An Interview with Former Congressman Tom Perriello

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This interview has just been published in the Kennedy School Review. Full text:

Tom Perriello

In 2008, Virginia Democrat Tom Perriello made a name for himself by practicing what he called “conviction politics,” challenging “the conventional wisdom that we have to choose between our principles and our ‘electability.’” Perriello argued that conviction politics would make him more likely to win and more effective if he did, since he’d have a mandate for enacting his views.

After winning one of the closest House elections of 2008, Perriello represented the 5th District of Virginia from 2009 to 2011. During his term in Congress, Perriello voted for the stimulus, health reform, and an emissions trading bill, among other controversial measures. In 2010, he was narrowly defeated in his reelection bid by Republican State Senator Robert Hurt.

The interview took place via telephone on December 20, 2010.

KSR

In your one-year report to the citizens of your district, you wrote, “We’ve worked hard to ensure transparency in our efforts [and] to focus on the areas of greatest need.” You also emphasized the need for “game-changing investments rather than symbolic expenditures.” It seems that you brought your conviction politics with you from the campaign trail to Capitol Hill. As a freshman congressman, did you find real opportunities for transformational leadership? And what kinds of institutional barriers did you face?

Perriello

Oh, I think there are great opportunities for it, and I certainly encourage people . . . to get into politics, whether as an elected official or serving in another capacity, and to come into that with a spirit of what I sometimes call “transformative pragmatism.” We sometimes have a false choice between whether you want to think big or think small, and whether you have to move dramatically, say, to the Left or to the Right on the conventional spectrum. [The] problems we face are not small—they’re large—and the solutions that we need must be transformative, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t think pragmatically about how to get there.

I think that’s part of what I ran up against, not just in the structure of government, but probably more significantly the assumptions of the media, where they tend to have a very narrow spectrum of understanding. You know, “Oh, that must mean you’re a liberal” or “That must mean you’re conservative” and not really understanding things outside of a very narrow spectrum. And then you can get pigeonholed in one direction or another.

So there are barriers within the media, in their understanding and wanting it to fit neatly within a story. And obviously, I think that there are political structures involved: the People’s House, which is the only one that was directly elected by the people in the original Constitution, is set up much more for pursuing real change than the Senate, which is a structure originally intended to be a brake on that impulse and has now become a full-on brick wall. So I think that there are certainly challenges to doing transformation.

The other though, of course, is that transformative change, in any meaningful sense, takes years and years to reach its full impact, or even in some cases, marginal impact. And we have a political structure right now that’s based not only on this very short two-year timeline, but now has been on a twenty-four-hour timeline. So to try to step up and fight for something like a national energy policy, which is so clearly going to be crucial for America over the next twenty-five years doesn’t necessarily deliver in the next twenty-five seconds.

So I think in between those things is where leadership is required. There’s also a gap between some ideas that do take, you know, thirty minutes to explain and thirty seconds to destroy. I think where you see most politicians as saying, “Well, let’s go for the thing that has the immediate payoff, and let’s go for the thing that avoids the issues that are easy to attack in a thirty-second spot.” And I think when you get into this to change things and not to get reelected, that calculus changes a little bit.

KSR

It’s interesting that you bring up the Senate. My sense is that the country is more and more familiar with that “brick wall”—with the filibuster and the single-senator hold and some of the other procedural mechanisms. I think folks are a little less familiar with the operations of the House, so I’m wondering if you could get into the nitty-gritty and talk about some of the institutional barriers and some of the institutional openings in the way the House functions.

Perriello

First, I want to challenge your premise a little bit. I think those from the Kennedy School are probably more aware than ever of the limits to the Senate, but I don’t think that’s true with the general public. They don’t really care. I think they care about whether they have a job or not, and whether we got something done. They don’t care whether it was the House’s fault or the Senate’s fault.

So I think that it’s important for understanding this election, where people felt like we had done too much and not enough. It had some to do with frustration with the Senate but not understanding that barrier, and I think more can be done on it.

In terms of the House procedure, you know, it’s interesting because I still don’t really understand the House structures and processes, so I’m not an expert on that. But certainly, this administration made a decision to give a lot of power to Congress to develop the laws, and of course, certain laws have to originate with us. But the divisions in the House . . . are sometimes seen as being Republican/Democrat, and people get into how much the Blue Dogs do this or that or the progressives. But a lot of the divisions in the House are regional as much as ideological. So oftentimes, what the disagreements are over will mean that there is a certain regional disparity on a given issue, on how hospitals are reimbursed under Medicare in that region—differences between a coal state versus another kind of state in the energy bill.

People either look at that and say that’s an important part of our democratic process, because it’s the way to make sure that no region in the country is left out or marginalized, or you look at it and see this as part of the problem, because you end up getting into all manner of negotiating and making special deals for, say, Nebraska. And that’s where a lot of the price tags start to go up and the purity in the bill goes down.

