Erratum added Nov. 7, 2011 at 8:39 a.m.
Park Forest, IL-(ENEWSPF)- One movement claims to speak for the 99% of Americans who have less than they had collectively since the days before the Great Depression. Others on the right are calling for less government, less regulation, some for no government.
Can the right and the left ever see eye-to-eye again in America, or will the radical polarization of our respective ideologies continue to push us even more apart from one another? While those of us on the left have been clamoring for change – and disappointed, at times, that the President we elected to effect such change has spent more time worrying about his manners, as if compromise itself were a virtue – there are some on the right who have been working to responsibly reform the G.O.P., as some of us on the left still work to reform our own party.
Somewhere along the line, we simply must stop shouting at each other. Somewhere along the line, we need to learn to talk to each other again, to negotiate, and, yes, compromise.
One of those working to reform his party, the Republican Party, is Michael Stafford. And Michael Stafford is someone you should know, regardless of your political ideology or philosophical leanings.
I met Mr. Stafford through connections at Coffee Party U.S.A., and had the pleasure of speaking with him about politics, about America, and about change. *
Those at the Coffee Party U.S.A. are people you should know.
As is Michael Stafford.
Our conversation, from a few weeks back….
ENEWSPF: Let’s chat. What is your affiliation with the Coffee Party?
Michael: I have posted content over there. I am sort of running the Facebook page for Republicans who are responsible for reform. It is geared towards current Republicans who are dissatisfied and ex-Republicans. The Coffee party is a transpartisan movement and I’ve known the two founders of the Coffee Party—Eric Byler and Annabel Park — for a while now. Back in the beginning when Annabel was first getting the group going she had posted a quote from an article that had appeared in the New York Times. The quote was: “If you’re only upset when a president from your party is being compared to Hitler, you’re a part of the problem.” I thought “By God, that’s spot on, that’s exactly what’s wrong here,” with some of the forerunners from both sides. I reached out to her and I said “You know what? I definitely want to help out with this.” They’ve kept that sort of spirit going. It’s hard to have a real transpartisan movement that encourages civil bylaws about issues that people feel really passionate about in today’s world. It truly is. And people are so used to conducting political discourse down at the level of maybe an adolescent, middle-school stoop fight where people are just hurling insults and one-liners and slogans back and forth to each other.
I think they have done a really great job at overcoming that. Over the past year and a half I’ve done some radio programs with them, and I’ve had some content reposted over there. I think they think–and I think–that one of the great political opportunities right now in America is reaching out to the center. There are a lot of center-right Republicans who are really dissatisfied with the sort of far-right direction in the National Republican Party…they’re worried about the extremism that’s emanating from some of these Tea Party groups. Glenn Beck scares them. They just don’t have an organizational structure to rally around. And that’s a really big part of it.
As individuals they’re going to call us every name in the book and if you’re standing alone and you’re just one soul at a local party meeting or commenting on a blog or a Facebook page or whatever, you can kind of get bullied into submission. You can feel like you’re just that one voice in the world in this. But if you have an organizational structure behind you and you know there are hundreds of thousands of people who agree with you, that helps.
And by the way, we’re really the true Republicans! We’re the ones that have kept the faith with the real heritage of the party, of Lincoln, not these extremists—they’re radical libertarians–they’re not true conservatives or Republicans. That’s really what it’s all about. Getting a flag and starting a rally—the points around which other people of goodwill can kind of gather. That’s what we are trying to do.
ENEWSPF: That is so cool. I’m working with them as well. I met Eric and Annabel a few years ago at a screening of 9500 Liberty.
Michael: That’s exactly how I got to know them. I have a friend who is a former Bush administration official and she works on Hispanic affairs in the White House and I had gone to D.C., because I’m a big advocate of comprehensive immigration reform. Out of that I ended up doing a local radio show with my friend, the former Bush administration official, and we were out in Hagerstown or Frederick, Maryland, on an AM station on a Saturday morning and Erik happened to be in town and was doing a viewing of 9500 Liberty. He called into the show and we kept in touch after the show and I saw the movie and it really spoke to me in a lot of ways so we started collaborating on some immigration projects and it kind of worked from there.
ENEWSPF: Friends on the left tell me that John Boehner seems to be a good guy and would probably sit down and talk–But he’s got to be between a rock and a hard place. And it’s difficult for the left and the right in Congress. After this last fiasco…this was man made. Where do you see the left and right coming together?
