immediate family unit; whereas gender is something that starts in the home and with relations between your mother, your father, your sisters, and your brothers. And so gender is close to the bone, if you will, as a set of preconceptions and prejudices. And that’s why it is easy to joke about Hillary Clinton’s cleavage or make a statement or write an article in the paper about that than about Barack Obama playing basketball.

So I mean if that’s true, then it seems to be the standard wisdom. I may be making this up: Barack had a tougher climb, obviously, because he’s got less experience. But are you saying that [for] Hillary, the natural prejudice is against a woman more than a man?

Oh, absolutely. I think that’s right. I think that’s right.

Let me go on to talk about debates. One of the things that we have heard — you remember that conversation that was overheard between [John] Edwards and Hillary about getting rid of the minor candidates. I assume you might have an opinion upon that.

I actually didn’t hear that. You have to tell me about that.

Well, it was overheard by a microphone in which Edwards said at the end of a debate to Hillary, “We have got to get these minor candidates out of here so we can really debate.”

And what did she say?

And she said, “Give me a call,” or something like that. But I assume that you have some views on the benefits of allowing minor candidates into the debates.

The minor candidates keep the debate more honest. I mean, right now it’s already so scripted. It’s scripted by the media. It’s scripted by the time constraints of television. It’s scripted by the process. So there are so many different determinants of how the debates will be conducted and what will be said. Frankly, what the American people get now are wrappers; they get the sizzle and not the steak in the debates anyway.

And the minor candidates, in my opinion — like my comment about women being abused in the military — without having somebody who doesn’t have 57 consultants standing by having scripted every word that they say, the minor candidates can’t afford the media training in many instances. They don’t do the media training. They don’t do the scripting. And they don’t have the 19 different constituencies to balance in terms of how their answers are structured. You get a better read on what the issues really are, I think.

A lot of people have laid a lot of blame for the difficulties in American politics at the feet of consultants and media trainers and that kind of thing. What you say seems to suggest that you would, too.

Well, yes and no. The problem very often is that people don’t look at politics as an industry. But it is an industry.

You are right. A rather lucrative one, isn’t it?

A multibillion-dollar industry, that’s exactly right. And in that multibillion-dollar industry, there are different players, different dynamics, different processes just like in any other industry. And so while the theater of the whole thing is the debate and reflected in the debates and the rallies and all of that, the public stuff, the reality is that making the candidacy is something that happens within a political class of actors who are themselves professionals. And the higher tech and the more we rely on, again, processing to access that process, the more powerful these people are. And they are.

I mean you don’t raise any money unless the people who do fundraising decide to work for you, period. You can’t. I don’t know. Unless you are Michael Bloomberg and you have your own fortune. If you have to raise campaign money, you have to go through and get the approval and the assent of the professional fundraisers. And the professional fundraisers won’t work for you if you are not considered by the rest of the political class to be a viable candidate.

So they play a gatekeeper role as well.

They play a gatekeeper role. Exactly.

And I guess also, you are suggesting — because your spontaneous comment about women in the military — that they tend to zap the spontaneity from campaign.

They not only tend to zap the spontaneity, in many regards they zap the honesty from it. I mean it all becomes very self-fulfilling. And that’s how it is that you wind up hearing — I love watching The Daily Show and those kinds of comedy shows where they will show clips of four different politicians saying the exact same phrase in response to an issue. Well, that doesn’t happen by accident. That’s not coincidence. That’s a function of whatever the political class is saying about whatever that thing is being reflected by the candidates themselves.

Hillary does have the reputation of being . . .

Of being scripted. Right.

And the women I have covered over the last four years in politics often are very cautious like that. I assume that the reason is what you were talking about, the whole fear of people reacting to the woman-ness of the whole thing.

Well, that and the minefield. And even in regards to this, if she has people giving her sound bites and structuring her responses, she is considered wooden and scripted. If Barack Obama does the same thing, he is considered brilliant.

So you think it’s the same behavior, just through different prisms.

Right. You journalists and thought-thinkers in the public debate arena, one of the things that I haven’t seen a whole lot of conversation about has to do with women on women in this whole thing. I mean one of the things that I discovered, when we started this interview, you asked me, did you find the women were harder on me than the men all along the way. I got tripped up going into the Senate over the issue of my fiancé, my boyfriend. And that dogged me every step of the way and caused me innumerable problems. I got through it all.

I got accused of taking money from my campaign, because people didn’t like him. It cost me almost a million dollars to prove that I hadn’t taken a dime from the campaign. The FEC [Federal Election Commission] agreed with me. The IRS agreed with me. It still wasn’t enough. So back to the old hemline husbands, et cetera. I ran afoul of, again, the social issues in terms of your partner, because obviously if you are a woman in public life, a man is telling you what to do. That’s very much in the waters with regard to Hillary Clinton.

You mention Elizabeth Edwards. Well, Elizabeth Edwards, if you think about it, went the traditional route. That is to say, she became politically powerful through her husband. That’s the way women have done it for millenniums. Women who do it that way are often the most vicious when it comes to women who have stepped out on their own.

Well, now, Hillary did it that way?

Hillary, absolutely. And, I would point out, to take that one step further, the woman who is running for president of Argentina made that point in a campaign statement just a couple of weeks ago.

What point?

The point that, well, I got here on my own. I was a politician first, before I married the president. And she’s running now. And I got here on my own. Hillary Clinton got here through her husband. So the whole issue of direct versus indirect influence or power among women is a huge issue that some of the academics have addressed. But really the commentators have not yet.

