“What Would Jefferson Do?”
Remarks of Dan Gerstein
Fels Institute of Government Lecture Series
University of Pennsylvania
February 25, 2005
I want to thank Congresswoman Margolies-Mezvinsky and my friend and former Hill colleague
Brian Selander for inviting me to speak with you here today. It’s quite an honor, one that I am
not sure what I did to deserve.
To be honest, I was wracking my brain about that after Brian told me that one of your most recent
guests was Joe Trippi. I mean Joe is a political legend, a national celebrity, and I, well, my Dad
grew up in Philadelphia. And my Uncle Lew the doctor once worked for Penn’s hospital – who, I
might add, I am grateful to have here today as my guest, along with my wonderful aunt Hilda.
But I did realize that Joe and I have a few things in common: 1) we both have exiled ourselves
from Washington in recent years; 2) we both worked for a doomed presidential campaign in
2004; 3) we both backed the same losing candidate to head the Democratic Party; and 4) for at
least the next four years, the DNC will stand for Do Not Call us. We might as well form our own
firm – Pariahs and Associates.
Before I begin the heart of my remarks, I must confess, this is an unusual position for me to be in.
I am used to being the one writing the speeches, not giving them. In fact, this is my first “lecture”
I have given since leaving the Lieberman orbit last spring. Though I should qualify that by
saying, as my college-aged sister would probably tell you, this is the first lecture I have been
invited to deliver.
Now that I have gotten that out of my system, I thought it might be instructive to talk with you a
little bit about why exactly I chose to flee the Beltway scene, given that many of you may be
actively considering going there and checking into what I have taken to calling the Madhouse of
Representatives.
You may find much of what I am about to say disheartening. But my counterintuitive hope is that
in the end, you will see the reasons I walked away in exasperation are precisely the reasons you
should hold fast to your aspirations -- and grasp the dire need for your help in restoring some
sense of sanity to our nation’s capital.
Let me first preface my comments with the following disclaimer, and you will understand why I
am doing so in a few moments. What I am about to say represents my views and my views only.
They may not be taken to reflect Senator Lieberman’s thinking, or anyone else’s for that matter.
Now, as many of you know, lots of Democrats are high-tailing it out of Washington these days.
It’s not exactly a friendly place for blue-staters right now. But you see, unlike most of my peers,
I decided to depart long before the election -- not out of despair or disgust with the Bush
dominion, but with the whole damned place.
I came to politics as what you might call a realistic idealist. I studied American political history
as an undergrad, was a reporter for four years out of college. I was quite familiar with the highs
and lows, the statesman and the scandals. And while I knew it was often a dirty business, I still
had faith in the Jeffersonian ideal, the transformative power of democracy, of “equal and exact
justice for all men,” and the nobility and responsibility of self-government.
But after working at the highest levels of national politics for a decade – which included one
record-breaking winning senate campaign, one heartbreaking vice-presidential campaign, and one
illusion-breaking presidential campaign – I reached my own spirit-breaking point. I just could
not take any more of the soulless, bastardized culture that had taken root there.
What am I talking about? It’s a long bill of particulars. But let’s start with these: The empty
triumph of ideology and spin over ideas and facts. The shallow, reflexive thinking and vacuous,
repetitive debates it produces. The routine failures to bridge differences and forge meaningful
common ground. The ritualistic dance of denial and blame that follows. The cynical,
manipulative campaigns of fear, smear and scandal. And the perverse and pervasive win-at-allcosts mentality that fuels them.
As much as I admire Senator Lieberman and cherished working for him, I found staying in
Washington not just dispiriting and disillusioning, but poisonous and corrupting. I felt the last
remnants of my idealism, which like many of you propelled me into public service in the first
place, about to be extinguished. So putting self-preservation over self-importance, I gladly gave
up my modest spot in the power structure.
But not surprisingly, I could not fully appreciate just how sick the system has become until I got
outside of it, started observing it from a distance, and dared to speak some unspoken and
unpleasant truths I was now free to share. It all came to a head when I wrote an op-ed in the Wall
Street Journal last month about the perplexing leadership choices the Democratic Party was
making in the wake of last falls electoral debacle.
I was dumbfounded by the prospect of entrusting our resurrection to House Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, and DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe, who at the
time was being courted by some to serve another term. These three were integrally involved in
developing and articulating the dismal strategy of the post-Clinton era, which culminated in John
Kerry losing 81 percent of the nation’s counties.
