5 Questions For: MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, On Political Diversity And Being “Better Off” [#DNC2012]
On the question of resonating: I think all of us [at MSNBC] see our roles as hosts very differently. Rachel [Maddow]…Rachel’s a teacher, in the sense that, when you’re watching Rachel’s show, she’s gonna find some little nugget of something that you never even heard about and she’s gonna bring it together and connect it into a big story. Ed [Schultz], in my experience, is an advocate. Anything that he sees as a group of people getting the short end of the stick, he’s gonna tell you how those policies affect those people.
For me, I think the kind of teacher I am, I want to be there, I want to be present, but I also want to be facilitating lots of different voices at any given time. And so, I don’t know about the resonating: I do know we all see our roles differently. And I guess I’ll say this: I don’t know where all my colleagues live. I really don’t, it’s not like we hang out in each others’ houses. I live in a poor neighborhood. I commute back and forth from ruins. We make a choice to live there. I wouldn’t live any other place. The few years I lived in a place that was not a poor neighborhood was an unhappy time for me. So for me, it’s very real.
Raw Story: This election year, more than any other before, both parties have used diversity as a selling point. It’s still early at this convention, but how do you see that playing out on each side of the campaign trail?
Harris-Perry: The big difference is, the diversity that you see on the stage at the DNC is reflected in the delegates and the voters. The Republicans, there’s just no way around it: they did a good job of putting together a diverse group of speakers. They had Latino speakers, they had women speakers, they had African-American speakers, they even had former Democrats as speakers. So they certainly had a diverse group of bodies speaking. But that diversity on stage is not reflected in their delegations, it’s not reflected in their attendees, and it’s not reflected in the voters who make choices to put those policies in action. It is still predominantly an older white male party. With the DNC, you see black and Latino and South Asian people on stage, but then you also see those same people in the delegations, and you also see those same people on the ballot or in the voting booth casting those ballots.
Raw Story: Are we building toward some sort of political flashpoint?
Harris-Perry: I think of American politics as very plodding. Even moments that, in many other countries, might cause a crisis of government or leadership. Think about 2000 and the question of who’s really President; the fact is, Al Gore didn’t stage a coup. He didn’t go get the military together and say, “I won this.” He stepped aside. Our country, from my perspective, is very slow, it’s very moderate. Part of it is why President Obama, in 2008, was talking about “the arc of history”–he can’t give the revolutionary speech. Americans don’t go for, “Tomorrow I’m gonna do this.” They’re like, “Okay, we’re gonna make a little step toward it and a little step toward it and a little step toward it.”
And I think what you see–not from all Republicans, but from many Republicans right now–is they look back over the past 50 years and it looked like dramatic change [to them], but in fact it’s been piecemeal. Tiny, tiny, tiny. Even the Republican party itself is changing. When you look at who’s gonna show up in 2016 to be their candidates, they’ll look very different than the folks now. You’re gonna have Marco Rubio and Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal. It is going to be a brown and white and female coalition of people who are running the Republican party in 2016. It’s like, “Change is here–hello!”
Raw Story: In the 24 hours between Sunday and Monday, we saw the Democrats stumble on the question of, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” And then they reversed course. Why do you think they slipped up like that?
Harris-Perry: On Sunday morning, when we talked about who the Democrats are, we talked about “the big blue tent,” and the messy big blue tent. I think one of the messaging problems the Democrats have pretty regularly is that, because there’s not just one demographic, it is hard to send home what the message is.
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