That women are harder on women.

Women are harder on women.

And it’s probably a sort of embarrassment kind of thing, right?

Well, no. No, it’s more than that. It has to do with the changing roles of women. And women who are invested in the social construct that has us women, if you will, working through men to become powerful. Those women are the most challenged by women who are attempting to do it on their own, independent.

Oh, I see. I didn’t understand the point.

Yeah. I am sorry. It’s funny, because it’s something that has been so much a part of, again, my last couple of decades, that if I weren’t running an organic-food company, I might take the time to try to do something.

Or write something about it.

Or do something about it. Because it truly, I think, is at the heart of the matter.

Can you think of an illustration of this in your experience?

Well, let me think. I think the best illustration is what you are looking at. If you did a continuum, you’ve got the woman who is running for president — and I think it’s Argentina — she is a political activist on her own. And she is married to the current president. And she is now, herself, running for president and likely to be elected. She made the point that she got there on her own without benefit of her husband as a political actor.

Then you go the next step, and you get to Hillary Clinton, who has been First Lady, whose power and ability to get elected to the Senate, her ability to now be considered the front-runner presidential candidate, did come indirectly, but she is having to hold her own, both in terms of her ability to speak to the issues as well as goofy issues like cleavage. So then you have the Hillary Clinton.

And then the next level on the continuum is Elizabeth Edwards. Well, if you put Elizabeth Edwards, Fred Thompson’s wife, Mitt Romney’s wife, all the wives who are, themselves, very important political actors, but do it indirectly, on behalf of their husbands. And this goes to the core issue for women in political activism. Because we have for centuries, since the beginning, had our views reflected and represented by people who don’t have the same gender experience. And the choice issue is actually primo number one about that.

At the time when I was in the Senate, I was standing there looking at a debate [with] 95 people talking about abortion who couldn’t themselves be pregnant, ever.

Well, I think this idea, and it’s fascinating, says that it’s going to be hard for Hillary — and maybe she’s already done it, I don’t know — to move from type to another.

She is; that’s exactly right. And that is the challenge of her transition. And you are right; maybe she’s done it already. I think she has, actually. I think that people see Hillary Clinton as an independent political figure — independent of Bill, at this point. She is not yet to the point where she is totally judged on her own. It’s kind of like “Brangelina.” “Billary,” OK? She is still “Billary.” But at the same time, she is seen as a figure in her own right and the same with Angelina Jolie, as an actress in her own right.

I see. You mentioned that The New York Times wouldn’t interview you. Can you elaborate a little on your sense of the role the media plays in this election process?

Well, again, as part of the political class, they do their own weeding. I had all of the credentials in the world. And again, I don’t take this personally. I mean I took it as a reflection of how The New York Times viewed black people. And women, for that matter. I was the only woman in the race, and the editorial board of The New York Times, our newspaper of record, did not have time to talk to me. I mean, of the two black candidates, myself and Al Sharpton, here is somebody who is a high-school dropout and everybody knows to be charlatan, versus someone who had been in the United States Senate and a U.S. attorney. And they chose the charlatan who was a high-school dropout. I mean it’s just shocking.

Well, so what you are saying about the media is that they really make choices between who is . . .

Oh, absolutely.

Any other complaints about the media?

That’s not my way of a complaint.

Yeah, I know. It’s an observation.

Yeah. I am just telling you what happened. I mean that’s just the way it was, which campaigns they decide to cover. I got elected to the United States Senate largely because the press ignored my campaign. There was an incumbent Democratic senator — this is the primary, because I had to win a primary. Actually, that’s another example. I had to win two back-to-back. First, I had to win a primary and then a general [election]. And yet you will see reflected in the press, very often, comments that I was elected on a fluke. Well, I don’t know how a person wins two back-to-back elections in a fluke. And yet Barack, by the way, got elected through a series of just bizarre things, people getting knocked out by their ex-wives. But the word fluke has never been applied to his election. So they make judgments about that.

And my first primary campaign, there was an incumbent Democratic senator, Alan Dixon, and a very wealthy trial lawyer, Al Hofeld. And because Hofeld had announced that he had $10 million of his own money to spend, his campaign and Dixon’s campaign got all of the attention. The media really ignored [my campaign.] There were a few kind of local papers and that sort of thing that said, “Oh, what about this other person over here running?” But they basically ignored my campaign. And then they were all surprised; it was the shock of the century when I won the primary, because they hadn’t been paying attention.

If you consider this whole process, what ought to change? What could be done to improve it?

Well, the role of money is hideous in our campaigns. And I think campaign finance remains a huge civil-rights issue and an issue going to the heart of what kind of democracy we want to have. If we are comfortable having an oligarchy, or if we would prefer to have a genuine democracy, then we are going to have to fix the way campaigns are financed and the way elections are run.

You would do total public funding or . . . ?

That’s an interesting question. At this stage, I think public funding is the answer.

Anything else in terms of remedies?

I think doing something about standardizing election processes. That is to say, again, one of the reasons why there is so much money sloshing around in campaigns is that you have more jurisdictions having more elections at different times to do different things in this country than anywhere else in the world. And so the rest of the world looks at us and kind of scratches its head. How can you have so many elections and so few people show up? Well, one of the reasons so few people show up is that there are so many elections, and the rules are different for all of them.

So you would nationalize?

Nationalize is the wrong word.

Or standardize?

A standardization among the states.