So I made what I thought was a fairly logical case that instead of following the same tired crew
who put the party in the hole we are in, Democrats would be better served to turn to freshthinking leaders who know why we are losing, how to fix it, and what it will take to win. As an
example, I cited Simon Rosenberg, the head of the progressive centrist New Democrat Network,
who was running for McAuliffe’s job.
Well I must have been more dumbfounded than I thought, because then I did a stupid thing. In
emailing the text of my op-ed around to a long list of friends and colleagues, I mistakenly
included the tail of an email from Simon’s press secretary.
It was all very innocent -- I had sent Simon and his advisors a draft of the op-ed as a courtesy, and
the press secretary had simply asked that I send him the final copy. But some blew it up into
evidence of a cabal, and a few of Simon’s rivals in the DNC race apparently blasted the email
around town, not so subtly suggesting that Simon was actually behind the so-called “attack” on
Pelosi, Reid, and McAuliffe.
Let me pause for a moment here, and say that if you take anything away from my talk today, it
will be to think twice before cutting-and-pasting an email at 6:30 in the morning that might tick
off a person in a very high place of power. Kind of makes sending the Paris Hilton video link to
your mom by accident look pretty harmless, doesn’t it?
Anyway, when I learned what was going on, I felt terrible -- not just because I had done
something unwittingly to hurt Simon, but that someone was pathetically trying to manufacture a
scandal out of simple mistake. So at Simon’s request, I put out a statement to make absolutely
clear that the op-ed and its criticisms were mine and mine alone, that Simon strongly disagreed
with my views about the three leaders in question, and that he and his advisers had strongly urged
me not to publish the piece.
I thought somewhat naively that should put the matter to rest. And for a while it seemed to have
worked, although I am told there was still a fair amount of teeth-gnashing going on in some
quarters. The DNC race ran its course, Simon put up a good fight but was unfortunately not a
serious contender, and Dean efficiently closed things out.
Then two weeks ago I learned something that, even as jaded as I am, I found shocking. Despite
my statement, and despite the DNC race being over, I was told on good authority that Harry
Reid’s advisors were continuing to blame Simon for the op-ed and were actively working to
punish him by telling NDN’s donors not to support the organization. A few days later, an article
appeared in Roll Call with sources alleging the same thing.
I was appalled at this behavior. But what made me really angry was that no one else seemed to
care. No one seemed put off that the lieutenants of the Senate Minority Leader were apparently
trying to destroy a fellow Democrats’ organization because of someone else’s views.
Certainly no one said a word publicly – a silence, I might add, that stands in stark contrast to the
cries of outrage we heard from Senator Reid and his allies when the Republican Party recently
sent out an over-the-top direct mail hit-piece accusing Reid of being an out-of-touch
obstructionist.
To me, this really was the coup de grace. It was no more offensive that anything else I had
experienced in Washington. But having seen it from a totally different perspective, it made me
finally realize that our national politics is beyond badly broken, as Bill Bradley argued when he
left the Senate. The system has in fact become profoundly warped -- a perfect case study of
defining deviancy down, to quote another of my favorite former Senators, Pat Moynihan.
It’s not just that our political system is fundamentally not working -- that, more often than not,
our voters don’t vote, our leaders don’t lead, and our government does not govern.
It’s not just that both parties for the most part are wholesale hostages to their own respective rigid
orthodoxies and special interests, and have lost sight of their common interest in the common
good.
It’s not just that the politics of personal destruction has become standard operating procedure.
It’s not just this ugly, demoralizing mess continues to drive good people in droves out of public
service – and deter good people in countless numbers from ever going into it in the first place.
It’s not just that all this has happened and is happening that is so gravely disturbing, but that it is
so widely accepted and publicly unremarked upon. Sure you’ll get a good-government group
here and there howling in the wilderness. But for the most part, the prevailing attitude is that
these are the rules of the game. And the Members, the high-ranking appointees, the staffers and
bureaucrats who serve them, and even to a large extent the reporters covering them, just go on
about their business.
Let me give you a recent relevant example. Just this week, the New York Times reported that the
consultants behind the Swift Boat Vets for Truth ad campaign were getting the band back
together to obliterate the primary opposition to President Bush’s Social Security privatization
plan – the AARP. And I am not exaggerating by using the word obliterated – the head of the proprivatization front group, Charlie Jarvis, was quoted as saying, “They are the boulder in the
middle of the highway to personal savings accounts. We will be the dynamite that removes
them.”