KSR

Let’s talk a little about conviction politics. In 2007, you wrote, “I remain convinced that a campaign based on conviction politics is the only kind worth running.” You said it would make you more likely to win and more effective if you did. Well, you won in 2008. Talk a little about conviction politics, and in particular, how running a conviction-based campaign affected your capacity to do your job as a congressman.

Perriello

People sometimes talk about America being a centrist nation. I think it’s an independent nation, not a centrist nation. If people want to make up their own mind, they want to look at individual issues. One thing that I believed before I got into this that was very much confirmed by my experience is that people do not expect to or need to agree with you on every issue, but they do want to know what makes you tick. They want to know why you’re taking this position, how you’re thinking about things, and to some extent, are willing to trust [you] as you put in the time to come up with the answer that’s right.

Now, conviction politics doesn’t mean that every conviction politician should be elected, because if your sense of right and wrong is not sufficiently aligned with that of your district, then maybe that representation doesn’t make sense. But I think the reason [my campaign] did so much better than the national average this year—outperforming the sort of generic Democrats by fourteen points in a traditionally conservative district, despite voting for what were considered controversial issues—was because we got very high marks for integrity, for hard work, for standing up to the special interest groups. So even if people didn’t, say, agree with my vote on health care, they understood why I was doing it, to some extent, and that I was doing it for a set of reasons that were consistent with their values.

So it’s a difficult space because you’re always going to be able to justify just about any vote. There are going to be things about the bill you don’t like, and there are going to be things about the bill that you do like. So when that’s the case and you know one vote is an easy one and the other is a hard vote, it is easy to get the wheels of rationalization going.

KSR

Did your defeat in the fall of 2010—and perhaps this year’s political climate more generally—give you any pause or suggest any potential limitations to conviction politics? Were there moments where you lost faith?

Perriello

Normally, in an election, you don’t get the chance to know the answer to the question “what if?” “What if I had voted differently? What if I had done this differently?” You know, so many Democrats lost this year who took very different paths, but you can actually look at similar districts around the country where people did things differently, and I think [my race] did outperform those who, say, didn’t take those votes or those who took them and then tried to hide them.

You know, everyone has to figure out their own path. I’m not judging members of Congress who did that, but I would say the fact that [my race] was able to get 110,000 people out and lose by only three and a half points is a testament [because for this race] we should have lost by nine to sixteen according to the stat.

The tension, of course, is we have become an increasingly parliamentary-style system. Our elections have been nationalized, our media has been nationalized, the ability to run as an individual as such. So one of the tensions is what happens if you have a party that doesn’t seem to be running on a strong sense of convictions or different convictions for different people in what is truly a more diverse partisan environment.

So for me, for example, the stimulus was not the stimulus I wanted. That’s true; I’ve been very clear about that. I’ve been very critical of Harvard’s own Larry Summers and others over [the fact that] our vision was an anemic stimulus but, nonetheless, if the choice was between that stimulus or not voting for it, it was pretty clearly unconscionable to vote against this, particularly for Republicans, quite honestly, in a stimulus that was a third tax cut, a third funding of unfunded mandates, and a third investments in competitive advantage.

When you look at that, it was the right thing to do, and we shouldn’t be afraid to go out and talk about the fact that we created nine straight months of private sector job growth. Now, whether one leans Right or Left or what have you, the idea in January of 2009, that, by November, we would have strung together nine straight months of private sector job growth—if the Republicans had done the same thing, they would be calling it the “Obama miracle;” they would be calling it the “economic miracle of the century.” But that’s not where we [as Democrats] tend to come from.

On the energy bill, the idea of defeating a national energy policy when China and India aren’t waiting for us to get our act together . . . every day that the Republicans and the spineless Democrats don’t have the courage to get us a national energy policy, we’re just sending a huge signal that says, “Send your investments elsewhere because we’re not serious about it,” and something that says, “We will continue to fight unnecessary wars because our leaders don’t have that courage.” And frankly, if you don’t believe the stakes are that high, then don’t support a national energy policy. But if you do—because they are—then we shouldn’t be afraid to talk about how high the stakes are.

KSR

Absolutely. I’m interested in hearing you contrast the nature and scope of your leadership opportunities in Congress with some of the positions you’ve held before—as a security consultant in Afghanistan, Darfur, Kosovo, and Liberia, as an employee of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and as a cofounder of online advocacy organizations. What kinds of leadership did Congress permit and encourage and what kinds did it obstruct or obscure?

Perriello

Well, I think leadership opportunities as a freshman are limited. I ended up getting more of a role than I ever intended or wanted, and I think that was in part because I happened to represent what was seen as a swing district—I’d won the closest race. And to be blunt, our district was within driving distance of journalists in DC; it was the shortest trip to the “real America.” So for all these reasons, I ended up probably in more of a spotlight than was intended.

