John Podesta
The Center for American Progress’ CEO talks about the religious left, President Clinton’s progressivism, and the next generation of politicos.By Tim Fernholz
September 10, 2008
Center for American Progress CEO and President John Podesta
John Podesta, the CEO and President of the Center for American Progress (CAP), is a long-time Washington hand whose talents run from politics to policy to activism. Most famous for his years as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff in the late 1990s, Podesta has played a major role rebuilding the progressive movement’s infrastructure during the past five years, both through his work at CAP and consulting with leading political operatives, elected officials, and donors. His new book, The Power of Progress: How America’s Progressives Can (Once Again) Save Our Economy, Our Climate, and Our Country, co-written with CAP Senior Fellow John Halpin, looks at progressives in the 20th century through the prism of today’s politics and Podesta’s own working-class Catholic background. Podesta sat down with Campus Progress to talk about his book, the future of CAP, and how young people can learn from the history of the progressive movement.
Campus Progress: There’s a debate on the left about whether we need new, big ideas that break with the New Deal/Great Society tradition. Do you feel like that that’s important?
John Podesta: If you look back during the time when progressive politics really came to the fore in the early part of the 20th century, we were looking at national problems. Today we’re in a different circumstance. We have global challenges and global problems of how we’re going to expand the middle class in the era of globalization, how we’re going to deal with a major transformation of our economy from a high carbon to a lower carbon base, and how we’re going to create sustainable security going forward against a range of global threats. The values that inspired those early progressives are completely relevant today. It was always progressives who focused on working people, expanding the middle class, expanding the circle of opportunity, and creating the global structures of cooperation and security.
You mention the religious overtones that affected the progressive movement historically in your book, and you talk about your own Catholic faith. Among progressives today there’s a real debate about how important faith is to public policy and about the relationship between political leaders and religious leaders. How do you think progressives should approach the topic?
Whether your reference point is the Declaration of Independence and a focus on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; whether it’s on Catholic Social Doctrine, which it is for me; or whether it’s on Social Gospel, which it is for many others, or it’s rooted in other religions, progressive Judaism, etc.; whatever your motivation to get beyond yourself to find a kind of spirit of community with one another, we need to respect the inspiration that comes from each of us. We need to respect the moral fire that comes from the religious community in addressing a deep social injustice. The classic example for those of us who have lived in the second half of the 20th century is the civil rights movement, in which people with that strong, passionate religious voice came together with secular individuals to say that they found injustice in society and it needed to be rectified. We need to find that same ability to come together and move forward.
One of the things you do in the book is defend President Clinton’s legacy as a progressive. I think a lot of progressives today try to set themselves apart from the politics that President Clinton followed while he was in office. Why do you think there’s that kind of divide between progressives who don’t see President Clinton as one of them?
A lot of it is [about] the way he approached globalization, trade, and opening markets abroad. The president’s thinking evolved over the course of his presidency. I think he came to a place that makes sense from a progressive perspective. When you think about what President Clinton focused on—which is raising wages for people, expanding the earned income tax credit, raising the minimum wage, focusing on supporting work, expanding the circle of opportunity, reducing crime, increasing aid to education—those are all very progressive ideas. He came from, I think, a background in which he really understood the lives of working people. He grew up with a single mother in Hope, Arkansas. It wasn’t abstract, it wasn’t theoretical. It was about improving people’s lives. And if you look at what happened over those eight years, peoples’ lives got a lot better—across the board, from the rich to the poor, everybody grew together, and I think the country got stronger as a result.
When you started CAP in 2003, you were definitely setting an opposition agenda. Now there are more progressives in office and one may even move into the White House next year. How does that affect your work?
We play an important role both in explaining [serious challenges] to the American people and coming up with fresh approaches to dealing with these problems. We also try to use whatever good offices we have to try and move those ideas forwards in an administration, on Capitol Hill, and in governors’ offices around the country. That’s what we need to do going forward—not to be a cheerleader for a new administration but to constantly push the envelope, push the analytic base. I think facts matter. I think arithmetic matters. I know that the current administration seems to have abandoned that approach to solving problems, but if we can operate in that zone I think we’ll continue to be successful.
The country is facing a lot of major challenges, and progressives have put forth a lot of big ideas on how to handle them, from universal healthcare to infrastructure investment. How do we decide what our priorities are?
We’re coming into a circumstance where the economy is weak, certainly today, where growth is almost non-existent, where wages have gone backwards, weekly wages are less than they were ten years ago, family income is down. We’ve got the financial crisis [and] the housing crisis. In the short term, I think that deficits are going to have to give way to ensuring that we have growth in the economy, but in the long term I think the path of fiscal discipline is a wise one. It gives the opportunity for more progressive investment. That’s probably the sentiment that a new administration would come into office with. It is clear that we can live within our means.
You mention in the book that human rights are very important to progressives. How is it possible for progressives to make change on human rights in places like Darfur without problems like the Iraq war, for instance, giving a bad name to humanitarian interventions?
We carried out the use of force with the intervention in Kosovo when Slobodan Milosevic was engaged in ethnic cleansing, but we did it with a coalition of support, we did it with the right values base, and I think, ultimately, we were successful in reversing the ethnic cleansing. He was wrong, we were right; I think we approached it in the right fashion.
In the context of Darfur, support for intervention, for the African Union and now the joint African Union/UN mission in Darfur is the right approach. [We need] more diplomatic force, more economic sanctions on the government, and potentially more use of force there. For example, I think a no-fly zone would have been particularly important early on in the conflict. As long as one can bring together the power of alliance and global unity to try to move forward [on] the U.N. ideas of the duty to protect vulnerable populations against governments that are attacking them, in the case of Darfur, or not protecting them in other places, then I think the world moves forward. President Bush set the cause back, [with] unilateralism, the trumped up intelligence to go into Iraq, and, at a minimum, the cherry picking of intelligence to go into Iraq. I think it actually went beyond that. The pretense for preventive war, which I would call preemptive war, was not based in the rule of law or international law. In the end of the day it was a strategic disaster for United States.
The [Millennial] generation has been a part of this progressive resurgence in the last few years. What should young people take away from the historical lessons you talk about in this book?
The most important thing to take away, particularly for young people, is that this wasn’t just a top-down, politician-led challenge to the status quo. It was a bottom-up social intervention. There was as much activism in neighborhoods and cities and states as there was at the federal level that really produced massive change in our country.
I came into politics in 1968, when it was another time when there was a surge in momentum of young people getting engaged with what was going on in the country and with political affairs; I think that early part of the 20th century is another reference point that is inspirational for young people.
Tim Fernholz is a writing fellow at The American Prospect. He graduated from Georgetown University this year.
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