Is this really what we’ve come to? Aiming to blow up senior citizens – and brazenly bragging
about it on the front page of the New York Times? How dysfunctional has our democracy
become that this is perceived to be appropriate behavior? Has the lust to win become so
overpowering that we can no longer see the difference between defeating an opponent and
destroying them? Is this what Jefferson and company pledged their sacred honor for?
Now in raising these questions, I am not insinuating that Washington is filled with ignorant rubes
or amoral reprobates. Many of the people I encountered, I’d safely say the clear majority, were
decent, hardworking, and earnest. In most cases I would suggest they don’t lack values, just
perspective. They are trapped in vicious cycle, and most of them are just trying to keep their
heads above water and get through the day.
For those who are consciously aware of how screwed up the system is and readily acknowledge it
in private, there is a heavy and pervasive air of resignation about it. Most would tell you there is
little that one person can do to change it from the inside, and on the flip side, there is a lot of pain
and punishment to be suffered for challenging the order of things – losing your job, being frozen
out of others, and getting shut out of power.
I don’t say this in judgment, for I am every bit as culpable as anyone else, if not more so. The
fact is, I helped maintain this conspiracy of silence for a decade. Just as many of my peers did, I
made a tradeoff. In my case, I got a rare opportunity to work with a principled leader and a
committed staff that stood above the miasma and could actually have an impact on public policy.
I don’t regret that choice. I learned a great deal, and together with my incredibly talented
colleagues in the Lieberman office accomplished several things I am quite proud of.
But I really began questioning that tradeoff in 1998, during the horrible Lewinsky scandal, the
year it seemed proportionality died. Looking back, it is hard to overstate how surreal it was to
experience the whole matter from the inside, and trust me when I say the head-scratching
behavior was completely bipartisan, if not bipolar.
I mean on the one hand, I could not believe the moral summersaults my fellow Democrats
effortlessly performed to rationalize Bill Clinton’s indefensible behavior. I remember standing
over the fax machine in our mail room after Lieberman condemned the President on the Senate
floor and reading the torrent of letters we received from angry Democrats. Over and over they
wrote off as “just sex” the fact that the President of the United States carried on a lurid affair with
a White House intern in the Oval Office, and then not only lied about it to the Nation for eight
torturous months but asked his Cabinet and his allies in Congress to lie for him.
On other hand, the Republicans were so consumed by their hatred for Clinton that they blindly
lurched to the other moral extreme, and launched what could be credibly called a legal jihad to
bring him down. They could not see the rank absurdity of one of the nation’s foremost
constitutional lawyers parsing the technical definition of sexual relations before the House of
Representatives, let alone equating an attempt to hide oral sex from an overzealous prosecutor
with treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors.
I would suggest, by the way, that this was the moment of no return for partisanship in
Washington, when the idea that we were all Democrats and we were all Republicans became
officially laughable. We had crossed some kind of Rubicon of recrimination, and more and more
politicos came to see this less and less as a contest between two parties, but a war between good
and evil, which has only continued to escalate since then. I even felt it in my own office – one of
my coworkers, who is a good friend and generally a very sweet person, would hardly speak to me
on the days we would do events with Bill Bennett. I might as well have been holding a press
conference with the Antichrist.
My tolerance for the tradeoff really began to crack, though, once I got into the stratosphere of
presidential politics. A big part of it was just absorbing all the gross realities of high-level
campaigning – the pathological aversion to risk and candor; the polling behind every utterance,
right down to word choices; the predominance of mercenaries up and down the staffs; the
repetitive, cookie-cutter policies and events and tropes – and coming to the deflating conclusion
that this was the best that we had to offer America.
That was the primary reaction I had soon after arriving at the Gore campaign in Nashville in
2000. There was such an overload of overpaid consultants flying in and out and so many warring
factions I needed a scorecard to keep all the vendettas straight. I am not joking – I remember
having to check with one of my colleagues on the Lieberman desk to tell me who did not speak to
whom. I also remember finding it odd that the campaign communications director, Mark Fabiani,
spent most of his time in his office behind a closed door not communicating with much of
anyone.
What was just as distressing was to see what happened to those who tried to break the mold and,
more importantly, tell the truth. First there was John McCain’s remarkable primary campaign in
2000. Most people tend to forget just how close McCain came to pulling the political equivalent
of Jesus’ loaves and fishes trick, and beating a candidate with the biggest bankroll in history at
the time and the backing of the entire Republican establishment with little more than straight talk
and free press. But ultimately the hard right mustered its full might and crushed his insurgency,
thanks in no small part to a wretched innuendo campaign in South Carolina.