Michael: Well, with the last fiasco, the big takeaway for me was how dangerously close we came to what might have been a disaster and looking around at the big coalitions of these Republican parties there were a lot of people who seemed willing to over the edge, and that truly terrified me.
I’ve been outspoken towards the extremists, and I remember these issues from long before.
So where do I see us coming together? There are reform elements on the left and the right. I’d actually go back to Teddy Roosevelt with the Progressive Movement at the dawn of the twentieth century. That was a movement that united both Republicans and Democrats. It threw together a disparate element under its umbrella, and it was geared towards responsible reform. If you think about the world as it existed back then, you had these ensconced status quo interests. You had those representing the money. You had radicals, you had socialists, anarchists–these radical groups that wanted to fundamentally destroy the existing system and build something new with sort of utopian vision of the future.
And then you had in the middle this great opportunity, this political space for people who were interested in responsible reform, and that’s really what Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement were, back in that earlier age.
And I think there is an opportunity for another movement like that today, and I say that because if you look at the early twentieth century, we were working out some of the excesses, some of the darker side of industrialization and industrial capitalism. We were talking about workers’ rights. We were talking about wages, about working conditions, about safety, about consumer protection, about women’s suffrage–these issues that were just coming to the forefront.
If you look at our world today, just like they were working through then. Is [today] going to be a system in which most of us do worse and a few at the top do fabulously well? Or is it going to be a more just distribution of some of the burdens and the benefits? And so far for a variety of reasons the Progressive Movement in the early part of the last century really spoke to the middle class and it spoke to the working class and those are two groups in America that I think have really been failed by most of the voices in our political system on the left and the right. There is really an opportunity to be champions for their interests and their values in this system.
That’s how I see some of the reform elements coming together.
I mean, we definitely have to learn how to talk to each other. There are huge canyons separating us on some issues but we’ve got enough in common and we’re all concerned enough that we can find some common ground and maybe we can leave the country a better place than we found it.
ENEWSPF: I like phrases like “common ground”. I remember Cardinal Bernadine in Chicago using that– talking about the elements in the Catholic Church needing to sit down at the same table–and that seems like a good focus moving forward, [to ask] “What are our values?” What is your background with the GOP?
Michael: I’ve walked along a range of local—we’re talking municipal—county races, statewide races, volunteering in federal races, I’ve been involved in that. I was a local/regional Republican Party officer for about two years in Delaware until right after the 2010 election. I was on a Republican state committee, and in Delaware we have three counties and I live in the northernmost one, which is a suburb in Newcastle County. So I was on a Republican state committee and I was in the Newcastle County committee and then I had a region within the Newcastle County that I ran. I’ve also been involved with one of the other Republican organizations that are out there, Republicans for Environmental Protection. I’m the Delaware coordinator for that group and I still do that today.
In fact, just a week and a half ago down in DC they had–you would love this–their Teddy Roosevelt banquet dinner, because Republicans for Environmental Protection is an organization that really champions the conservation legacy of the Republican Party. And, of course, who better exemplifies that than the man who created our national parks system? Teddy is the ultimate example of that. I actually got an award down there, the Grassroots Leadership Award for 2011, which is a nice bust of Teddy Roosevelt that’s got my name on it, and I was deeply honored by that.
I’m still active in the Republican Party. Before that, back in the day in college, I was the head of the Federalist Society at Duke Law School, and the head of the Republican Club down there as well, and after that I did volunteer work like door knocking and that sort of thing for a while.
ENEWSPF: What city do you live in?
Michael: I am south of Bloomington-Delaware. One of the other things I just thought of, not officially a Republican thing: I’m a nationally syndicated political columnist. I write a lot of the essays you see on the Coffee Party blog, but those are also in newspapers across the country.
I’m one of a number of columnists, I write for the same organization that syndicates Michael Reagan, Joe Gandelman, people like that, a number of national columnists syndicated through this outfit. Around 900 newspapers are signed up and they can pick and choose what columns they want to run. Those articles you see uploaded to the Coffee Party site, every one of them makes it into papers all across the country. Some of them more than others, some have been in numerous papers. Every one of them gets picked up somewhere.
ENEWSPF: It seems that conservative politics seem to get bogged down on one or two social issues. How can we move beyond that?
Michael: I don’t think it’s so much bogged down on social issues, right now. I think the bigger problem is this radical libertarianism that’s crept in that just fundamentally just hates government in itself. If you think of talk radio–I’m thinking of the major nationally known hosts I would argue that they’re not really conservatives. At the end of the day they’re peddling something that’s not the conservatism of William F. Buckley; it’s not the conservatism of Russell Kirk.