I think, you know, there’s some room for moral leadership, and I think if people . . . know that they should be voting a certain way based on principle but consultants are telling them to run away from that and you see someone taking a tough vote, I think . . . that helps.

The place where I think I probably pushed the most, besides on energy, was this issue of challenging the elite economic consensus in DC. . . . For all of the . . . rancor back and forth, both [parties] are essentially aligned on a pretty similar—what I’d call elite globalization platform. There’s a lot of merit to that, but I think ultimately it’s flawed. I think it’s based on the idea that building, making, and growing things in America was what we did yesterday and it’s naïve to think we’re going to do that going forward. I think it’s naïve to think that we can have a middle class and a working class in this country without jobs that involve building, making, and growing things. There just aren’t enough other jobs out there, and we’re going to start looking like the Central American economies of the 1980s, where 10 percent of people make all the money and pay all the taxes, and it’s just not sustainable.

And so, I think this deeper level and the gap of the stimulus show this. If you basically are in that top 10 percent—the donors to both parties, the electeds in both parties, basically come from that space—then in January 2009, your goal is to just try to get back to 2006, when everything was all right. Well, for people in my district and for many parts of the country, getting back to 2006 was not the goal. That was a time, too, of tremendous economic insecurity, reduced purchasing power, etc.

So part of it was because I felt like I had one foot—with, you know, a couple of Yale degrees and what have you—in that elite consensus and another foot in the Danvilles and Martinsvilles [Virginia] world, that I was in a position where I could challenge some of those assumptions and start working on a national manufacturing strategy and not be embarrassed to talk about building and making things in America. So I think there was some move back in that direction from the original space.

But the chances for leadership are limited, and I think, you know, you try to find places where you can make an impact, and that probably increases over time.

KSR

I heard a radio interview in which you said something similar. You said, “I think there’s been a tremendous selling out of the American people by the elites of this country.” Were you referring to economic issues only here, or was there another sense in which you felt like the elites have sold out the American people?

Perriello

I think it goes more broadly than that. Most empires, when they head into decline, there’s a moral decay from the top down that’s in part a giving up on the [res publica], or the common space. And I think . . . if you look at the way, for example, Wall Street has acted in the last couple of years, however one feels about what got us into this mess, there was clearly a commitment, right or wrong, from the American people to come in and make sure that the financial sector did not fall apart. And frankly this president . . . has been extremely soft on Wall Street. I mean, the House and others did have the pitchforks and so were ready to go, and this president stood between and held that line. You know, the response from Wall Street and others has not been to constructively engage like statesmen, but to be part of sort of an “irrationalizing” of public discourse.

If you look through history, it’s not just elected officials or academics, by any means, that step up and fill that space. It’s often been our business leaders at key moments who stepped in and tried to make sure that . . . adults are there in the room to make decisions and keep this country strong over time, and instead, it seems like that impulse from the top has been to encourage sort of a downward spiral.

So again, I think if you see that “greed is good” or instant gratification culture reflected at the high end, whether that’s the government or business . . . that does tend to have an effect reflected down.

KSR

Paul Krugman said something similar in a December 2, 2010, column, “Freezing Out Hope,” in the New York Times: that by endlessly compromising with these merciless forces, the president ends up giving cover to bad ideas, like free market fundamentalism and other forms of flawed economic thinking. I wonder if the same isn’t true at a broader, moral level: that in attempting to convene a civil, compromise-heavy national conversation, the approach ends up failing to confront the issues we face in necessary ways.

Perriello

Sure. My feeling, if you go back to January 2009, was that we needed to make a pretty serious commitment to one of two things. We either needed to commit to austerity and say, you know, “The parents are home. This isn’t going to continue anymore, there’s going to be a lot of pain for a while, but we’re going to get there,” or a grand vision that says, “Underneath all of this is a complete loss in America’s competitive advantage; there will be no balancing the budget or anything else until we rebuild our competitive advantage. We need to commit . . . like the Apollo mission, to ten years of rebuilding America’s competitive advantage, which requires infrastructure, innovation, and education.”

Either of those is something where you inspire people to a difficult place by putting a great vision on the table that happens to be true and necessary. I think what’s tough is when you do a little bit of each, you end up in the middle. We did some rebuilding of competitive advantage with the largest down payment in modern history on science, research and development, broadband, grid technology, etc. through the stimulus, but not really enough to get the private dollars coming off the sidelines because it wasn’t a big enough commitment.

It’s in that space between those two things that we did some austerity, which is probably why the full-on recovery that started in the spring of 2010—if you look at the numbers, the private sector job growth—continued. It was the drop-off in public employment that was the reason why the overall job numbers were going in the wrong direction. That was pretty directly correlated to how serious we were in sustaining that stimulus, so there’s a relationship in these things.