Then there was my former boss’s run for President. I am not fooling myself. He had some
serious challenges as a candidate, some he could not control, some he could. And running as a
pro-war candidate in an anti-war electorate, it is clear in hindsight he was never going to get the
nomination. Nevertheless, as most Republicans would privately acknowledge, he was clearly the
most qualified candidate in the field and the biggest threat to Bush in the general election. Yet he
was not even competitive in the primaries. And that was due in large part to his unwillingness to
kowtow to every party orthodoxy and the resulting view that he was “too conservative” to be
tolerable.
Let me cite one telling example – I will be happy to discuss others during the Q&A – and that’s
the National Education Association’s endorsement process. Senator Lieberman had a tremendous
record as a supporter of public education and innovative reformer, and worked closely with the
Clinton Administration on its standards-based agenda. But he committed the unpardonable sin of
independent thinking, and cosponsored legislation to test whether private school vouchers might
help low-income children trapped in failing schools get a better education.
And for that offense, the NEA deemed him a presidential untouchable – they ranked every
candidate in the primaries – including Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich – as “acceptable,” except
Joe Lieberman. Even worse, no one in the party thought it was tetch strange that Al Sharpton,
whose experience on security issues was limited to starting a riot in Crown Heights, was
considered more qualified to be president than Joe Lieberman, the guy who helped rally the
Senate to stop the genocides in Bosnia and Kosovo.
That moment, more than any other during the campaign, made me realize I was politically
homeless, and it was time to go. I felt out of place not just as a matter of ideology, of what the
majority of my peers thought, but of how they thought – and the Republicans too for that matter.
It was the rampant tunnel-vision, the deeply-ingrained instinct to vote first and ask questions
later, and to view interparty collaboration as traitorous betrayal. There’s even a pet name that
Republicans have for moderates such as your own Arlen Specter who work with Democrats –
they are called squishes.
It was through this prism that I watched the rest of the 2004 campaign unfold from the sidelines.
You might recall this as quote-unquote “most important election in our lifetime.” What I will
remember is a wedding of trivia and travesty:
 lots of nasty accusations about the start and prosecution of the current hostilities in Iraq;
 even more nasty accusations about who did what when in war that happened more than
30 years ago;
 dozens of rigged “town hall meetings” President Bush held that saved him from ever
having to defend his decisions or persuade a skeptical voter;
 one ridiculously transparent hunting excursion John Kerry took that probably lost him far
more votes in Ohio than he ever could have hoped to gain;
 three nationally-televised debates where no debating took place;
 no serious discussion of how to destroy al Qaeda and create jobs; and
 two candidates that I suspect most Americans, outside the true believers, thought were far
from the most qualified men in the nation for the job.
Now let me be clear about something. I am not naïve. I know all about the long tradition of
gutter tactics in our politics, from rumor mongering about Jefferson’s slaves to the cries of “Ma,
ma, where’s my pa?” that greeted Grover Cleveland. But these were the occasional outbursts of
bitter campaigns, not the norm of public policy discourse. The point is, there have always been
boundaries. And I am afraid that those boundaries are being obliterated one by one by the Charlie
Jarvises of the world.
Even worse, I am afraid our priorities have been completely turned upside down and inside out,
and the warped culture has led to a warped process. There used to be campaign seasons, and
politicians won elections to govern. These days -- looking at the unrelenting gamesmanship and
partisanship, the symbolic agendas and rigged votes targeted to appeal to or turn off different
constituencies, the meticulous, electoral map-driven travel schedule of the President -- it’s hard
not to come to the conclusion that we are largely governing to win. It’s no wonder the means
always justify the ends – that’s because the means have become the ends.
That ultimately is why this all matters – it’s the consequences for our country. When I say our
democracy is in dysfunction, I mean that quite literally – it’s not functioning. It’s not just
polarized, it’s largely paralyzed. Think about it – what has Congress done in the last 10 years that
is relevant to your daily life or your family’s? Better yet, ask one of the 40-plus million that don’t
have health insurance. Or the 10 million or so workers who have lost their job because of
outsourcing and other complex forces flowing from globalization. Or the untold millions of gay
and lesbian Americans who are just looking for the same basic rights as any other citizen.
It’s unfair to blame any one person or even one party for this depressing state of affairs. It truly is
a systemic problem, which makes good people do bad things -- sort of like fraternities. But just
to be provocative – I know that worked so well for Lawrence Summers -- and start a discussion
we can continue in the Q&A, I will hold up two actors to a higher level of scrutiny.