It’s sort of a libertarianism, sort of a radical libertarianism. Right now, it’s anger directed at the government. There’s an element that just really dislikes the federal government. They want to chop it to pieces. And that combines with all of this fear and angst about President Obama and it just creates this very toxic stew. Social issues are a part of that, but the real thing, when you look in Congress right now, you think about the chasm we were ready to drive over…laughing all the way. When it comes to social issues there’s this real dislike of government.
ENEWSPF: I can’t even find a glimpse of Ronald Reagan in what they’re saying. It really does go back to drown the baby.
Michael: It does. You talk about rights. And as a supporter of immigration reform, I’m always quick to note that Reagan was a supporter of immigration reform and he signed IRCA–the laws back in the 80s, in ‘86. The proposals that are out there now–for example one from a year ago– don’t involve an amnesty, they involve outright legalization. IRCA and another in ‘86 involved an outright amnesty! Ronald Reagan was a supporter of that. But you say that to some of these far-right and they shrug it off and say “You know, he was wrong that time” and there’s a lot of compartmentalized thinking.
I don’t think Ronald Reagan would be popular in today’s Republican Party. He was pragmatic, he was solutions-oriented, and he understood the need to build diverse coalitions. He wasn’t just a slogans guy. I’m not sure how popular he would be as a political figure of stature in the Republican Party today. I don’t think the far-right would find his pragmatism endearing.
ENEWSPF: Do you want to comment on any of the frontrunners right now in the presidential election?
Michael: Personally, I’m a big supporter of John Huntsman. I think he’s a good guy. He’s got a great record, as an ambassador in China and as governor of Utah. I find several of the candidates in the Republican field profoundly scary and disturbing. I’m sure hoping that we don’t get a Bachmann candidacy. And I know people on the left are quick to slash that off, “she’s unelectable”, it’d be great, it’d ensure another term for President Obama. If he were facing someone like Mitt Romney I’m not so sure there’s a lot of uncertainty out there, you never know what the economy’s going to do next. And if there’s another major economic crisis that really hits people in their wallets and if we tilt back into another recession, that’s all it’s going to take, I think, for somebody like Bachmann to win an election. And I think that’d be a real disaster for the country.
ENEWSPF: She’s certainly not running a smart presidential campaign. She’s a reactionary.
Michael: Yes. So, I’ll read an interview and she sounds perfectly reasonable, and then I find well she has major questions about the Renaissance. It’s just that it’s all over the place.
This is where I feel the Republicans have a role to play. Part of the issue is that we are about putting courage and a spine into the people who disagree with some of this rhetoric coming out from the far-right. You look at candidates–and I like Huntsman a lot, but take Huntsman for an example. There was a column about him a few weeks ago that asked “where’s the passion? Where’s the conviction?”
You don’t look at leaders in the Republican Party and see a lot of passion and conviction. What you see, often, people who are very, very quick to try to distance themselves from parts of their résumé that make them, at least to me, the most appealing. And you look at Romney and some of his prior comments, for example, on climate change. How quickly did he abandon that? You know the biblical story: the rooster had to crow three times before Peter abandoned Jesus. The rooster never even got to crow for Mitt Romney! He was disavowing himself before the sun even showed!
Health care, climate change, the list goes on and on.
So I want a Republican Party where people like Mitt Romney are proud to run on those aspects of their record. And we’re not there yet, but we can start to move this thing in that kind of a direction. We need people who are willing to stand up on the national stage and say, “I’m sorry. Some of you people are just crazy and your ideas would wreck the nation and would be a disaster to all of us.” I think when you have a major national figure like that who has that strength and conviction and that moral courage, which is really what it comes down to, to take these guys on, that’s going to be the real turning point.
If a president like that doesn’t emerge, we’re in deep trouble. All of us, not just Republicans, are in deep trouble.
ENEWSPF: I have to say it’s a pleasure to talk with you. This is so refreshing!
Michael: There are thousands of Republicans who think exactly like I do! I’m not just a solitary singer out there. There are people writing about it, talking about it. But our narrative is not the Fox News narrative. We’re not radio hosts. We’re not the guys and the women who are going to be on TV shows and talk radio. Because of that, we’ve got much smaller audiences.
Erratum: This paragraph previously said Mr. Stafford is a former member of the Tea Party. Mr. Stafford clarifies via Twitter, "I was actaully an opponent of theirs from the beginning." We apologize for the error.
This interview was transcribed by Summer Fields, a senior at Marian Catholic and an eNews Park Forest student intern.