The first is President Bush. My primary issue with the President is not his ideas or his ideology,
which I often disagree with, but with his gross failures of leadership. And none stands out more
than the window of opportunity he missed in the aftermath of 9/11 to move the country past the
politics of pettiness, heal the destructive divisions, and begin rebuilding a sense of common
purpose. His initial instinct was promising, and for a moment we felt like one nation again. But
soon he slipped back into the stale groove of crass partisanship, which proved all the more
contemptible because he had campaigned so consciously – and it turns out hypocritically – as a
uniter, not a divider.
The second is the news media. One would expect, or at least hope, that folks who so readily tout
their constitutional responsibilities would exercise them on at least a semi- regular basis, and hold
up a mirror to expose the warpedness of our political system and hold leaders accountable for
their moral indifference. Instead, the political press has accelerated the race to the bottom with
their pack-mentality, overly-simplistic, conflict-driven, sensationalism-feeding, zero-sum
coverage. That’s the media’s real bias – it’s not towards liberals or conversatives, but
controversy and confrontation.
So at this point I suspect many of you are thinking, okay, we get the point, you can put down the
2x4 and let the dead horse rest in peace. And I bet a few of you, if you are not completely
depressed, are asking yourselves, wouldn’t it be more fruitful to be discussing how to change this
warped and warping culture?
That’s the $64,000 question, and it’s one I have been struggling with myself. I am not going to
try to spin you. I don’t know if there is a long-term solution or a sure-fire catalyst. I wonder
sometimes whether the bottle has become so distorted that we can never fit the genie back into it.
But I know how it has to start, and that’s by talking about it – publicly and bluntly. That, I am
convinced, is the only way to begin defining the norms up again – to put a name to what too
many in public life are avoiding or denying, to make moral judgments, and force people inside
and outside the Beltway to confront the dysfunction.
And, now that I have the freedom that comes from having nothing left to lose, that’s how I have
decided to continue trying to make a difference, at least for the time being. I may have given up
on living in Washington, but I have not given up on public service – or the belief that change is
possible.
You graduate students, on the other hand, are at a very different place. You will soon come to a
fork in the road and have to make a decision about where to spend the intellectual capital you are
accumulating here. And seeing as you can never go wrong heeding the wisdom of the great Yogi
Berra, when you get to that fork, I would urge you to take it.
Stick to the path you are on, and do not be discouraged or dissuaded from going to Washington if
that is your preferred destination. Uncle Sam does in fact need you, and if ever there was an
opportunity to make things better it is surely now. Indeed, the only hope we have of de-warping
our democracy and making it work for Americans again is to fill it with smart, principled, and
dedicated people like you -- with their ideals intact, and just as importantly, their eyes open to the
challenge ahead of them.
At the same time, stick to your guns. Once you are inside the culture, resist the exceedingly
strong temptation to go along to get along. If you are put in a difficult situation and asked to do
something that you feel is unethical, immoral, or just plain icky, just ask yourself, What Would
Jefferson Do? Have the courage to question, and even to say no. It may seem pointless. You
may wonder what effect one individual can have amidst the vast cogs of the federal bureaucracy.
In that case, I would suggest asking, What Would Daniel Ellsberg Do?
I am not suggesting you resign in protest every time your boss says something poll-drive and/or
dopey, because, well, that’s just endemic to the business. Pick your battles. But just as
importantly, draw some lines. Don’t let others define or degrade your standards. And I beg of
you, if you ever end up working for someone like Charlie Jarvis who wants to pack your Sunday
school teacher’s house with TNT, run…… like…….. hell.
Seriously, you don’t have to be President or a Senator to exercise leadership, all you need to be is
solid in your convictions. That’s the best advice I can give you – if you want to make a
difference, be different. Practice civic disobedience. Avoid the dogma and think independently.
Don’t play by the rules if they are corrupt. As Jefferson suggested, a little rebellion now and then
can be a good thing.
And lastly don’t be afraid to evangelize. Imagine if each succeeding class from Fels and
Woodrow Wilson and Kennedy in the next five years takes that same fork in the road you do,
pretty soon we’ll have a critical mass of critical thinkers, maybe even another generation of
Jeffersons. Who knows what might happen? But I would sure like to find out.
Thank you for patience. I hope I was able to give you something to think about, and I look
forward to your questions.